Lara Hejtmanek

Everyone thinks they know who is going to win American Idol this season: your mom, your 12-year-old sister, about half of the people you follow on Twitter and even Simon Cowell all seem to agree that California rocker Adam Lambert will be this year’s champ.

Well, now you can add digital marketers to the growing list of Adam-believers – but for a different reason.

What if you could predict the winner of American Idol before the final votes were tallied – without having followed the season’s contest or listened to the pundits – by analyzing online search trends alone? Are search trends really a proxy for what will happen in the future?

By looking at Google search trends – volume, demographic and geographic – from March through May for the top three finalists of prior seasons, we were able to spot patterns in the data that seem to predict the eventual winner of American Idol Season 8.

So, how do this year’s search trends enable us to predict Adam as tonight’s winner? Well, it’s certainly not as simple as looking at who has the most search volume.

Read our complete article in Mashable to learn how we did it.

@TwitterMoms has amassed more than 17,000 followers since Jan. 2009 (stats via TwitterCounter).

By Lara Hejtmanek, Director of Customer Insights

In honor of Mother’s Day we thought we’d take a closer look at the influential mom set, a rising power of reach and distinction in the digital world. Moms can be influential opinion leaders and vocal activists – just ask the makers of the infamous “Wearing Your Baby” Motrin video. And with events like Oprah announcing her own Twitter feed on April 17 (she’s racked up 850,000 followers as of May 5), the groundswell of mommy power will likely pick up even more momentum in the social sphere.

Marketers hoping to piggy-back the buying power of moms would do well to monitor this phenomenon, as a way of both understanding this valuable segment and creating engaging strategies to reach them. The TwitterMoms network represents a confluence of about 15,000 women. Judging from the types of groups they’ve formed on the site, they are a force – comprised of bloggers, Twitterers, business owners, community leaders and experts in their respective fields. Despite their diverse interests, they have an important commonality: social media is their mouth piece.

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By Lara Hejtmanek, Director of Customer Insights at 360i

Earth Day was a huge success on Twitter, with more than 30,000 tweets in a 24-hour period, or an average of 21 tweets per minute. Whereas blogs still typically dominate digital chatter on most topics, Twitter accounted for 64 percent of the conversations about Earth Day in the last 30 days. It seemed like the event was tailor-made for this micro-medium, with each individual acutely aware of the small, virtually effortless actions they can take on this day to help make something bigger happen.

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