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.

“Early on, I noticed that these weren’t your ordinary, average, everyday moms joining the site,” says Megan Calhoun, who founded TwitterMoms in September 2008. “These women are impressive and industrious. Nearly 75 percent of the members are active bloggers and almost all have substantial followings on Twitter because they have interesting things to say. Their voices really carry.”

So, what insights can TwitterMoms reveal to us about the power mom set? And what do marketers need to know about them before joining the conversation? Here are some observations gleaned from looking at the most active groups and conversation threads on the site:

• They are social-media obsessed and enthusiastic self-promoters – in a good way. Mommy Bloggers and Twitter This Please are the two most popular groups, and phrases such as “would really appreciate a retweet” are routine.

• They are tech savvy. Some favorite “mom-friendly” tools include Kindle2, Netbooks, MacBookPro, the iPhone and BlackBerrys.

• They are striving for mommy excellence. This is exemplified by groups like Super Moms, and the endless streams of child-rearing questions and advice. They are relentlessly on the look-out for new products and ideas that will help them achieve more each day in their time-starved and multi-tasked lives.

• At the same time, they desperately seek “me” time. The TwitterMoms Book Club, Fitness Moms and Twitter Wine Moms are popular groups that allow women to pursue interests aimed at their own personal development or enjoyment.

• They are natural marketers who love to review products. Many of these moms are marketers themselves who are ready and willing to be turned into advocates for the products they appreciate. For instance, the Moms Who Review group is full of mommy bloggers who focus on a range of product reviews and recommendations.

By understanding their needs, motivations, likes and dislikes, marketers can speak to these moms in their language, and offer them utility to help them promote what they care about. Above all, as is the case with any influential customer segment, they deserve an extra dose of attention and respect. In a social environment like the TwitterMoms network, your brand IS what they think it is, as well as what they tell others about it.

“There is a ton of opportunity here for brands to engage influential moms,” says Calhoun. “When they do it right, the results are amazing – for all the participants.”

As a final bit of insight and advice for this Sunday, we explored what influential moms want most for Mother’s Day. Here’s a tag cloud of about twenty-five answers to a question posed on TwitterMoms on just that topic:

The verdict? These moms want the things that are in short supply for just about every busy mom on the planet – sleep, relaxation, and time. Time with their kids, time with their husband and time for themselves. Twitter Dads, take note.

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.

What did Twitterers do for Earth Day besides spread the word? How did they feel about it? The unique thing about Tweets is that they are stream of consciousness missives, less self-conscious and less carefully constructed than blog postings, often more emotional, more ambient. One way to capture this ambiance is through visual expression of the language used. This type of exercise can yield nicely qualitative insights, uncovering both actions and sentiments in one shot.

For example, here is a tag cloud of about 50 tweets on what people did to honor the earth on April 22:

People celebrated by turning off the lights for one minute, planting trees with their kids, going for walks, generally enjoying nature – and they seemed quite happy about it all (full disclosure: negative, sarcastic tweets were left off this exercise). All in all, Earth Day made them feel good, and they wanted to share that feeling.