A short tip on finding out where your audience is talking, and what they're saying.

My curiosity has always been a great asset. I've always been interested in the social psychology behind word-of-mouth marketing, group trends, memes, etc. I've learned a ton from tracking emerging memes and seeing how/where they spread.

The techniques and discipline applied to researching memes can also be applied to brands and niche specific search queries. Its useful to research this kind of information because it lets you know where your audience is communicating. Knowing where your brand/niche evangelists are communicating is an incredible asset, because they really have their fingers on the pulse of that brand/niche, and people LISTEN to them. By knowing where the evangelists communicate, you are in a position to deal with bad PR before it spins out of control; you're also in position to exploit and leverage opportunities you might have missed if you were just relying on Google News Alerts, and BlogSearch.

This isn't just about researching the buzz on social sites like Twitter. I mean, let's face it, Twitter has a fairly narrow demographic. For example, let's say you want to know how to best communicate to real estate investors. You better know where the realtors are hanging out on the web. You've got to get your hands dirty and identify the popular opinion blogs, the obscure dicussion forums, and so on.

I use alot of the obvious tools to do my research, like google search, blog search, technorati, etc, but, my favorite new tool is BoardReader. It is, hands down, one of the best research tools I've used in recent months.

Let's say I wanted to find out where people are talking about condos in Toronto. I'd goto BoardReader and peform this search

With that one search, I've just been given a whole group of new websites to research and monitor. Now I know that people are talking about Toronto Condos on forums such as SkyScraper Forum, and InvestorsHub  and Realestatetalks.com and Cyburbiaforums etc etc etc.

And the best part of this is that BoardReader gives us a list of recent/relevant topics and posts on these forums. This makes it incredibly easy for us to monitor the conversations, find the opinion makers, and connect with our audience through meaningful, relevant and timely communications. 

A decent, but not perfect, way to buy niche-relevant domains

So, I've been messing around a bit with Googles 2001 search (http://www.google.com/search2001.html) and I've found some great old domains with it.

I got the idea when I found some domains that ranked for various viagra search terms back in 2001 that are now unregistered. They are old, plus have backlinks, which is a double bonus. We all know how much Google loves old domains!

Anyways, I created a small script that goes through the 2001 SERPs and pulls each domain into a list that is run through a whois search to see if it's available. In under and hour I found almost 15 great domains. The thing that I like about this, compared to domain auctions is that you know you're buying a domain that is relevant to your niche! And chances are, whatever backlinks those domains still have will also be relevant to your niche.

Give it a whirl! Some of you might be pleasantly surprised with what you find.

If you rely on Google Trends, you'll often miss the boat

Google Trends is a great tool for figuring out what's hot on the web...right? Alot of us have scrapers that grab Google Trends terms and then use them to create content pages. But the problem is, once something hits Google Trends, it can often be too late for you to really get any traction on the search term. What if you want to find out what's hot ahead of Google Trends? Allow me to introduce TwitScoop.

Today, there is a great example of how valuable TwitScoop is. It seems that Kanye West got arrested for beating on some paparazzi...have you heard about that yet? If you are relying on Google Trends, then no, you haven't, because it hasn't hit Google Trends yet. But its already all over the front page of TwitScoop. You can bet that Kanye West Arrested will be all over the front page of Google Trends in about 12 hours. This is because Twitter has its pulse on exactly what people are talking about at this exact moment, whereas Google Trends represents what people were searching for 12-24 hours ago.

So, next time you're researching what the moment's hot topics are, check out TwitScoop first, and Google Trends second.

OH, and PS: TwitScoop has an API....so...yeah.....it's a slam dunk.

Here is a freebie for you all. A database of about 1,000 laptop reviews.

Enjoy!

http://www.2shared.com/file/3839085/7448ec0a/laptops.html