As a lot of you, I read with attention the release of the new Google Trends service. I really like it, as it offers, for free (until when?), real potential insights to PR and marketing professionals. You may check for example at any time the interest of people towards brands, markets, or anything else. The value now is that you can now trends things over time.
One of the questions I had was to figure out what may be the relationship of popular search terms and "consumer generated media" (cgm). It seems obvious that although that there may be relationship, it may not always be going in the same direction:
- search and cgm may be simultaneous around a topic that grab people attention in general and bloggers as well,
- cgm may anticipate a bigger trend as later reported by google trends,
- or in some cases, search popularity on a given topic may be higher that cgm to start, cgm taking off later when bloggers for example take the topic of interest towards deeper and more intense conversations.
I do not have any specific examples to illustrate the above three situations. Do you have any? If so, please feel free to share.
Still, as I recently commented on the fact that the buzz (as reported by BlogPulse) around "web analytics" was pretty much dominated by "google" (for the full note click here), I simply compared data reports between Google Trends and BlogPulse, below are the results.
The blue line provides the trend towards "web analytics", the red line provides perspectives on the popularity of the search term "google web analytics".
Quite clearly, as I pointed out in my previous post, the release of free web anaytics from Goggle towards the end of 2005 generated a lot of interest. The interest was very centered around the release.
Now, what is really interesting is that when BlogPulse reports the same pic towards the end of 2005, "google web analytics" still seem to dominate the content of conversations around "web analytics"... whereas, Google trends does not report such trend.
Still looking at the google trends result, it also seems to indicate that the market of "web analytrics" is probably establishing itself as a"durable trend": no significant search was reported until early 2005, but since then it has constantly increased, confirming the fact that the web analytics market is growing and becomes more and more established. This is indeed well in line with the market growth and its early signs of concentration.
All in one, I will encourage marketing professionals to use Google Trends and BlogPulse. The two services are complementary and offer really valuable insights.
Thanks Binal - good comment indeed. This speaks to the fact that the two tools are complementary indeed...and that we should look at a dimension of expertise and leadership among bloggers as well...in order to amplify further the importance further the importance of some vs others... Thanks for your comment!
Posted by: Laurent Flores | 05/17/2006 at 12:33 AM
When you compared Google Trends to Blogpulse on the term "web analytics", shouldn't you have to keep in mind that bloggers like yourself would talk about it more than mainstream population would and performing a keyword search? I would think bloggers like yourself are much more passionate about web analytics and its importance in measuring a successful website than someone in the mainstream population. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Binal | 05/17/2006 at 12:28 AM