Real Time Collaboration and Web 2.0 tools, tips, and reviews

Steve's analysis of consumer interest/chatter ("buzz") about gas prices was an "aha" moment for me because he pulls together information from several sources to reach a conclusion. 

With all of these new metrics and analyzing tools coming out, it is hard to get my head around how to use them in real life scenarios.  Steve shows one way:

First, he starts with a topic:

"...manufactures think a lot about confidence as a future indicator of the consumer's interest in spending on big ticket items like cars. Naturally, fuel prices are a big influence on what consumers will buy - hybrids or SUVs."

Next he looks at the first variable, gas prices:

1. Does a basic search on Google News that shows 771 articles just today about gas prices;
2. Checks out a website related to the topic of "gas prices" to verify that the hype is real;
3. Looks at the blog chatter on Technorati;
4. Compares the charted data on Technorati with a chart of gas prices provided by GasBuddy and a chart of visits to GasBuddy from Alexaholic and Google Trends.
5. A search on Indeed.com confirms that gas station hiring is up;
6. Then he does a similar search (numbers 1-6) on the second variable - is the concern over gas prices increasing buzz on hybrids and decreasing it on SUVs.
7. Reaches his conclusions

While there are other variables at play here (check the comments), this provides an excellent start for researching "buzz" and the effect of different variables on "buzz".

Thanks, Steve, for such an excellent example!