CorpComms Magazine

Whether or not a barbeque summer beckons, the clouds are already gathering on pages and screens across PR agencies, adorning blogs and websites, illustrating magazine articles and glowering from board room tables.

Word clouds are the latest gadget in the communications arsenal and they are popping up everywhere. A word cloud illustrates the dominant themes in a given text, with a larger font indicating the most frequently mentioned ideas. The clouds give an immediate gist of what was said or written. They suit the casual reader, scanning for interesting insights rather than poring over every word.

Rather like headlines and bylines in articles, their strength is in plucking out key ideas and pushing them to the foreground. Because of this compatibility with the magazine format, at Lang Communications they are often used as illustrations to accompany articles. Director Sally Lang notes how they add flavour to a page. 'It's certainly a more agreeable format - illustrating graphically which factors are most often mentioned, as opposed to simply writing an article saying a certain newspaper said this, another said that.'

But Lang insists they are not just a pretty face. 'They may look fluffy but they contain a lot of interesting information.'

They can have analytical applications. Milorad Ajder, managing director of the Reputation Centre at Ipsos MORI, observes: 'Because number of mentions determines size of print, in seconds you can see the big themes. So there is something quantitative about them, even though they are reflecting qualitative responses to these questions.'

After the final election debate, Edelman created word clouds to illustrate the public mood. Paul Afshar, senior account manager at the agency, says: 'We ripped all data and chat about the three candidates off Twitter and it gave us an idea of the volume and frequency of discussion around each of them. One of the most significant words in the Brown tagcloud was 'smile' and we can deduce from that that there was a lot of chat about this superficial front, this grimacing smile.

'You can use word clouds to get a sense of the buzz or the zeitgeist around a theme. With Twitter, because you're limited to 140 characters, you can't convey that much so the discursive words used tend to be very telling.'

Afshar advises circumspection when bringing word clouds into the boardroom. 'They're useful for monitoring online coverage of a particular brand but they have to be used as part of a broader analytical toolkit. I don't think I'd ever advise a client to take action just in response to the findings of a word cloud,' he says.

Revealing themes

Harriette Hobbs, client director at copywriting agency Stratton Craig, does see the benefits of word clouds as an in-house tool. 'We use them to illustrate a point to our clients. This is what you think you're communicating to stakeholders but these are the words that are actually coming up.

'We'll do an audit of various pieces and highlight the main messages. The big central words may be something like the brand's name or more generic concepts. But the smaller words on the outskirts of the cloud can be very telling and a bit more unique.'

To illustrate the significance of the smaller words, Hobbs drew attention to a fascinating foray into the clouds by The New York Times. The broadsheet has compiled a timeline of word clouds from every inaugural presidential address from the 'humble' George Washington's acknowledgement of 'vicissitudes' and 'fervent supplications to that Almighty Being' in 1789 to the 'humbled' Barack Obama's acknowledgement of a 'crisis' and stirring assurances of 'action, bold and swift' last year.

Many of the largest words are recurrent from one president to the next with regular appearances from the usual suspects. Nation. Government. Citizen. God. Power. War. Peace. The smaller words tell more personal stories - Woodrow Wilson's first mention of 'women' in 1913 amidst growing clamours for women's suffrage, Abraham Lincoln's 15 references to 'slaves' and 'slavery' in two successive inaugural addresses in the build-up to emancipation and Ronald Reagan's repeated allusions to the 'soviets' as the Cold War began to thaw in 1985.

However, this tool is more sophisticated than a standard word cloud. By clicking on a given word, users can see a timeline of every instance in which it has been used in each address in its original context.

With attention spans waning, readers are increasingly demanding information in quick bursts and bite-sized pellets. A whole industry is developing around speed-reading techniques and mind-mapping to improve efficiency in absorbing the written word. And word clouds are both more attractive than a graph and more immediate and digestible than a linear list, stimulating both verbal and visual halves of the brain.

But the striking simplicity of the clouds also prevents them from conveying much subtlety or nuance. They can be ambiguous - without its immediate context, the word 'mean' may be a noun, an adjective or a verb. A word cloud only demonstrates frequency of mentions. Ipsos MORI's Ajder also highlights the downside: 'Although you know a theme was mentioned, you do not know the importance that was given to it. Say you hear 'innovation'. You do not know whether that illustrates a throwaway remark or something really critical. You cannot tell the underlying weight of the words. So you have to be careful how you use them.'

Other issues arise in the selection of the original material. A picture may tell a thousand words but all that a word cloud can show is naturally limited by what is put into the generator.

It is important to place the cloud in context, whether it is a response to an audit of stakeholder opinion, a day spent trawling Twitter for hash-tags on a particular theme or inputting discrete and carefully selected articles. The comparison of presidential speeches works particularly well because they were all of a similar length and written to a similar brief but from different ideological standpoints in different eras.

Ajder adds: 'We pose our questions to a discrete, finite sample of people. But if you're taking them from online sources - blogs, websites, etc, it is important that the sample is assized effectively, so you can establish how representative it is.'

Massaging the results

Even when it has been weighted and appropriately labelled, the data usually has to undergo a few transformations before it hits the printed page. Heather Atchison, creative director of brand language at Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, highlights the need to tailor the information to make the end product meaningful, rather than a bland cascade of 'its' and 'ands'.

'You need to put the right formula into the software. And you really need just nouns (the information gathering words), some verbs too, but mainly nouns to ensure the end result is instructive and enlightening,' she says. 'Most people who use them do a certain degree of massaging to make sure they're presenting the message they want to get across. Otherwise the cloud can be unwieldy or overwhelming.'

Lang also notes the need for flexibility in producing the finished article. 'Sometimes you have to rethink the pieces you've chosen because the resulting word cloud doesn't show the sort of lively variations you'd anticipated.' At the very least, as Lang says, they do 'make for a jollier page.'

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