The Media Interview

In a previous post I wrote about injecting your interview answers with references to well-known current events, social trends, etc. How do you brainstorm about what’s current? One way is through Technorati, a real-time blog search engine. Steve Rubel gave me the idea when he talked about using Technorati searches as a type of focus group. Find out what a lot of people are blogging about and you’ve got something that should ring a bell with a large majority of your audience. And because you’re seeing what people have posted just minutes ago, your research is guaranteed to be up to date.

There are a couple of ways to search Technorati for trends - you could look at the top searches or hottest tags lists (a tag is like a category), or you can enter your own search phrase or tag. Be sure to enclose phrases in quotation marks and sort your results by what Technorati calls authority - authority is based on the number of links to a site. Then look for common threads in the discussions and refer to those in your interview.