On searches and WOM...
David Leonhardt wrote an interesting column about the value of Google Trends in the Business Section of last Wednesday's NY Times. He comments on the ability of this powerful source of CGM (Google searches) to serve as a "real economic phenomenon," beyond what John Batelle once referred to as a "database of human intentions."
I was wondering what WOM researchers think about this and the projected outpouring of other companies coming up with their own methods of capturing search terms. The article conceives of this source of data as "an enormous online focus group," which is interesting given that most of us WOM researchers throw around that terminology to refer to our drastically different database.
Thus, my underlying question: how are search terms related to buzz? Might search terms mediate the relationship between buzz and sales?
In its truest sense, search terms are not WOM Units. So, what power do they really have to translate to sales? It's sort of a question of what has more predictive prowess, actions or feelings? So often do we tell clients that absolute levels of buzz are unimportant without qualifying them with the associated sentiment; popularity is so often tempered by tone. Would Google Trends be more predictive of intentions if they were to incorporate the overall mood (via language) of the internet on a given day when a given search term spikes?
