Last week Google quietly added an interesting new feature to its Insights for Search tool, predictions of future search trends. If you don’t already use Insights, you should, it’s a useful tool for monitoring search trends in order to get a good picture of how consumer interest in specific brands and topics rises and falls over time.

Google’s latest improvement to the service, based on some very clever science which I won’t try to bluff my way through, enables you to see what the future consumer interest in brands and topics could be.

There are a couple of points to make about this. Firstly, for a lot of searches you don’t need a sophisticated algorithm to predict future trends, because the annual pattern is so consistent that it’s easy to make an educated guess about how the chart will look for the next twelve months. For example, the trend for the search term “cheese” is highly predictable, so most people could figure out the pattern for themselves.

Secondly, there’s no way the prediction algorithm can account for unexpected events, since it relies purely on past data to extrapolate future trends, so like all predictions it’s only of limited value. However, it may well prove to be helpful for planning, once we’ve ascertained how accurate its predictions are for the less obvious trends.  For example, the search trend for the keyword “ninjas” is much less obvious than that of “cheese” and this is where the tool could be really useful, in spotting more complex trends and patterns that a human observer would not be able to identify.

This is obviously going to take a little time – we need to record Google’s predictions for search trends now, and revisit them in future to see how accurate they were. If they stand the test of time, then we’ve got a powerful new tool at our disposal.

On the surface, URL shortening services such as http://bit.ly are a great idea, because they can turn long, messy web addresses like this:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6788774.ece

Into nice tidy addresses like this:

http://bit.ly/g4ol9

This is especially useful for posting to Twitter, since it saves valuable space, but a lot of people have got into the habit of using URL shortening services all the time.

There’s an obvious problem with this from an SEO point of view. For a start, the shortened URL contains no anchor text, and secondly they do not pass on PageRank.  Since these two things are fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithm, any links to your company website that use a URL shortening service are practically worthless in terms of SEO value. They will do nothing to improve your site’s ranking for the relevant keywords.

[EDIT] As pointed out in the comments, it seems bit.ly and other URL shortening services do pass on PageRank (a few of these services do not) but the anchor text issue is still a problem, links without embedded keywords don’t provide much value.

But that’s not all. As the recent closure of http://tr.im has illustrated, sometimes URL shortening services go out of business and that means that all those millions of links on the internet which use that service will suddenly stop working.

So the long and short of it is: for online PR purposes URL shortening services are best avoided where possible, but sometimes they’re necessary, like on Twitter.

Here’s the really interesting bit

But there’s more to this story. They may have certain disadvantages and risks, but as long as Twitter is going strong, it’s fairly certain that bit.ly will be doing quite nicely too (did somebody say buyout?) and that creates an interesting situation.

Twitter is a hotbed of viral activity, with news and trends being retweeted backwards and forwards, spreading across the web faster than ever before. Given that bit.ly is rapidly becoming the de-facto URL shortening service, it is an amazing and unprecedented position in that it has access to a live, detailed view of these trends as they are developing.

Before anybody else knows what’s making an impact on the web on any given day, the people who run bit.ly will already have a clear picture of what people are looking at, what is spreading around the web, and how it’s spreading. If they’re smart, they will already be analysing that in all sorts of clever and interesting ways to figure out how they can extract value from it.

For most web users, bit.ly is just a handy way to make unwieldy URLs a bit more manageable, but for businesses it’s a goldmine of up to the minute data on consumer trends and behaviour, on an amazing scale. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see bit.ly selling customised dashboards to provide businesses with snapshots of that data in the future.

Twitter’s business model may still be a bit hazy, but it’s certainly created fertile ground for bit.ly to develop into what could be one of the most powerful and valuable business tools on the web.

[UPDATE] It seems tr.im has decided to stick around after all – although the service’s owners have a few things to say about the relationship between Twitter and bit.ly

Following the release of our Truth about Twitter report recently, we were contacted by Guy Stephens, the Online Help Manager of mobile phone retailer, The Carphone Warehouse, who wanted to highlight some of his company’s experience of using Twitter to support its customer service operation.

Since we’re not planning to produce another Twitter report in the near future, Guy kindly agreed to let us interview him for this blog post. It’s made a lengthy article, but if you’re interpreted in a big brand Twitter case study from the real world, you’ll find plenty of great insight below.

Can you give us an overview of what CPW currently uses Twitter for?

We have various accounts, which are used as follows:

@carphoneware – This profile represents the corporate voice of the company, and is used to tweet company announcements. It employs a formal tone without too much emotion.

@guyatcarphone – This has been the main customer service profile. It uses a personal, friendly tone to respond proactively or reactively to customer complaints and queries. We also use it for customer service alerts, help tips and so forth. I will be moving back to providing help and support to our customers via Twitter.

@becksatcarphone – Becks will be taking over from me to provide customer service. She is our first actual customer service agent to be providing customer service support for our customers. We will be adding more agents in time.

@erkanatcarphone – Erkan will be providing information and answering questions specifically about the iPhone and other handsets we sell.

@stuartcarphone – We use this one specifically for BlackBerry related information

@steveblancpw – Steve is the UK Sales & Customer Director, he’s only recently started using Twitter.

@shaneatcarphone - This is for official PR announcements, daily share prices, etc.

@cpwhelp – Help tips, service announcements. We’re building this one up at present.

@cpw1team – this was set up for a senior managers’ conference held in June. It was the first conference we tweeted and yammered live from. This allowed us to connect with employees, customers and generally anyone interested in getting a live tweetfeed of what was happening at the conference. I think this might have been a first in the UK. We had Charles Dunstone and Andrew Harrison speaking, and we officially tweeted about Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse partnering up again.

What drove the decision to engage with people through Twitter?

We realised that people were seeking out new customer service channels, often using social media to create their own peer-to-peer self help networks. It’s clear that information is decentralising, and as a company the challenge for us was working out how to engage with our customers in this new world.

Companies are being forced to use whichever channels their customers are choosing, rather than continuing to focus on their own websites and call centres. We also saw examples such as  BestBuy, JetBlue, Dell, Zappos, doing great things in this space.

Do you feel Twitter provides any specific advantages over the other channels you use?

From a customer service perspective, Twitter speeds up the identification process of a problem (although not necessarily the resolution of it, just the identification). Once the issue has been identified, then it is resolved using traditional channels such as email or phone.

It also serves as an early warning system. Various issues were higlighted on Twitter 24 hours or so prior to the launch of the iPhone, so we’ll take this lesson and ensure we’ve got the appropriate resources in place ahead of the next big launch.

In terms of customer service channels, emails, phones and letters are the most popular route that customers use to contact us. These are essentially 1-to-1 and private. No one else will see the customer’s enquiry apart from the person who wrote it and the person who reads it. Twitter and social media on the other hand, have completely opened up this world.

They are public mediums, where the resolution of an issue often takes place within a very public and populated arena. An arena in which bystanders are often more than willing to add their own experiences, suggestions and recommendations. This opening up of a historically closed space, is forcing companies to recognise the value of transparency, openness and collaborative working practices with customers firmly at the heart of it.

What are the main challenges you have encountered with Twitter so far?

It’s an evolving medium, so there’s a lot of learning as you go along. Sometimes that doesn’t sit too well with companies, because it opens them up to risk.

In terms of customer service, we’re looking to get our customer service agents directly onto Twitter, dealing with customers directly rather than through me. This is going to be great for customers, but it raises the issue of how scalable the service is.

One of the advantages of Twitter is the speed with which it can help you identify customer service problems. The challenge we face is how can we take the best of Twitter, such as that speed, or any social media platform and apply it to traditional customer service channels.

Moving forwards one of our challenges will be how best to involve all the different parts of the business and employees who want to get involved in this space in a coherent and effective way, not only for themselves, but also for customers. This requires making sure everyone who wants to get involved knows what is required of them, the risks involved, as well as the opportunities that are available.

What was the rationale behind running several different accounts?

We felt it was very important to be specific about how we wanted to use Twitter, rather than have generic jack-of-all-trade accounts.  This might not be the case for smaller companies, but for The Carphone Warehouse it has ensured that in each area we go into, can build up their own personality and characters as they see fit.

We also deliberately had a more formal account for the company which we use for corporate info, announcing our results, etc. To be honest, on one level we probably didn’t think about it too much either, as we were learning as we went along.

Do you have a particular strategy for deciding who to follow?

There’s no overall strategy or hard and fast rules about followers. At the end of the day, I’m probably like anyone else, if they look interesting I’ll follow them. I tend to follow them as an individual (‘me’) rather than someone with their corporate hat on.

I think in both instances it’s more about building up credibility and trust within our customer base, rather than actively seeking followers. I would say that The Carphone Warehouse is still very much operating on Twitter in a somewhat functional way, we have not got to the level of a Frank Eliason at ComCast or Tony Hsieh at Zappos, who operate on a thought leadership level as well.

With the corporate account we deliberately do not follow lots of people as many add no value to the account. Those we do follow are linked to our business in some way such as Robert Stephens (CEO of Geek Squad). Being less ‘personal’ the account benefits from staying lean as far as followers are concerned. Its growth in followers is because people want to follow and it’s growing steadily.

Have you found that using a specific ‘tone of voice’ on Twitter works particularly well?

What you read is what you get, and our tone of voice reflects that; we’re there to help or to provide information. We encourage conversation with our customers and it is important to understand their frustrations or concerns and be open to listening and responding in a timely and efficient manner. In order to do that, our tone of voice has to be more empathetic, open and honest. Whilst our corporate account is more formal, there’s still an element of personality that comes through.

We’re trying to create a sense of ‘freedom within a framework’ for our employees who want to get involved in this space. We can’t stipulate how they should sound or what they should say, that works against the whole idea of social media. There’s room for lots of different opinions but coming from The Carphone Warehouse it would be in our approachable, honest and open tone of voice. Our challenge is to create a framework that allows that to happen.

Do you actively post comments that you want people to retweet?

We do not have an RT policy or guidelines. If you find it interesting and want to RT it, do. If you don’t find it interesting, dont. There’s no doubt that we try to RT colleagues where we can in Geek Squad, Best Buy, TalkTalk etc, but it’s still got to be interesting.

CPW has a quite sophisticated customer service IT system – is the Twitter customer service channel linked to that in any technical way, or are you just managing it personally?

At present, Twitter is not integrated into the business at a systems level. This is coming, and now that we are starting to put our customer service agents onto the front line, we’ll have no option but to find a way to ensure that Twitter is not only seen as a valid customer service channel, but is also integrated more fully into the business. We don’t know what that will look like, but I would imagine within the next 3 months or so, we’ll start seeing Twitter stats appear on weekly reports.

We are also planning to add Twitter and other social media sites such as Digg, StumbledUpon, Delicous to our online help content so that customers can share it if they like it.

What lessons have you learned from your experience with Twitter so far, and what advice would you give to other organisations who have yet to get started with the channel?

• Be specific and clear about how you want to use Twitter. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

• Just have a go.If you’re feeling a bit nervous,start small, become confident in one area, whether that’s customer service, sales, marketing, PR etc, and then as you become more familiar and confident, grow your offering from there.Then get the directors on boardandusing it.

• Be prepared to change the way you think. It is an open medium that cuts across business units, it forces you to become more transparent in the way you work, and you begin to realise that actually customers can operate quite happily without you. You need to find your rightful place within their social spaces.

• Ultimately, Twitter is just another channel. You’ve still got to understand your customers, how they engage with you, and what motivates them. Once you start understanding that, you can then understand whether Twitter is really for you. Twitter isn’t for every company, so don’t feel the pressure to join if you can’t find value in it.

• If you do decide to join, do it wholeheartedly, embrace the space and the opportunities it offers, and simply keep listening to your customers, they’ll tell you everything you need to know.

• Encourage people to have a go and, if you can, help them to understand how toget thebest out if it. Sharing good content means that youwill attract good followers etc.