Social Ch@nge

Today, Google Trends is dominated by the US presidential inauguration. Every single one of the top 100 searches in the US are related to Obama being sworn in. I’ve been watching Google Trends for a while now, and I’ve never before seen the national attention so narrowly focused. Usually, there’s at least one apparently random search term, like “ping pong robot.”

If you’re not familiar with it, Google Trends ranks the search terms most commonly typed into Google. It’s an hourly snapshot of what has the attention of users across the internet. Often, it’s a weird mix of things – it’s sort of fun to try and figure out why “recipe lasagna” suddenly shot to the top of the charts. My guess is that it’s often related to big media such as TV programs – for instance, Oprah may have just mentioned her recipe for lasagna, and her fans want a copy.

Interestingly, Trends is a good way of monitoring the news, albeit a little cryptic. The Mumbai attack, for example, started popping up in Trends before many of the big outlets started catching the story. Of course, if you really want to be in front of the latest news, search Twitter. There’s even a brand new mash-up to search Twitter for news stories called TweetNews.

You can also dig into broader trends in searches using Insights for Search, analyzing by region or by time. For instance, take a look at social media as a search term, focusing in on Canada as a region.

The result shows you how, as a search term, social media has increased steadily in frequency since 2004, with a surge in the last year. It also show, unsurprisingly, that Ontario, BC, and Alberta have the highest volume of searches. Finally, it shows related “rising searches” which include “social media marketing.”

All of these tools offer you a chance to better understand what your audience is looking for, be it potential donors, clients, or stakeholders. The only danger is that you’ll spend all your time trying to figure out why “banana sunshine r2d2″ is the internet’s fixation du jour.