Nick Garner's Blog

I have been working on a lot of online PR stuff recently and one of the statements that comes up too often is ‘ I can’t think of a good story to write about!’ So as a Sunday morning task I thought it would be useful to aggregate some of the best meme trackers  (what’s a meme tracker? | what’s a meme?) and trending topics tools out there and point my online PR people at this post, so they get some inspirational ideas on what to ‘PR up’ next.

FFUUUU, FOREVER ALONE & TROLLFACE

(Clue on the above pic: Reddit FUUUUUUUUU section)

The important thing about hot topics of course is that as social animals, we are very tuned into memes and subtle social signals.  So much like with surfing, the idea is to wait for the right meme to come along and surf it by spinning up your angle on something everyone is already interested in.

IMHO there are 3 main categories of meme trackers:

1. The raw flow on consciousness (Twitter)
2. Filtered sources like Digg and Reddit where content is submitted and the community elect the top stories
3. Sources that are driven by utility like most popular tags or most bookmarked on Delicious

1st group….finding the underlying ‘raw’ ideas that people care about now:

Twitter - the ultimate meme finder

Twitter… is an amazing source of trending topics because so many people use it and because its so easy to just write something. Here are a few of my favourite trending topics tools

• Trendsmap: Pick a geographical area and then see the hot topics for that area. The UK is all about Glastonbury right now.
• Tweetmeme: monitors the URL’s posted on twitter and then aggregates them into ‘whats hot’ lists. Here is a list for ‘world & business’ for the last 7 days
• Twitscoop: It’s a top trending twitter topics tool. There is a lot of noise here, but with some persistence you will find interesting ideas to work some more.

2nd group: seeing how these raw ideas manifest themselves within communities and main stream media

Newsmap

• Newsmap: Its like a tag cloud of headlines that are aggregated from places like Google News. It’s a great way to zone in on what subjects are getting the most attention right now. Here is one for the UK
• Digg: it has lost some of its ‘shine’ over the last 2 years, but it stil has a big community and from what I can see the trending topics are useful
• Reddit: I love reddit. I’ve even bought the Reddit tee shirt. But as a way of watching memes build, its only OK. It tends to drift off into the preferences of this rather ‘left’ community, which is fine if you want to appeal to this group.
• Mag.Ma is a meme aggregator for video. It’s very interesting to see what’s hot here, but with video, if you see something really ‘cooking’ its gong to be a challenge to get a meme surfing video in a hurry, so for me, its about taking these hot videos and writing stuff about them, rather than produce something to compete with them.

3rd group: seeing the popular vote work in places that aren’t entirely news driven.

Wikipedia Traffic Stats

• Wikipedia: It ranks highly across the internet and its reasonable to say that when there is a hot subject and you want unbiased background information on a given subject, its a place to go. So some clever people have set up a tool to monitor Wikipedia’s traffic.  Here for instance is their top 1000 list of most viewed pages.
• Google Keyword Tool: it tells you where the competition for phrases is. If there is a lot of volume and or commercial competition, then obviously there is a hot meme around there.
• Google Trends: Its the best tool I know of in the way it can give you long term growth or decline on a phrase and thus its popularity.
• Yahoo Answers: I had never really thought about yahoo answers until I had read the post from Viper Chill and on setting up a search, I can see how its actually a very good source for picking up on stuff people want to learn more about and for what is on peoples minds. I did this search for new filtered by ‘most answers’ and ‘most popular’. I think its very current and topical. As of writing If I wanted to surf a good meme, I would write something on your rights if you were burgled i.e. can you fight back without being imprisoned yourself?
• SEOMoz Most popoular: As a means for identifying memes in order of importance, its not great, but it does give you a general overview of whats of note.
• Delicious most popular tags: As you will remember, Delicious is a bookmarking service, so the hot tags will reflect the subjects users are most interested in

With more time, I’m sure I could find a load of other tools, but this gives you a flavour for what is out there. We are lucky today to have so many places to reach into the minds of the masses and if you pay attention to these flows of consciousnesses, it will only be a matter of time before you get a feel for the kinds of topics that will propel your spinned piece to prominence

I randomly found this inforgraphic from click2rank.com. For those of you who don’t know who Matt Cutts is, then this wikipedia article about him may help you.

Click on the image to enlarge it:

I'm a social media specialist!

Social has been heating up recently in my neighborhood. I’m spending a reasonable amount of time working on how my employers (Unibet) use social more effectively within the organization.

A couple of months ago I did a session for a Marketing Week conference where i talked about how social helps generate interest in something, acts as an honest reference point to others seeing the ‘conversation’. I then tied in SEO, explaining how SEO is one of the mechanisms by which this content gets exposed.

http://www.slideshare.net/nickgarner/marketing-week-conference

Broadly the areas im interested in are
- Refer a friend (mine the social graph)
- Influencing the businesses technical architecture to make our content more easy to navigate to and get a hold of (fuel for conversations & mindshare)
- Making our content easier to navigate around (if you’re interested in us, were going to be easier to reach into)
- CRM infrastructure to externalize our help content (social isn’t just Facebook, its happy users, so help them)
- Portability of data (where you are, we can be there too with content you might want in a widget/mobile/embedded on a page)
- Building a blog infrastructures, leading onto a content framework I.e the web sites then the writers

My main thesis is
- Social isn’t just Facebook and twitter, its people communicating together anywhere
- Social is about being authentic, helpful, entertaining, engaging
- Social is part of the DNA of a business, so that means getting the technology, staff incentives and staff freedoms right.
- Make our content accessible and portable
- Be worth engaging with anywhere i.e. forums, Facebook, twitter, other sites… and your own site
- Its ambient like brand, its the fuel that propels word of mouth acquisition – that 50% of all your new business you don’t know how to track

and there you are, simple really  

Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen

The greatest presentation I’ve ever seen is this:

He is a hard act to follow, but if you even get a tiny part of his magic in your presentation, you will probably be a great presenter.

As you my know a PowerPoint presentation can break out into

• A motivational theme
• Transmission of facts and information
• Or a bit of both.

Generally I assume:

• People can already read, so don’t repeat the words on your slide verbatim
• Keep the numbers of ideas to a minimum per slide
• There is a start, middle and an end in all presentations and generally people forget about the stuff in the middle!
• Come in with a BANG and go out with a BANG
• People get bored with “ummmmmm, ahhhhhh, OK” So I like to keep it flowing
• I have a great deal of work to do here !
• People like to be engaged, so look at them as much as possible
• And on engagement, ask questions….and do something with the replies
• Have takeaways – URL’s to tools and other interesting things they can use later i.e. create a google doc, add all you content there, create a bit.ly link to it – easy!

There are 3 books that form the basis of my presentation outlook

Presentation Zen review (taken from powerpoint ninja) The book on amazon

“an informative guide to presentation preparation, design, and delivery. If you’re not already familiar with the popular Presentation Zen blog, this book highlights many of his theories and techniques. If you’ve seen a presentation from famous presenters such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, or Steve Jobs, you’ll be familiar with the highly visual, stock-photo-heavy style that Reynolds advocates.”

My Comment: He is all about stripping out every unnecessary part of a slide, bringing it to the core so you can understand whats being presented to you. e is also about shifting the emphasis to teh speaker and not the slides – after all that’s why you’re there – right?

Here is Garr Reynolds explaining Presentation Zen to a group of Googlers. Its a pleasant watch, where he explains how you can use Presentation Zen (1 hour or so)

Resonate (review taken from their site) The book on amazon

By leveraging techniques normally reserved for cinema and literature, Resonate reveals how to transform any presentation into an engaging journey. You will discover how to understand your audience, create persuasive content, and elicit a groundswell response.

With Resonate, you’ll learn to:

• Connect with your audience empathetically
• Craft ideas that get repeated
• Rely on story structures inherent in great communication
• Create captivating content
• Inspire enthusiasm and support for your vision

My Comment: It’s an awesome book with some far reaching ideas that I do my best to employ. The main one is that a presentation moves people when it follows a path. Know the path and you will communicate beautifully.

Here is a webinar Nancy Duarte did for Ted Talks. Its full of detail… useful detail!

And finally…

Unfolding the Napkin (review taken from backofthenapkin.com) The book on amazon

Unfolding the Napkin teaches readers how to:

• Improve our three “built-in” visual problem solving tools.
• Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
• Instantly improve our visual imaginations.
• Learn how to recognize the type of problem we face and corresponding pictorial solution.

My Comments: It taught me to use pictures to explain how things can fit together. It has amazed me how visualising a problem makes it so much easier for everyone to understand what I’m talking about.

Here is Dan Roam explaining back of a napkin the preceding book to Unfolding the Napkin

Finally – here is me speaking – its not like the Benjamin Zander presentation, but – hey its ok!

Check out some of the vertigo inducing jumps from the bikers headcams