Google Trends
Want to know what people are searching for in real-time? Of course you do.
Google Trends, technically a beta product from Google Labs, has been around for a while. But the service, which allows anyone to track keywords over time, continues to add new features, including its latest, which is an application that will aggregate terms from social networks such as -- you guessed it -- Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
According to Reggie Miller, CEO of ICED, a media strategies firm, client demand for "buzz" reporting has made tools like Google Trends an invaluable part of his arsenal.
"By tracking popular terms, I can keep a pulse on what's hot and what has piqued people's interests," Miller explains. "When I sense something is becoming a reoccurring theme, I'll dig deeper and figure out if it's something that I'll actually find useful or should really care about."
So how can you "dig deeper" with Google Trends? Try pairing your trend analysis with another tool, Google Insights, which allows you to narrow your focus to specific web properties, location, or vertical categories. You can also overlay seasonal factors, like holidays, sporting events, and elections to see how long-term trends are affected.
Want to know what the three most popular search terms were for Black Friday last year? It's there. But pair that information with tweets from Christmas morning 2008, and you get some idea of what people really thought about those "hot gifts."
Twitter
OK, at this point you're probably suffering from Twitter-overload. But I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you that everyone, and I do mean everyone, I spoke with told me that their favorite market intelligence tool these days is Twitter.
Here's one representative comment from Rich Sullivan, president of Red Square Agency:
"Twitter is probably the best tool in spotting trends. I get nearly all of my information from thought leaders there. By its nature, Twitter represents a kind of collective conscious for what's happening right now. There are a number of very intelligent people (from the fields of technology, marketing, advertising, PR, pop culture trend spotting, music, art, literature, satire, television) that I follow. Before Twitter, I read as many blogs as a possible. [Now], I still read blogs, but find it quicker to get information via the feed. It is intelligence delivered by the fastest method I know."
Why?
Well, here's a snapshot that any marketer can use.
These are the most popular tweets of the moment (10:14 a.m., PST, June 16, 2009). For a marketer, that's an invaluable window into what people are talking about in real-time. Who wouldn't want that?
But Twitter is just one tool, and a rather limited one at that. Only a fraction of the visitors to Twitter actually tweet with any regularity, and while the tweets themselves can give you a good indication of buzz, it's hard to get a lot of depth in 140 characters.
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