Although I’ve been a geek and early adopter since the 80s of all things tech, I admit to having trouble staying on top of what’s trendy. So, if you’re young, hip and have a great network of trendy friends, you can pretty much stop reading now.
But, if you’d like to learn about handy tools to stay on top of the trends, read on…
It all started with Jimmy Fallon. He was doing his hashtag sequence where he says “#whatever became a trending topic in America” and I thought, “I absolutely detest Twitter…I’m not attention-span deprived and I enjoy having context accompany written thought expression…but I do wish I still knew what was trending.”
So, I did what an old geek does and dug around on the old WWW. I wanted to learn what’s trending without needing to pay attention to a media format I loathe. Fortunately, I found some pretty cool tools to stay on top of trendiness. One I highly recommend is trends24.in as it works very well.
Checking out what it was listing, I found it quite accurate. First off, you need to set the location and I chose United States in general. It’s pretty cool that you can switch this location setting and see what’s trending elsewhere as well. Anyhow, back on the accuracy thing: for the US findings Karen McDougal showed up in the top 5 at the time I pinged. Then I looked at the news and, low and behold, it was just announced that she had won her case against the National Enquirer. Now we can all hear her lurid details about her tryst with the president. Yay?
After that, I saw a trending name I did not recognize: Tammie Jo Shults. Turns out that she was the pilot that had just landed that Southwest airliner that got the broken engine. Research showed that plenty of news had just been published about her too. And below her in the listing was Jurassic World. I wondered what was causing that movie to trend as its release is weeks away but then learned about breaking news regarding a newly released trailer for it.
Bottom line on this tool: it works great and I highly recommend bookmarking it. There were other trending tools out there like Buzzfeed’s trending page but it seems to have some level of curation (hey, another trendy term!). The content on it doesn’t seem to accurately reflect what’s happening in general and it features many youth-targeted subjects. Not really up the alley of an old man like me!
Let us know your thoughts on trendy tools.
–Mark Salow, Marketing Consultant
