A great way to gauge popularity is to use Google Insights for Search, a tool we use all the time to help our clients research their market and discover new ones. This time we thought we’d use it to take a look at search trends around the political parties and their manifestos.

Let’s look at the Big 3..

You can see a clear surge after the live TV debate. There were also searches for “Lib Dems” & “Tories”…

They say personality is important in politics, so how did the leaders do?

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems and their manifesto generated thousands of queries as people searched for ‘Liberal Democrat manifesto 2010′. Searches for David Cameron and the Conservatives topped searches for PM Gordon Brown and the Labour party, although both parties’ policies and manifestos generated a similar number of searches.

Interestingly, throughout the debate all three party leaders made references to a particular policy, term or event which generated thousands of queries, including David Cameron’s reference to “quangos”.

Could this be an early indicator on how the votes will go? I for one will be keeping a close eye on the web trends in the run up to May 6th.





Counting followers is kinda useful. Sure, it makes you feel good when you get some new followers. But when measuring Twitter we should probably be looking for a more meaningful metrics.

Here’s 3 Free Twitter Analytics Tools that help you measure your Twitter activity and give you a bit more info about your influence..

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer gives you a whole load of brand new Twitter Metrics including your Influence, Engagment and Generosity. These new metrics really open your eyes to what we should be measuring on Twitter and who the real influencers are. Highly Recommended.

Check out: www.twitalyzer.com

TwitterCounter

We all love counting followers and this gives you the information over time with a pretty graph. It’s useful for looking at trends. Are certain Tweets attracting new followers? Are others losing you followers? This tool is also handy for finding people to follow.

Check out: www.twittercounter.com

RE:Tweetest

RE:Tweetest doesn’t count your followers. It gives a far more interesting metric – Re-tweets per 1000 followers. This is a real measure of your influence. One caveat: this site is developed by a guy in Japan on his own and doesn’t always seem to work correctly. Still worth a look though.

Check out: http://retweetest.com

Dan Stroker, Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama campaign was one of them. I’ve just found a video of it, which is quite long, but well worth a watch (or listen) if you have the time.

Exciting is maybe too much, but it is kinda cool.

For example, when I typed in the keyword “rowing,” questions returned include:

What muscles does rowing work?

What is the best rowing machine?

I’m sure we can see that this has the potential to be a very powerful tool indeed for sites who can find much asked questions related to their industry. Coupled with a well optimized landing page, answering a potential customer’s specific question could go a long way to gaining them as a customer. This could perhaps be especially powerful for information-based products.

However, when I entered the phrase “phone numbers” (I’m working on a UK-based phone number merchant site at the moment), some very different results appeared:

Wow! Not only did I find nothing useful for selling phone numbers, I also found out two disturbing things: People really want to find out celebrities’ phone numbers, and they also seem to think that they will actually be freely available online! I’m not sure which is more worrying. (Well, probably the stalking thing now that I think about it).

Seeing this, I thought it might be interesting to compare questions on some prominent world figures, namely George Bush, his replacement Barack Obama, and our own Gordon Brown.

The results for Bush looked like this (note questions 7 and 12):

It seems a fair amount of people were also concerned about Obama’s height, and aside from small questions about morality and constitutional violation, his top 20 results were very similar:

More worryingly if we scroll further down on Obama’s results we see:

Now to look at the results for Gordon Brown:

Oh dear. In fairness the results only return questions asked in the US versions of Wordtracker’s partner search engines, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of interest in our own Prime Minister (correct at time of going to press), but there are some worrying elements there.

Perhaps the questions on Obama’s assassination are not such a big surprise, but I’m wondering why people want to know when this will happen, and how they think the internet will know? Last time I checked, oracle.com was still just a business software company, not an actual oracle.

What also intrigues me is the obsession with the height of US presidents. Is this a deciding factor in supporting one candidate or another? Perhaps when finding the wikianswers pages for Obama and Bush, a hundred or so Americans decided that they did indeed need a much taller man as president, then went ahead and ticked a box for Obama. Seems as good a reason as any to cast your vote, eh?

More likely looking at some of the other questions, certain people were after height figures so that they could more accurately calculate trajectories from the windows of tall buildings. Forward planning sure makes those assassination attempts go so much smoother.

So there you have it. Wordtracker has a great new tool which can make you money, and the internet is used for stalking celebs and planning assassinations. Here ends today’s lesson. Oh, and has anybody got Kelly Brook’s phone number?

Michael Theodoulou

Follow Michael on Twitter

Hosting your software online makes perfect sense. The internet is now fast enough to deliver great software and with Mobile Phones finally becoming really useful web enabled devices (iPhone, G1 etc) having all your tools at your fingertips, and not on your desktop, is essential.

Here’s some of the software we’ve been using. I suggest you try some of them….

..your desktop will never be the same.

Basecamp – Project management

Highrise – Contact Relationship Management (CRM)

Freshbooks – Online Invoicing plus much more.

Enjoy your new tools.

-Alex