HitWise has an great post by Bill Tancer about YouTube, NBC and Search Data; Bill to dictated it  using voice recognition software because he had a bad cycling accident that left him with a cast on his left hand and with some difficulties using his right arm.

The Bill Tancer post has a double message - 1) HitWise gave a freebee in terms of Search Intellegnce information to NBC (to get it as client for HitWise - hopefully) and  2)it showed that Blog Posting can be done with Dragon Naturally Speaking faster and better than typing your post in a browser window - like I’m doing right now).

 The Search Terms giveaway to NBC is the kind of information you have to pay HitWise Big Bucks to get - thousands per month in some cases - but if you can afford it - it’s well worth it.

" Here’s a freebie for the NBC executives, the top 20 search terms driving traffic to NBC for the 12 weeks ending July 1, 2006:"

 What I would do with this information is this:

A. NBC releases a couple of old episodes from last season of Deal or No Deal on YouTube and monitors the return traffic using in house analytics (whatever they use - hopefully Omniture)

1. a.HitWise (if Bill Tancer manages to convince NBC to buy it)
2. b. BlogPluse
3. c. Google Trends
4. d. AdCenter
5. e. Alexholic

Measure the Brand Lift that comes from doing this - also the additional eyeballs that come to NBC after using YouTube (this is best found by putting in some tracking urls). 

My guess is that NBC will be getting some web analytics metrics from YouTube - they must - although they can see how often people viewed each movie.

The thing with HitWise data is it’s valuable - but you have to have some framework from which to use it - have to figure out how to use it.  I think it’s valuable to have HitWise’s information but I have yet to convince any of my clients to buy it.  I think it’s the pricetag - they don’t understand what they’re paying for, I think.

I have also suggested to HitWise they use some of their technology to monitor, for free, businesses that are getting sudden influxes of media mentions that they did not originate (in other words, a Viral campaign that goes out of control).