Dissecting Windows Live PR with Data

I am still totally hooked on Google Trends. I am bullish for its use in PR. In fact, so much so that I may do a series of posts on it. Why am I so ga-ga? Because Google Trends is an invaluable tool for building, tracking, selling and measuring the impact of any PR program, especially a product launch. The key is to use it in concert with other existing analytic tools -  BlogPulse, Technorati and Alexaholic (which charts Alexa data)- so that you can also track the conversation and traffic trends. All of these tools by the way are free.

To bring this to life, let's take a real-world example - the launch of Windows Live. (Fine print: Microsoft is an Edelman client. We work on the MSN/Live.com business throughout Asia.)

Windows Live launched with much fanfare on November 1, 2005 with a special press event in San Francisco. Until then no one had heard of Windows Live. It didn't exist. When we pull up a Google Trends chart for WIndows Live it confirms that no one started searching for it until November. (Note to Google, it would be really helpful to have more date hash marks in your charts.) However, there's more.

The Google Trends chart reveals a spike in searches when the product debuted in November and also again in early 2006. So clearly there was a lot of buzz on these days that prompted people to go to Google to find Windows Live.

Now, let's run "Windows Live" through Technorati and also BlogPulse. First of all, you will notice a parallel between the dates the searches spiked and when the conversation increased - early November and again very late in Q1 2006. (Also note the differences between these two charts - another matter for another day.) If you click the drill down on BlogPulse you will see that Microsoft launched a revamped Windows Live search on March 8. On a related note, bloggers were talking about Windows Live - at least as a parent brand - even before it launched, yet no one noticed.

So to recap, we see that that two separate news events generated a) an increase in Google searches and b) an increase in conversation. So how about traffic? Well, here's where it gets interesting.  According to Alexaholic there was a lag between these news events and when the site became a regular visit for many consumers. In other words, it took Windows Live a considerable amount of time following the launch to build any kind of critical mass. (A caveat here. Alexa data is questionable when measuring true traffic data because it amounts for a small subset of the total browsing public.  However, the overall trends it shows I feel are bankable.)

So what did we learn from all of this?

* News drives conversation and searches (not a big revelation)
* It's important to set up searches for a new brand before it launches, just to make sure it doesn't leak
* It takes time to go from conversation to and searches to actual traffic
* You can benchmark your product launch against that of a competitor using these tools to see how you did. You can also layer in clip report data

Exciting stuff! More to come.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Google Trends, BlogPulse, Technorati, Windows Live