Obamashot or McCainshot? Debate Drinking Game Dominates Twitscoop

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Obamashot or McCainshot? Debate Drinking Game Dominates Twitscoop

Here’s how the Obama/McCain debate drinking game goes: every time Barack Obama says “change,” you have to do a shot. Every time John McCain says “my friends,” you have to do a shot. Judging by the frequency with which Obama and McCain use these terms, you might want to consider shooting peach schnapps instead of Jagermeister.

Why do I mention this on an SEO blog? To demonstrate the power of Twitscoop, a great tool for finding up and coming stories that are buzzing right this minute.

Google Trends is another good location to find hot items, as is DiggLabs’ Diggspy, but Twitscoop is well structured and compelling, plus Twitter’s user base (by my own measure) is a bit more cutting edge than Digg’s or Google’s, at least right now. Twitscoop basically displays a tag cloud where the words constantly inflate or deflate based on how often the words are tweeted. Right now, the biggest word in the Twitscoop tag cloud is “obamashot” since that is hottest topic right now. Getting bigger very quickly is “deadpool,” since a lot of people are Tweeting about TechCrunch sending Uber to the deadpool.

What is the value of this? For sites with blogs, getting a post up about something hot that few others are writing about can be a big source of traffic for your blog and your website. Also, hot keywords that aren’t optimized can be found and exploited before others get to them.

Perhaps most importantly, you can use services like this to put up a quick Google AdWords ad that exploits the spike.

Of course, right now on Twitscoop, the hottest word is “dinner.” Must be time for a snack…

UPDATE: Game was kind of a dud. Surprisingly, Obama only said “change” once, and McCain said “my friends” twice. If you had been drinking every time the word “economy” was used, you’d be in the emergency room. Or, strangely enough, “package.”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 3:11 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.