A new web-search engine that is starting to gain some traction in cyber-scape is Clusty. It is built around the principal that any topic that you might search by will actually generate clusters of websites around common ideas that you may not have thought of and may lead to something more specific that you were looking for.
For example: If I go to the main screen and type “Ferrari”, it takes me to a results page that looks similar to something that Google might give you, except for a box on the left side that has the following Clusters:
- Pictures (32)
- Enzo (19)
- Owners (12)
- Reviews (12)
- Maserati (12)
- Ferrari Club (11)
They are ranked by the number of unique sites in each cluster (numbers in the bracket).
So if I were an avid Ferrari owner – I would be asking myself why does Maserati come up with more pages than Ferrari clubs given that I was searching for Ferrari?
Where I see this adding value for a marketing managers is that it provides a quick snap-shot of what anyone and everyone in the world (wide web) is currently talking about with your brand. It sorts through not just websites, but blogs, job postings, images.
Here is another example: Southwest Airlines
This company has always been the darling of business school case studies for their contrarian business practices, fun work culture and their success at being a low-cost airline. This past week, they had to ground several planes because of FAA safety violations.
When I searched Southwest Airlines – the first page generated a list of pages you would expect to be no different if it were pulled prior to this FAA ruling.
Clusty came back with the following Custers:
- Airports
- Tickets
- Planes, Grounded
- Safety, Investigating
I think this paints a more accurate picture of what everyone is thinking about the brand.
Does it not seem like this might be a useful tool to instantly gauge the marketplace? While rudimentary, it certainly can’t get much more current (or dynamic) for market research data.
