Use hot topics to frame your marketing message

The best marketing message is that which addresses people's concerns.

What are people talking about? What are they searching for online?

You can get answers to these questions from statistics provided by search engines, blogs and social bookmarking sites.

If there are a lot of searches or a lot of blogging on a given topic, that means it's hot. And if you're an expert on this topic (or something related to it) it's an ideal time to write about it or comment about it. This will help build your status as an authority.


HERE ARE SOME TOOLS:

Google Trends - See at a glance what the popular searches have been for the past 24 hours. Or search on a specific topic for trends in recent weeks, months or years. You can even compare search terms and get a breakdown of searches by country and region.

This graph shows the results of searches for 3 popular psychiatric diagnoses: ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar, for the last 12 months.

Overall, Autism (red line) has been the most popular search. However, if you look at the countries below the graph, you'll notice that this is the case mainly for English-speaking countries. in northern Europe the most popular search has been ADHD (blue line.)

Thus, depending on which population you're targeting, you'll frame your message accordingly.





Yahoo Buzz - Learn what's hot right now. A "Buzz score" is based on search term popularity, how many times a news story or other item is emailed from Yahoo Buzz, and the number of votes from Buzz visitors. You can search for buzz within a particular topic, and within a specific time frame, up to the past year. Here's a screenshot from what's hot in health news from the past 30 days:





Blogs and social bookmarking - People are not only searching online; they are also talking about what they've found. They're blogging, commenting, and sharing their bookmarks. You can see what's hot by visiting:
Technorati
BlogPulse
Del.icio.us
Furl