Houston, TX (October 1, 2015)- 950 AM Radio will officially add its first ever radio show dedicated to helping you build your business, The Hook, hosted by The Marketing Maverick Jason Arcemont. The Hook will provide marketing tips, tricks, strategies and news to business owners and executives seeking direction and assistance.
As evidenced by the obsolescence of phone books and Encyclopedia World Books, it’s no secret that the Internet and the rise of search engines have revolutionized the way people find information over the last several decades. In particular, Google has powered much of the online revolution thanks to its intense interest in how we search, take in information, and what we do with the results of our online queries. As a result, Google is now the world’s most popular search engine and leader in the field of search algorithms and search information. When Google updates its algorithm, the world takes notice and starts its own discussions about the implications the algorithm changes have on public information.
Yet even today, some Google tools still go overlooked by the general public. While Google search, Gmail, and Google Chrome are popular with a wide variety of computer users, two of the most impressive Google tools are rarely mentioned: Ngram Viewer and Trends.
With a better understanding of these tools, writers, researchers, and people who are simply fascinated in how the world thinks can gain insights never before possible.
Here’s how they work.
The Google Books database comprises books dating back to 1800 and runs up to the year 2000. You can see the frequency of a given phrase in the entire body of books they have available, giving you an idea of how popular a term may have been over time. Essentially, Ngram Viewer gives us the opportunity to look at the quantity of word and phrase usage within a cross-section of books.
Why is that meaningful? Well, since books were the broadest method of transporting complex ideas, and individual words and phrases in conjunction made up the ideas in books, Ngram Viewer becomes a way of assessing microtrends in broadly shared ideas over those 200 years. With each chart we create in Ngram, we get a different perspective on how people thought, spoke, and spread ideas, improving our theories on collective information and psychology.
Did I mention this tool is free?
Ngram in Action
Let’s assess some generalized fields in Ngram to see it in action. Here is an Ngram search result for “business”, “politics”, and “arts” between the years 1800 and 2000.
You’ll notice that the reference to “business” is far more popular than the other two, which may speak to the field being a bit more common in English practice, or may speak to the versatile nature of the word “business”. In other words, many uses of the unigram may be about “business” as a field of study or practice, but others may be more along the lines of its use as part of the phrase “business as usual”. We have no way of knowing without looking up every cliche involving the word “business” in the Ngram database.
However, it does appear that the concept of business as a whole is far more mentioned and far more popular than those of “art” or “politics”. Furthermore, the relationship between those two latter terms is fascinating, as “politics” surpassed “arts” in usage in 1884.
Then again, the term “arts” is a variation of “art”, which is much more common in usage as a whole.
“Art” shoots over “politics” by quite a bit. Not too surprising given the possibilities for the gram “art” (including its use in the phrase “the art of politics”).
Let’s look at the chart with one more variation, swapping “politics” with “political”:
The “political” nature of things seems to have taken off starting mid-twentieth century. Given that “political” is a term that can be used in a way that is not necessarily about “politics” (as in “The corporate world is extremely political”), it may be the case that the term simply increased in general use. However, this uptick is suspiciously steep, so steep that it seems more likely to have come from an increase in interest and discussion of “political” matters in the literary world. For example, the phrase “The personal is political” AKA “The private is political”, a slogan popularized during Second Wave Feminism, both may account for some of the uptick in the use of the term “political” by authors.
Whereas Ngram Viewer covers the years 1800-2000— a period when, as we mentioned, books were used as the main method by which in-depth ideas were spread— Trends covers the years from 2004 to the present. During years covered by the Google Trends database, the Internet has provided an immediate platform for sharing and researching ideas.
Interestingly, Google Trends also gives users the option to measure words as a “topic” rather than just search terms. Whether this means Google is measuring the word as an idea based on all of the terms related to the “topic” or if “topic” is just a synonym for “search term” is unclear.
Google Trends lets you select the terms you want to search, the time range you want to search, categories of online topics, and types of searches within Google (news searches vs. general searches vs. YouTube vs. Image vs. Shopping queries).
Frisbee is a more popular search during summer months. Not particularly surprising, right? What may be surprising, however, is that the term “frisbee” is actually decreasing in share of overall searches! This is an interesting contrast to the claim of some people that ultimate frisbee is gaining in popularity.
However, the decline of “frisbee” as a search term does not necessarily mean that people are less interested in frisbees than they once were. Early Google searches were often keyword based. Later searches have been more semantic, phrased closer to the way people speak thanks to advancements like voice-to-text and improved geo-search capabilities. Whereas an early Google Search user may have simply typed the word “frisbee”, a modern Google user might use voice-to-text to search the phrase “buy frisbee online” or “ultimate frisbee game in Houston”.
Let’s look at “Skiing” as a subject:
As we might expect, Skiing is more popular as a search term in the winter months. It also has decreased as an overall part of the search environment over time.
Now for a less “seasonal” trend: Tarot. It has felt lately like more people are interested in Tarot, but something like that could also be a function of living in a city, being in my thirties, knowing Bohemian people, etc.
Let’s see if search interest in Tarot aligns with my experience.
Well, I’ll be dipped! Tarot searches are pretty much at an all-time high. May not be a bad time to get into the Tarot card business.
It has felt over the life of our company (starting in December of 2012) that “copywriting” has become a term of the past, and that “content marketing” and other terms have become more popular. Trends can tell us whether or not my instinct on this is correct.
As it turns out, “Copywriting” is actually still the more popular term. In spite of the fact that it has been trending down while content marketing is trending up, “Copywriting” still enjoys nearly three times the searches.
Something interesting happens when we add the search term “Blogging” to the mix:
As we can see, “blogging” was a scorching hot topic on the Internet in January of 2008. Like, as hot as they come. It was a topic the whole world suddenly wanted to know about.
The popularity of “blogging” as a term correlates to some macroeconomic trends in ways that may lead to interesting potential theories. The bottom of the stock market decline during The Great Recession was March of 2008, marking a time when people were desperately looking for an advantage in the market, or new revenue streams, both of which might come about from blogging, if a person put their mind to it. Today, the term has leveled out to around the same search volume as “Copywriting”.
If you don’t, here’s the Wiki. Go get a feel for what it is and come back. If you remember it, keep reading.
Trends can tell us the exact month the Harlem Shake peaked, and how the fad flamed out.
We’ll view one more example: seasonal search. For this query, we turn to the “NFL” as a search topic. After all, we’re from Texas. Football is pretty popular here.
Here’s the long-term search trend for “NFL”.
Two trends stand out. First, search volume is growing over time. Second, the search interest in NFL topics usually peaks in January, likely because of the Super Bowl. However, in 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2018 the Super Bowl was not the period when search interest was highest. Theorizing why that was in the case during those four years with any real insight would likely take a person who is a bigger football fan than I am, but it stood out.
We’ll continue to investigate these tools and other tools along the way and share more on what we learn and observe. Our hope is that these insights will continue, over time, to yield something useful to everyone in the RedShift Writers community.
Got an interesting idea for Trends, Ngram, other Google tools, or something else altogether? Reach out and let us know at contact@redshiftwriters.com.
RedShift Writers: Stories change history.
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Calling all Houstonians in the business of crafting, amplifying, or tracking content: Let’s meet up and trade notes! RedShift Writers and January Advisors are hosting a small content writing meetup Wednesday, July 12, 6-8 PM at Mercantile Cafe on 3321 Stanford Street in Montrose.
Much like other industries in the Houston area, the Houston writing and content marketing scene boasts of a robust arrangement of talent unafraid to take to the page with the right preposition, data visualization, or dashboard as circumstances see fit. Let’s take a few sips of coffee or tea and trade notes on something you’ve learned.
Here’s the gist of the event:
1) Think of something you have learned about content that you are willing to share;
2) Show up and mingle to make a few new content buddies;
3) Share your lesson with the crowd in two minutes or less;
4) Pinpoint one lesson to learn from;
5) Have fun!
We’re keeping this casual with juuuuust enough structure (read: a super official Facebook invite and mild meeting structure) to be productive.
Kids are allowed. It’s a coffee house, but we’ll bring crayons and coloring books.
Hope to see you there!
read moreHave you been watching the presidential race? If not, you’re missing some primetime television, as well as an opportunity to learn about branding at the highest level. Make no mistake: the Presidential Election is one of the highest offices in the world and the 2016 Presidential Election is estimated to cost more than $5 billion WITHOUT counting down-ballot races.
The question is “Which candidate is best positioned to win and why?” The answer will come down to who has the best brand. And one key part of a powerful brand is a strong slogan.
With that, we partnered with OntoBox Training to present The Official Nonpartisan Guide to All 21 Presidential Campaign Slogans. We graded all 21 campaign slogans on style, positioning, and overall effectiveness.
Whether you’re a political junkie, a brand marketing consultant, a lover of language, a game theorist or just someone who likes interesting content about competitive scenarios, we hope you enjoy this special report and find it useful. If you have any thoughts, comments, questions, or disagreements, we would love to hear from you in the comments below or at Learn@OntoBoxTraining.com.
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