Word cloud generator: The results may surprise
Since Amazon started, founder Jeff Bezos has written 23 letters to shareholders. A columnist for Inc. recently put every word of every correspondence into a word cloud generator. That’s an app that counts how often each word appears in a text.
You can read the whole column here, but the word cloud generator showed that customer and customers appeared 443 times, making it the most common word in all investor letters. Word cloud apps help writers see when they’re overusing a word. But a generator can also reveal what is most important to the writer. The Amazon experiment would seem to indicate customers have been the top priority for Amazon since its inception. Competition, however, only appeared 28 times in all 23 letters. If an organization is focused on its customers, perhaps it doesn’t have to focus so much on what the competition is doing. Or maybe Amazon doesn’t have much competition?
Our test
We put some of our writing in this space to the same word cloud generator test: We compiled the text from nine recent blog posts comprising about 4,000 words. It was no surprise that registration came in first with 36 mentions, or about four times per blog post. The second most used word was can. We’re not sure why, but maybe we’ll try to can the use of can for a while. Third on the list, with 23 mentions in 9 blog posts: training. That also makes sense, because registration for training is a popular use of Learning Stream. A little more surprising was how often time (18) appears, followed by management (16). The exercise reminded us that time management is a big reason—if not the most important reason—our customers turn to the software in the first place.
Try it
If you have an opportunity, conduct the same exercise. Collect text from emails, your website, or other written content that you use to communicate what you do and what is important in your organization. Then find a word cloud generator on the web. You’ll come up with plenty of free options. Within seconds, you’ll see a list of words by use. (Words like and, a, an, and the are excluded.) You may be surprised, or validated, by the results.
Want to explore further any time management or other benefits of Learning Stream registration (and time) management software? Contact us at your convenience.
P.S. This blog post uses word more than any other, followed again by that pesky can.