Often when I am sitting in the presence of young marketers I ponder if what
they are proposing will play to the masses outside of New York City. Thanks to Google’s newest beta application - Google Trends – wonder no more!
Play with it. For a marketer it is
HOT! Google Trends allows you to check
the popularity of search terms over time, and to see where those searches were
most popular. You can also compare keywords against one another. It
can be pretty addicting.
The long-term business value is even more exciting. In theory, an
index of search terms captures what Wired founder John Battelle calls "the
database of intentions" - consumers are telegraphing their interests and
their concerns. It's the same technology that helps Google place
AdWords.
Google has made a part of this service free to the public. This poses
a small competitive threat to existing players in the online trend-watching
space, companies like Nielsen's BuzzMetrics, which take a more granular view by
trawling consumer generated media with a combination of spidering and human
analysis.
Imagine forming a hypothesis and being able to validate it on the fly. This could be the new crystal ball for
interactive marketers!
Read more
in about this tracking-hotness in the New York Times.
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