Tech Crunch 50: LiveHit Shows You What's Gonna Be Hot

I've been on the planet long enough to know that being a good marketer REQUIRES knowledge of both macro trends and a day to day understanding of what's hot. I feel very lucky to work at a small company where our teams' personal interests are so diverse that, simply through over the cube wall osmosis, I am kept up to date on fields in which I am not deeply interested.

We all have things -- fields, technology, gadgets, companies, music, books, whatever, that we follow closely, and our desire to be au courant in those areas is pretty darned strong.

Problem is, there's just too much out there. For example, I read about 4 books a week, so I am an avid follower of the literary world. But there are like a dozen social networks, I'm guessing 150,000 blogs, and thousands of publisher and media sites reporting on books. There's just no way to keep up.

Add to that the decreasing effectiveness of marketing aimed at creating hype, and you've got an untenable situation looking for a solution.

But now there's LiveHit, an entertainment site that tracks what's hot and what's going to be hot by monitoring the behavior of others on content sites. By examining people's behaviors related to your interest area, you can see what's getting attention right now, and connect with that content as well as people who share your passions.

Here's how the TC 50 site described it:

An entertainment site that tries to present users with media that is the most popular at any given moment. LiveHit is geared towards the social networking audience, with categories that include entertainment, sports, shopping, and general information. The site monitors how many people are interacting with a piece of content, and presents the most popular links as a stack of clickable snapshots.

The unique visual "Live Map" helps you sort of preview the pages people are examining. You get to pick where you want to go.

LiveHit is offering a variety of ways for publishers, ad networks, and content owners to work with them to participate in the community. It also helps those partners feature a constantly changing array of content so as to drive deeper engagement and user experiences. Presumably all of the consumer provided info on demographics and interests will also help them better target consumers with the right advertising.

It's a fascinating model. I haven't been able to get the alpha site to work right, but from what I saw this looks like a very intriguing concept.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.