How google trends can help you to anticipate what to publish as an intuitive leader.

Hello, welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James and I am your host. I've been an entrepreneur for over 25 years and I've also been running my own PR firm, EastWest Public Relations, with offices in Singapore, China, and the UK. And I wanted to share tools and tips, things that I've learned along the way that I think can help you as an entrepreneur to get your company noticed. Now, this morning, I had the good fortune to be taking part in the Progress Shed Action Coach webinar with Richard Malone, who is an engagement coach, and he has a company based around Engage and Grow. Now, Richard called us from Melbourne, and he filled the room because he's got a great personality, really vibrant. And what he was sharing was about The four quadrants that we find ourselves in right now as people leading organizations, and he said that on one axis we have that we either view it as the end of the world with coronavirus or that we see it as an opportunity to reset for growth. And across the other axis, the horizontal axis, we have either No time, limited time, or we have infinite time. And in those 4 boxes, in the bottom left quadrant, Richard said that we have people who feel lost and need to be rescued. And in the top left, we have people that are fighters, but they need to be helped. And in our bottom right, he had people who are victims, people who felt that it was the end of the world. no sense of urgency, but they needed to be served in some way. And that we have the people in the top right quadrant, those people that see COVID as being a time to reset for growth, but also see themselves as having infinite time. In other words, they see themselves as getting kind of reconnected with their core purpose and their core values. Those people are the leaders. And those people can give guidance. And I thought this was wonderful as an explanation because, of course, what it leads into is the kind of terminology that we can give as companies and as entrepreneurs to our 3 stakeholder groups: to our employees, to our partners, and to our customers as well. Now, as I'd mentioned before, in the Edelman Trust Index. Over 70% of employees currently feel as though they are ill-advised or just not advised by their company. So Richard also raised this, this number today, and what it leads to, of course, is a lack of engagement. So a large part of what we need to do now as entrepreneurs is to start to think about how we can redefine the business and how we can create engagement and key messaging for our team. And I've been doing some housekeeping myself, and one of the things that I've done over the years is I've accumulated a lot of domain names. So I've had a PR firm, I've had a motorsport festival, I have an organization for mature men that want to start a business. So as an entrepreneur, one of my weaknesses is that I start too many things, and I tend to buy the domain name almost as the first port of call. This led me to thinking this morning about the need to focus. So I have been paying, of course, monthly these renewal fees and annual renewal fees, and it gets quite expensive— £10 here, £20 there. So I went through today and I went onto my GoDaddy site and I did a culling. Now, as I was going to just kind of not renew, I decided I would just take a quick look on the GoDaddy evaluation and see how much some of my domain names are worth. And I was quite shocked to find that the combined value— I have some 32 domain names, but the combined value of the top 6 is over $4,000. Now, these have cost me variously £2, £3, £5 to register, but over the, over the years, they've accumulated value. And so I have put a number of those domain names up for sale because GoDaddy takes 20%, but there's no point in me paying £4 or £5 a month for these domain names if I'm not going to use them. So the one question is, do you have a backlog of domain names, and how many of them being useful? But also talking to my sister, actually, she has spread herself over the last 30 years across different companies and different activities and has all these legacy domain names. And it means that then when you look for them on the internet, it's a confusing picture. So one of the opportunities that we have now within, uh, this downtime is to clean some house. And if we think about the, the, the comments from Richard Malone this morning about sort of looking into the future and being a guided leader. One of our roles is to tidy up the branding of the company and the positioning for ourselves as well. Now, one of the ways that we can then look at what's got a value is by using, for example, the valuation tool on, on GoDaddy. There's another one called Estibot, and That then starts to give you some valuation. Now, for an example, sportsdoctor.com is valued at $11,000. My British Motorsport Festival, which I started in China, is now worth just under $800 as a domain name. I made more money on the domain name than I have on the festival. There are over 400 great domain name extensions that you can have for your business. Most people still want to have the .com. But as Yahoo and Google have both taught us, it, it really doesn't matter which domain name you've got. What matters is that you are focused on the marketing of that particular domain name. And it's possible to identify which domain names are going to have some value by looking at keyword searches on things like the Google Keyword Planner. But you can also start to look at trends and see if you're starting a new business, or if you've got a business that you're running now but you think could benefit from, for example, move from a .co.uk to a .com because you want to go global, or you want to take, for example, there's a .life domain name which I have for one of my businesses. Now is a great time to do that if you have some time on your hands while maybe the market is coming back. Now it's also possible to use Google Trends. So you can go to Google Trends, it's trends.google.co.uk, and what you can also start to do then is to look at which key terms and which keywords are starting to become in favor. Because you can see which keywords are trending in popular, in popular industry, um, and, and, and across YouTube and across Google Shopping and so on. So across all these different search engines, Google Trends will show you from 2004 or by different subsets of dates the amount of search terms there are for this particular word or keywords or phrases that you want to have. So interestingly enough, because I'd listened to this employee engagement talk this morning and Richard Holmes was talking about how important it is, I did a quick look on the Google Trends for employee engagement versus public relations. Now what's interesting is that over the last 20 years, um, the— or 16 years rather, since Google has been tracking this the, the search term public relations has gone down in overall search, and the term social media has gone up. And at 2012, they cross one another, and public relations as a term has continued to go down, and social media as a term has continued to go up. So they really create an X crossing paths in 2012. I did then a search on Google Trends on employee engagement as a topic and public relations as a topic, because if employee engagement is so important now, and we've seen from the Edelman Trust Index that people are not trusting their employers, um, and if Richard is saying that there's great need for employee engagement, surely people should be looking for this online. But interestingly enough, the search term employee engagement has still only a very fractional amount of search terms compared to that of public relations. So for example, from May 31st till 6th of June, public relations is 93 on the index, employee engagement is only 5. And, and interestingly enough, pre-COVID employee engagement was only at 3. And, and it really hasn't gone up. So I then did a quick search on keywordplanner.net, which is a site where you can look for your company name or your industry or things that you're selling and see where the keywords are that are being searched for. So then I toggled across to the Keyword Planner. Keywordplanner.net is a website that you can use to see which words you might want to use for your online advertising, or even your keywords in your headlines for your public relations press releases or social media. Last month, it would seem that employee engagement was a 49,500 keyword display for employee engagement. Now, the average cost per thousand was $14.98. But interestingly enough, I'm interested in the trend. The trend for people looking for the word employee engagement over the last 12 months hasn't increased. Internal communications is only at 14,800 in terms of monthly search volume, and the cost value— in other words, if you were to try and buy the words internal communications for your marketing— would only cost you $4.08. Per 1,000 click-throughs to your website. And employee engagement activities are down to 8,000. So what we're seeing— and in fact, even better— is that the employee engagement ideas are just down at 4,400. So on the one hand, we have this need and people talking about, uh, employee engagement. And on the other hand, the tools are telling us that people are not searching for it and people are not buying them as keywords. Now, this creates opportunities if you're in that space because there are obviously some people looking, but it means that the real estate is relatively cheap. Now, my, uh, my wife is interested in buying and starting a bubble tea shop. So when I did a search on Google Trends, I can search by country And I can search by different topic or different search and by different platform. And what that shows me is that bubble tea is much sought after in terms of how to make it on the YouTube videos in Singapore. But in the UK, it's well down the list in terms of search terms. Now, it's in fact in the UK, on the ranking, it's the 12th in all countries in terms of looking for things to do with bubble tea. So Google Trends is a very interesting platform if you have publicity and a business to build and to run, because Google Trends is helping us to determine whether there's interest in our keyword or our business and whether it's rising or declining, but also how it compares to other comparable products. I mentioned that we're doing some work now in Asia for a car company, and this car company recently had a sighting of its pre-launch car issued in Autocar in the UK. And there's some flurry of excitement about whether this has now ruined the launch. But a search on Google Trends would show that actually absolutely minimal exposure or search for this car online. So what happens sometimes is that News can come out in a news environment, in this case Autocar, but if the coverage hasn't gone viral, if other people haven't been interested enough to share it, then the impact of that news is relatively small. And what Google Trends is showing us is the data from all of those search platforms across search, across image search, news search, Google Shopping, and YouTube search of what people are actually looking for. And you can break that down by, by region, by city. And what we're seeing is that the, the opportunity for planning your PR and your social media shows that, for example, people are looking at pajamas, but not necessarily by, by season, but almost once a month. And what we're seeing is that there is a content refresh. There was another survey done that showed when people looking at the blog content for their bicycle shop, there was a seasonal amount of content because in certain times of the year people were getting new, getting old bikes out to recondition them in spring, for example, and around Christmas they were looking to buy new bikes as gifts. But in the summer, people were buying accessories and no longer worried so much about refreshing the bike, but maybe buying accessories. Now, what this means from a PR point of view is, of course, that our website blog content can and should change according to the seasonal interest in what our consumers or customers are looking for. Now, the assumption obviously is that in the summer people are looking at ice creams, for example, or holidays, and in winter they're looking at hot drinks and they're looking at home improvement. What we can see then, of course, is by using a platform like Keyword Planner and Google Trends, is we can start to look at what we might want to do for our business, but also what signals we want to be sending through our press releases through our interviews and through our social media activities. In this Speak PR platform that we've built, the 5-stage methodology includes Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. So in the knowing part of the course, we talk about a number of different tools— Google Trends, is one of those. And I share that today because as I looked and listened to the talk this morning by, by Richard Malone from Melbourne, he talks about the power of engagement. And having read the Edelman Trust Barometer just a couple of weeks ago, and that's also on our website at eastwestpr.com, there is a mismatch in what is taking place right now between what is needed and what people are looking for. That's not my opinion, that's just what Google Trends is telling us and what the statistics are telling us. And this creates an opportunity for any entrepreneurs that are out there now, and business owners who are running a business division, to look at what people are really talking about and what they need to bridge that gap. And ultimately, of course, that is what being an entrepreneur is all about. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. It's a bit data-heavy today, but I think that it's great to have messages and to talk about the 4 quadrants of leadership and communication with the, the lost, the fighters, the victims, and the leaders. There are measurement tools out there that help guide us It could be instinct, it could be passion, but it can also be data-driven. So thank you so much for listening. My name is Jim James, and I wish you a profitable business, great health, and that you keep on communicating.