OPEN

Ah, how fickle and fleet of fancy the online world can be. Last week’s
blog conversations were dominated – in PR and marketing circles at
least – by a new research tool launched by Google. A week later
everyone is rolling in the aisles with laughter at a veteran IT
journalist having his moment in the broadcast news spotlight snatched
away by an careless act of accidental punditry.

Window on the world spirit

Let’s begin with the more serious of the two topics.

For some time Google has published a monthly chart of the top search
terms used globally and locally. The "Google Zeitgeist", as it is
known, provides useful story-fodder with its tantalising glimpse into
what search expert John Battelle calls Google’s "database of
intentions", the things people most want to know more about.

For instance, in the UK in February this year, some of the things we
were most interested in included the National Lottery (number one),
Wikipedia (4th place), holidays (5th), Paris Hilton (6th) and car insurance (10th).

Now, with its habit of so often being able to surprise and delight,
Google has given professional communicators and marketers one of the
most potentially powerful and useful online tools around for free: the
ability to search and compare trends in search terms.

Called Google Trends [see also previous post Google trends: latest (free) must-have tool for research] the search tool
allows anyone to look at broad search trends on any possible search
term. You can narrow it down by country and year and it will even give
you a league table of the top ten cities, regions and languages that
the term was searched for in.

So far, so interesting. Where things get really useful for your brand
and corporate communicators though, is the ability to compare a number
of search terms side by side. For instance, if you ask Google Trends to
compare searches in the UK for Tony Blair and David Cameron you can see
that after an initial spike of interest in the new Conservative leader,
more Britons are still searching for information about the Prime
Minister than his rival.

Another gift to PRs is the news tracking graph that can help you see
where a spike in news coverage has prompted a flurry of search terms.
How’s that for a potential evaluation tool? A word of warning though,
if you want to look at the relationship between news and search in any
depth you would be well-advised to use a good media database (the
Factiva 2.0 service has some excellent complementary graphs and
analysis features that will help) to take a look at trends in the news.

But seriously: read the instructions first if you’re going to use it to
base pitch or story on. Google Trends comes with a few big caveats:
like you can only get results from a month or so back and the data
you’re seeing analysed is effectively a sample rather than a view of
everyone in the world.

Pundit in a Goma (I know, I know it’s serious…)

Last week, business graduate Guy Goma [oh yes, he now has his own Wikipedia entry] went to the BBC for a job
interview, and ended up being tragically mistaken for veteran IT
journalist and itinerant industry pundit, Guy Kewney.

Mr Goma’s ordeal was caused by a mix up when a producer in a hurry
mistook him for the Victor Meldrew of the IT commentariat, as some less
charitable souls cast him, and ushered him into a studio where the
presenter was starting an item about the recent Apple court case (the
Beatles music label lost a case against Apple iTunes). After getting
over the shock, Mr Goma, who thought he was now in his job interview,
bravely offered some insightful views into themusic download industry… [NB: you can see the video via this post.]