Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Trendierr
I’ve been playing around with Trendrr, the online trends tracking service. This has been around for a while, but has just shifted to a ‘Freemium’ model. Think of it as Google Trends on steroids. The sources of trends tend to focus on web chatter (Twitter, Delicious, Flickr etc.), and the featured categories tend to focus on buzz categories like media, music and politics. However, I think it’s most interesting when you use actual transactional data (Amazon, Craigslist and Ebay).
The above example is taken from one of their showcase pages and (gratifyingly) shows response to three articulations of Ogilvy’s campaign for Cisco. You can see that the term “the collaboration effect” generated the most web traffic. What I’ve learned about using these sorts of tools is that they are most interesting when comparing two very disparate sources, something that you can’t do with Google Trends. Try Ebay searches against Tweets of a certain product, for example. It’s not the trend itself that’s interesting (they’re very hard to judge in isolation) but the relationship between two or more trends that happen at the same time.
This morning I listened to a NPR interview with Anthony Wesley, the Australian amateur astronomer who noticed a black spot the size of the Pacific on Jupiter at the weekend (probably made by a comet!). He made the point that the world of professional astronomy is now aided by an “army” of amateurs who are using equipment that only major observatories had twenty years ago. The same is true of trend watching. Amateurs now have the same equipment as professionals. We should look forward to similar discoveries.
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