David Armano recently wrote some new lyrics to an old tune at Advertising Age, bemoaning the continued reliance on flashy microsites, and appealing to a policy of community activity as the most effective – however unglamorous – strategy for building brand loyalty.

When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.

He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."

So that's the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it's developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.

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If you haven't checked out Google Insights yet, and you run a website, you probably should. The idea behind Insights is that you can compare and evaluate a handful of metrics — volume, regional interest, top search terms — on search results, given a particular topic and/or geographical area. For example, I took a look at the search patterns and volume in my area (Omaha) for "web design," a key item on the DLB menu, and promptly established that we're in the wrong business.

This is clearly an unproductive metric. (From top: Generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, generic search term.)

All glibness aside, Insights could certainly be used smartly to provide agile firms with a real-time look at trends in their geographical areas. These trends could be used to indicate growth markets, and this information could inform rapid-SEO strategies (aka. blog post keywords).

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Slate has a thought-provoking article this week on how stock photography companies try to predict what kinds of pictures journalists and designers will need several months in advance. It's interesting to read about the various trends that are revealed by studying the rise and fall of search terms like ”Christmas” and “woman” and the subjects of images, like people staring off in the distance or children in the foreground. This kind of information is probably more useful to cultural anthropologists than designers, but it did get me thinking. Like the author of the piece, I hadn’t given much serious thought to how stock photos are made.

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