Twice in the past week my referral logs have told me something I didn’t know. In the first case, it was that a high school classmate and dear friend had passed away. In the second, it was that someone I’d written about a while back is in the news again. In both cases, the spike in number of people searching for those terms indicated an unusual level of interest in those terms; sure enough, with a little searching of my own, I discovered the “new” news.
Which got me to thinking…
If an organization had its employees blogging on a variety of subjects, it could seed Google’s index with a variety of info on subjects across the subject matter spectrum that’s relevant to the company. Then, by running statistics about how frequently certain terms come up (names, subjects, competitors, product names, etc.), they can start to gauge the relative importance of those terms. Importantly, it can be an important leading indicator of a newsworthy event, customer interest, or competitive positioning. An important benchmark would be the deltas between the average number of times a term was searched for and any increase for those terms over a specific period of time.
Cross-referenced against the Internet domains of the people doing the searches, and you could have some very interesting info about what matters to whom, and even start to glean why. Put in the hands of the executives in charge of those business areas, this kind of info could be very useful…
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