It’s all in progress so if there is anything you would like to see in the future let me know!

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/12-no-brainer-steps-to-internet-success.html

Considering it’s on www.searchenginepeople.com it focuses on offering online marketing services but it’s good advice for any business. This section was especially resonant for me:

2. Don’t Offer What You Don’t Know

Another no-brainer right? You would think so, but so many business owners simply jump on the latest fad service offering without having any knowledge of what they are offering. This is most blatant in social media right now, where we have scores of “Social Media Gurus” offering services they have no business offering.

That’s not to decry anyone working in social media, there are many great consultants and agencies out there including, of course, Qube Media where I was lucky enough to train.Instead I worry about the increasing number of agencies who offer offer social media as a core service without any prior experience, hoping to win their first contract so that they can learn on the job.

As always the lesson is to make sure any agency or individual you decide to work with does indeed have a backlog of quality work in the field they are offering before you pay them an experts fee.

There are a number of trend tools based around blogs and user generated content but looking at them from the eye of a non-technical user these tend to be bias towards more technical topics:

Twitter trends:
http://search.twitter.com/

Technorati’s Popular Blogs:
http://technorati.com/pop/

and even Delicious to find out what people are book marking:
http://delicious.com/

With all the talk of social media tools giving us a better insight into our customers / audience / users it was interesting (if not surprising when you think about it) that the best tools to get a taste of the general publics interests are based around search engine results, still the most popular of all online tools.

Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Yahoo Buzzlog:
http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

and Asks tool for popular searches:
http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

I love looking at all the different ways people search for the same  topic, especially those not yet covered by the mainstream media and as such have not had terms around them concreated.

Finding a way to deliver useful content to the masses based on these interests is the next stop!

There are some other good posts from the rest of the qube team as well so its worth a look if your into that sort of thing.