Google Trends, New Tool For Crisis Management
Posted: Friday, November 13, 2009
by Jonathan Bernstein
Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc.
How much effort should you put into reputation management programs centered on particular company or brand names, or the names of individuals under attack? Are people really looking at the criticized terms a lot? What parts of the country or world are more vulnerable? Some very expensive and often proprietary diagnostic tools have been developed for this purpose, but I was very pleased to learn of a new, FREE tool from Google - Google Trends, which I anticipate will be very useful to crisis managers.
By the top 10 cities where the term(s) is/are searched, worldwide.
By the top 10 regions where the term(s) is/are searched,worldwide.
By the top 10 languages in which the term(s) is/are searched, worldwide.
In some cases, if the stats are low enough, the search results may not show a "top 10" but, rather, a "top (number of significant results)." In one example below, there were only four results.
Using the brand name by which a certain company being criticized online is best known in the United States, I learned that:
To my great fascination, their primary brand name in North America is searched more in the State of Hawaii than in their corporate home state (which I'll leave out in the interest of confidentiality). That means, perhaps, that they have to focus some localized reputation management in Hawaii, knowing that a lot of people there will be seeing the negative on the Web. It could also, but not necessarily, indicate a higher level of concern by residents of Hawaii, something worth correlating against other research sources.
Subjective information the company had received to the effect that Spanish language reputation-related communication was a lower priority than English was verified - rather conclusively - by Google Trends. Most searches for their name were in English...followed by French...followed by Chinese...followed in distant last by Spanish. The company considers this to be very useful strategic information.
When you look at a broader term, e.g., "crisis management," once again the results aren't what one might expect.
The top three languages in which the term is searched the most often are Greek, Tagalog and Finnish. English is fourth.
When you look at the top 10 cities, the first U.S. city is ranked 8th (Washington, D.C.), with the top ranked being Athens, Greece.
And when you look at the regional rankings, the U.S. doesn't even make the top 10, which starts with Pakistan and ends with Indonesia.
Google explains the ranking system as follows:
"When the Cities tab is selected, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities' ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.
"The Regions and Languages tabs work just like the Cities tab. Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.
"Keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users' propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn't on the Top Regions list for the term "haircut" doesn't necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society's conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for 'haircut' make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions."
The explanation is followed by the usual caveats about the limitations of a feature still in beta-testing, the fact that not ALL of Google is included in the results, etc. Still, I've only just begun to think through the implications of this tool for my clients and I'm sure you'll start to do the same.
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