The Times’s David Leonhardt today pays homage to John Battelle and the SEM/SEO crowd by drawing attention to Google’s new toogle, Google Trends, in a front page “Business” section column. (Even Mr. Battelle was blushing.)
If you had read Mr. Battelle’s most recent tome The Search, which was released in proximity to another tale on Google, you likely will know a little something about intent-based marketing or “the database of intentions.”
So now we have Technorati for tracking the conversation in the blogosphere, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, which gobbled up Intelliseek, Alexa, and others offering predictive tools for marketers (PR people presumably among them).
Some months ago, I had the good fortune of meetings the folks at the Aussie-founded company Hitwise, which approaches database trend analysis from a different direction than Google and promises “real-time competitive intelligence. It works through ISP’s to collect data about site visits and referrals from a database of Internet users many times larger that the standard analyzers of online behavior.
The company also has some cool blogs. I especially like Bill Tanzer’s periodic musings on the digital world. Here’s his latest on MySpace.
Anyway, the point of this posting is that there’s life for marketers beyond Google when it comes to measuring and acting on what’s happening on the Internet. Can you ignore the search, software, and hardware (?) monopoly. Alas, the answer for the foreseeable future is a resounding no.
PR Google search advertising marketing Hitwise John Battelle database