Several years back, when The Cluetrain Manifesto hit the bookstores, it spoke of a new era where consumers play a more critical role in controlling brand messaging and perceptions. With the rise in social marketing opportunities, brands would lose some control of the messaging that hit the public as a new forum for sharing thoughts would continue to emerge. Essentially, a brand is decreasingly what the corporate marketing department professes it to be—instead it is a sum of the influences, both good and bad—that it has on the consumer.

Case in point is www.brandtags.net. This experiment by Noah Brier enables visitors to "tag" brands with top-line thoughts of what they believe the brand to stand for. Visit the site and you'll see a vast listing of popular brands. Click on a brand and you'll see a variety of words and phrases that individuals attribute to the brand. You can also "tag" a brand with your own words or phrases. Of course, with any open forum, you'll get your share of junk phrases and comments from people who get their jollies out of spewing profanity in public. But look a little closer and you'll see clear themes in consumer perceptions. Sites like this are an increasingly effective barometer of whether the brand promise is resonating with consumers, or if other issues are overtaking the message the brand hopes to promote.

The site also underscores the importance of staying connected with your customers and prospects to learn what they really think of your brand. If you're not taking the time to ask customers what they really think of your brand, and whether you're delivering on your promises, investing the time in that research is critical—if you're truly interested in shaping your brand destiny. Failure to do so could result in someone else shaping it for you, and the results may not be what you're hoping for.