Google Trends: A quick and dirty guide to popularity on the web
Posted January 3rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Discovery of Pokens
The other day my wife told me about a new Social Media device called a Poken which she’d stumbled upon on Twitter. Pokens are tiny key chains that act like digital business cards. They electronically store your personal details, contact information, photo, as well as all your social media information. When you meet another Pokenee (my term, not there’s), you can exchange details just by holding the Pokens against one another. Through some wizard technology (no – not Bluetooth) your details are exchanged and the Pokens lights up to confirm you are both “connected”. You can then insert the Poken into your computer’s USB port and access your new friend’s Twitter page, Facebook account or even – God forbid – give them a call!
An idea with potential?
I took a look over the Poken website and saw that the wee devices sold for around £11.99 in the UK. The entrepreneurial alarm in my brain started sounding! We live in Jersey in the Channel Islands which benefits from something called Low Value Consignment Relief (LVCR). This basically means you can ship a good under the value of 22 EURO (£18) to anywhere in the EU and not have to charge the customer any VAT. Pokens are the ideal product to take advantage of this; small, light, non-perishable, a narrow product range and easy to search for on the web. I could undercut EU distributors and make my first million by Christmas!
I started to do some more detailed research. It was clear that the Poken had to reach a critical mass if it were to really take off. There was no point owning a Poken if you never came across another person who you could share details with. The product had been launched in early 2009 and there was a lot of press activity surrounding it at that time. The idea seemed to catch people’s imagination, in the same way it had mine; “An end to the boring Business Card”, “Integrating Social Media into the real world”. However, nine months after the launch the articles seemed to have dried up. If it was to be a true success then growth should have been exponential, and while I was still excited about the product, the evidence in my Google search results wasn’t supporting my enthusiasm.
In (Google) trend?
I’d heard something about Google Trends a while back but had never had cause to use it. Now was the time. Google Trends is yet another simple but effective offering from the corporation that will soon run the world. It’s not rich on features or particularly sophisticated but for getting an idea on the growth or demise in popularity of a product, website or celebrity then there is nothing quite like it. I entered the term “poken” into the Google Trends search bar and bang there it was, a graph showing the trend of people searching within Google for the term “poken”.
In 2009 twelve times as many people searched Google for Cheryl Cole than Ashley Cole
The result was disappointing and clearly showed a demise in people searching the web for Pokens. There was a peak in popularity in March 2009 when the Poken was first launched and then a gradual loss of interest. While you can’t actually tell from Google Trends the number of searches taking place for a search term, you can compare one search term to another and get an indication of relative popularity. For example I compaired the popularity between Cheryl Cole and her husband, Ashley Cole, and found that twelve times as many people searched for Cheryl in 2009 than Ashley. However, twice as many people where searching for Ashley than were searching on Poken! …my millionaire dream was fading fast.
Should I just start a web site selling gourmet worms?
The final nail in the coffin was when I compared the term “eat worms” with “poken”. To my disappointment over the last six months eating worms proved to be just as popular as Pokens. … Hold on, may be this is where my fortune lay, may be I could freeze the wiggly critters them and sell them in Tescos across the country… or may be it was just time for bed!!!
Check out this video I found on YouTube for a quick guide to using Google Trends for your business. Including researching key words, analysing trends by country and city and lots more:
January 4, 2010 at 5:33 pm
I want a Poken – they look so cute. I don’t know what I would do with it Phil but I’m sure there’s a Poken class out there somewhere.
January 14, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Cute they may be but they might just remain a key chain unless they start to take off and more people start using them. I heard that Poken is trying to break into the conference market where they give people a Poken conference badge which contains all the electronic information the person used to register for the conference. That might be a winner for them.