Trends, trends, trends. Businesses love trends.
Trends are a valuable source of information when we’re trying to manage or observe an activity overtime. Are my sales going up? Is my cost going down? Are my customers more satisfied?
As someone told me years ago, “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage” and trends are a critical part of the measure.
So we just added our own piece to the puzzle by releasing Trends in Conversation (because our customers asked for it).
And the result is really very neat. Here’s a couple of examples from our application:
From our ’social media marketing’ project (~800 blogs we follow), we can now create a graph of how often bloggers talk about Obama & social media or McCain & social media.
Obama:
McCain:
From our mobile/wireless project (~250 blogs), here’s the trend on Mobile Chrome. Bt they way, there isn’t (yet) a mobile Chrome (Google announced the desktop version a few weeks ago) but mobile bloggers are already speculating about the why/when/what/how 
October 13, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I will be interested to see what Mobile Chrome will look like.
Trends are always important to study. The trick is not to study them after the fact. The trick is to anticipate them - which is a very difficult thing to do.
October 14, 2008 at 1:44 pm
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” (Niel Bohr)
Having said that , the graph above could be read: There is a demand or at a minimum some interest for a “mobile chrome” …
It’s an interesting insight ! Let’s hope Google marketers will catch it !
Maybe we should pitch to Google