Knowledgeistics

Posts Tagged ‘trends’

My last post in this series topic talked about leveraging Twitter’s built in search feature to find out what its growing community is saying about any given topic – a cheap and inexpensive way to get quick feedback on a subject of your interest – especially useful for current headliners and hot topics.

While not as clean cut as Twitter search, I’d like to bring attention to another similarly free search feature available to us that help pull summaries or quantify online activity and conversations.

This tool comes from no one else but the company whose goal is to organize the world’s information (quite useful for market researchers) – Google. Largely ignored for commercial purposes, Google Trends does exactly what the name suggests, keep track of hot trending topics, i.e. the most popular search topics at any given time. And like most things Google, this feature includes searchability. A new feature allows you to specify a date and find out the hot topics during that time. I did a quick search for “Guantanamo” and came up with the following result:

The search lists regions and cities that have high search intensity for the term, relevant news stories that came up during the period (helping make sense of peaks) and languages. You also get the ability to limit by region or time range.
An even more sophisticated version of Trends is Google Insights, which lets you compare search terms and chose a number of parameters. I quickly carried out a search comparing “Coke” and “Pepsi” popularity within the past 30 days in the United States. Looks like both terms are almost equally popular. The results also show me regions, related top searches and rising searches.

Given Google’s popularity as the leading search engine, market research could benefit greatly from this tool and find out how people are looking for their brands/topics and related content. For example, I just learnt about throwback (sugar sweetened instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup). Now if I was Pepsi and I had just made an announcement about the same, for a fraction of conventional market research techniques I could find out how consumers are looking for this information and use that to monitor and streamline my communications. And did I mention you can download the results in excel friendly format? Data analyzers rejoice!
The key message here is same as before. Conventional market research tools are powerful methods we’ve used over the year to answer our many questions. But the fast evolving world and its new technologies are opening new channels – for communication and data access, as well as monitoring these channels to do exactly what we all want to – get the answers needed. And now, we can do it quick, and cheap.