At Least for Today, It’s Still a Google World.

Google Sales Rep Michelle Vincent

Weathermen across the state of New York predicted rain, but the sun won and offered a patio cocktail party at FIT on Monday evening for the Google 101 Training sponsored by the National Alliance of Market Developers (NAMD). After wine and cheese were passed around, Christopher Mack, the VP of Communications for NAMD, gave a brief intro about the alliance, which was founded in 1953. It was created to promote the African American consumer market and these days they are working to help salespeople and marketing teams understand targeted marketing. The alliance continues to promote networking and building marketing based on the African American consumer.

Michelle Vincent, a sales rep at Google, took over the meeting to answer basic and not-so-basic questions about Google with an emphasis on teaching how to use some of the company’s newest and coolest technology for advanced searches. It was an in-depth tutorial of the icon we now call Google.

Michelle did drop hints about Google Wave and how excited she and her team are to get to play with it, but confessed that she hasn’t actually gotten it, yet.

The session began with some simple and basic searches and a mild explanation of the Google Algorithm, which uses relevance to place things at the top of your everyday searches. Before I could focus on the words, we were talking about Google Insight and how it actually forecasts the future and offers marketers a place to view what people are thinking, doing and reading about. Here’s the blur of brilliance leading up to Insight.

There are new additions to Image, now; there is a similar search option to specify down to a color in the photo. Site Search allows users to do a general search on a specific site by typing “site: name of website”. There’s the new Public Data aspect that pulls mass amounts of information from the census bureau and can then aggregate the search findings into a graph form. Finally, my favorite is Hot Trends on iGoogle – it’s a snapshot of the hottest rising searches in the past hour! You can see immediately what is on people’s minds. Nothing soothes the mind, body and soul like this kind of instant gratification!

Now, take trends a step further with Insight and tweak the trending topics down to a specific region…or compare years…the possibilities are ENDLESS and make my job as a journalist even easier. When I need a story idea, this is the first place to shop.

Finally, for all you swine flu followers, there’s always Google Flu Trends.

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