This document provides steps for discovering and tracking digital trends, including: 1) Staying updated on news sources to find starting points for trends. 2) Monitoring community sites like Reddit and Delicious to see what topics people are interested in and sharing. 3) Checking real-time sources like Twitter to find currently trending topics. 4) Tracking topics over time using tools like Google Insights and Facebook Lexicon to validate emerging trends.

1. STEPS FOR
SEARCHING
&
SPOTTING
DIGITAL
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TRENDS
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2. TREND SEARCHING
Methodology of discovery and insight.
Discovering a trend in digital is greatly determined by recognizing and following
specific topics and keywords on the web.
Diving deeper into each keyword can reveal new behaviors and outlooks
projected by consumers.
The following slides describe how to find trends on the web
with a combination of these steps.
• Stay updated on the news– Leads to start with.
• Community controlled - trending information by the people.
• Keep your hand on the digital pulse – Real-time topics.
• Track and validate – See what is happening.
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3. 1 STAY UPDATED
WITH THE NEWS
E-mail subscriptions to Smart Brief’s on Social Media and IAB.
RSS feeds from sources like Mashable.com, Techcrunch, and Clickz.com
Set up Google Alert’s for appropriate interests,
i.e. ‘social media advertising, new mobile technology, user generated content,
etc.
This is more effective in confirming a trend, or tracking it’s evolution over time.
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4. 2
COMMUNITY
CONTROLLED
TRENDING INFORMATION.
Digg.com and Reddit.com provide a list of community controlled interests.
Site’s like these can provide excellent leads on digital trends.
This can help un-cover what topics people are interested in and sharing amongst
themselves.
Deliciousis a bookmark sharing network, the delicious website feature’s current
trending bookmarks.
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5. 3 KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE
DIGITAL PULSE
Twitter search. Looking at popular topics on real-time networks like Twitter can reveal a lot of information.
Logging onto twitter and checking out the Trending topics of the day can be a good starting point.
Going to www.tweetcloud.com allows you to see what’s being said on twitter in the form of a word cloud.
Find related keywords in relation to another word (i.e..“SUPPORT”), which can lead to relevant discoveries.
Spending time on social media search engines such as www.topsy.com enables you to browse trending
topics amongst trending websites. Looking to this search engine can reveal new environments that users
inhabit, and what they are doing within those places. I have also recently discovered http://sency.com/, it is
much like Topsy, although includes a ‘what’s going on lately’ section.
Once a trending topic is found, looking to http://whatthetrend.com/ can help uncover what that topic means,
or who started it. Looking through www.urbandictionary.com or Wikipedia is also a good way to define
trending topics.
Information that is passing between people via re-tweets can find at www.dailyrt.com. This site shows you
popular re-tweeted posts, and the details of the connected content.
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6. 4 Track &
validate
Google insights for search lets you track and discover trending search topics. This can helpful in
tracking seasonality of topics, geographic specific interests, as well as categories of interest.
Facebook Lexicon counts the occurrences of words and phrases on walls over time. This tool is
very much like Google insight, except designated to track more specific activity. Lexicon can be a
handy tool in tracking and comparing current trends within Facebook, or discovering and
confirming new ones – given there is sufficient conversation around the subject to be discovered.
When tracking twitter trends, the website http://trendistic.com is helpful in creating flow charts that
link to specific tweets linked to peaks in the chart. This trend tracker is not specific to hash tags,
allowing for a broader range of keywords to be searched. The results can be tracked from the past
24 hours to the last 180 days. 5
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