How Google's Wonder Wheel Sparked an Edinburgh Technology PR video idea

Google's wonder wheel is not well known, yet it's useful for generating ideas.

Using the wonder wheel option returns search results on Google arranged in a wheel that resembles a mind-map. The spokes represent search terms. The natural results for your search are displayed to the right of the wheel.

The wheel format allows you to quickly see the search results. Click a spoke and another wheel pops up with more results, allowing you to drill down and chase threads of ideas. Then it's easy to refine your results by choosing to show results for "images" or "videos" - which are displayed like the results of a regular Google search.

Using this wheel/refined search combo, you may find information gaps, as I did in this example.

Technology PR agency search spots a gap:

Key a search term into Google as per normal

When the results appear, look above them - just below the Google search box - to see a blue shaded bar containing the words "show options" - click on that.

A list with 4 groups drops down to the right of your search results. The group called "standard view" contains the "wonder wheel" option . Click and your results show a neat wonder wheel.

Click a spoke of your wheel to see another wheel popping up based on a further 10 results relating to the spoke you just clicked.

Follow your thoughts and click away to spark off ideas for articles or blogs - and throw up opportunities.

Using a search on "PR"(UK pages), I clicked on a"technology PR agencies"spoke because technology PR is one of PHPR's strengths. I refined the list to see "videos" - there were no results. Excellent. That means there's a gap in the market and I'm now off to make a technology PR agency video!

Techno Babble

As we're a B2B PR specialist agency, we deal with a lot of technical clients and have had to deal with a fair amount of techno babble.

Reducing stuff down to initials is fine in a close-knit technical community, but specialisms are so narrow these days that even well qualified people can encounter terms that are meaningless. So why carry this stuff over to press releases and websites where people of real influence lose the will to live after the first sentence? Not to mention potential clients' procurement officers and finance people who have to sign off the purchase decision?

A few clients have argued they need to demonstrate they have the technical know-how and that's fine. It just doesn't need to be visible at the first glance of the home page. And surely the line up of second and third degrees on their people page does signal more than a smattering of knowledge?

This is where the Internet really scores: enabling hierarchical information to be arranged so that visitors can chose to click through to well signposted complexity as they travel through the information avenues on a website. And White Papers or Reports can underline your technical abilities without baffling those site visitors that need more general information. Not everyone needs to see all the branches, twigs, leaves and roots of the tree to know they're in a birch wood.

If you find yourself in such a wood, surrounding by numbers and letters, there's a techno-babble translation tool here: http://ping.fm/O40mZ