Transcripts

Bill Tancer:
I'll give you a great example: behavior online happens to occur a lot earlier than it does offline in the real world.

Bill Tancer, author of the book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters…

For example: Halloween costumes - we see people searching for Halloween costumes as early as the second week of July. And this year, I was just doing that analysis - the number-one costume (which has never appeared on the list before) is Bigfoot costumes; this is driven by that hoax that happened where there was the alleged Bigfoot stuck in the refrigerator.

With that early information, retailers can better plan for the demand. And with the upcoming election…

If you look at search terms which contain Barack Obama or search terms that contain John McCain, there's not a lot of search on where these two candidates stand on issues. Instead a lot of the searches are about things that seem somewhat superficial - like how tall Barack Obama is. You have to get below the top hundred terms to really start to see search terms telling where these candidates stand on issues.

We certainly appear to be a culture obsessed with celebrity.

And it really is growing. If you look at the traffic to the celebrity blogs like Paris Hilton and TMZ, the amount of traffic those blogs are getting is increasing at just an astounding rate. It seems that we're just so fascinated by that and less fascinated by some of the important issues of the day.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.