On September 15, we announced the commencement of 30-second television ads on Bloomberg and CNBC in the United States, as well as, BNN in Canada. Unlike search engine marketing, it can be used to be hard to measure the effectiveness of offline branding campaigns because potential new visitors don’t call you. If we were specifically marketing our IR services, you could measure the number of prospect calls or web inquiries.

Fortunately, we now have Google Trends. Google Trends analyzes how many searches have been done for a specific term, relative to the total number of searches for that specific term over time. In this case, I wanted to see the search trend for “AGORACOM” in the United States.

In order to make comparisons easy and put them in relative terms, Google assigns the searches over time a baseline score of 1.00. As such, anything above 1.00 since September 15 is a good sign and anything below 1.00 is a bad sign. How good or bad would depend on how far off 1.00 the trend is.

So what is the trend for AGORACOM so far? A Google Trends chart is worth 1,000 words:

The spike is so big that the baseline of 1.00 looks like we had no searches at all in 2008 when, in fact, the spike meant the chart had to be set to increments of 10. To put this into perspective, Imagine what the chart of a small-cap stock would look like if it was trading pretty healthy in and around $1.00 for most of the year and then suddenly spiked to almost $20.

I do concede this is still early and we will have to check this again in 30 days - but we are off to a great start.

AMERICANS SEARCHING FOR “GOLD STOCKS”

If you want to take a look at your own trends, go here. You can view a search trend for the entire world or for a specific country. The caveat is that Google Trends doesn’t give you reports on thinly traded search terms. As such, if your corporate name doesn’t register, try things like your industry. For example, I queried “Gold Stocks” and the following tells me that Americans are becoming VERY interested in them!

If you are a small-cap CEO and don’t recognize the power of Web 2.0 by now, I give up

Regards,
George