Throughout the year, I steadily add information to spot trends. I am looking to find things about products, services, apps, marketing campaigns, and new businesses..

Some are scribbled on a memo pad from a hotel room. Others are torn out of magazines or newspapers. There are printouts of pages from the web with handwritten notes and items circled. If it is an idea I think is important, I find a way to create a physical archive of it. Sometimes bookmarking an idea in a browser just isn’t enough.

Then at the end of the year, I look through that folder usually filled with hundreds of small ideas, and start to filter them. I group similar concepts together and think about how they will matter for the new year. My philosophy when looking at trends is pretty simple – I focus on three things:

1. Idea: What is the CORE idea behind products or campaigns that unites them and says something about our culture or business?
2. Acceleration: How quickly is the idea finding its way into multiple businesses and what are REAL examples?
3. Impact: How profoundly could this idea impact that way that business is done in the short term (next year)?

Before even beginning, it is useful to understand why so many trend reports that are already out there don’t really offer that much value.  To me, it comes down to three big tips I would share that help me when trying to make my own trend reports stand out:

  1. Don’t make it superficial – Talking about how social media will “be everywhere” in 2013 isn’t really a trend, it is more of a statement of fact.  Too many so-called trend reports just share a fact that is far too obvious and doesn’t dig deep enough.

Step One: Collect Significant Ideas

The aim here is to find ideas that describe a new sort of behaviour that is happening today with increasing frequency.

Step Two: Group Ideas By Theme

In this phase, my goal is to find individual ideas that have similarities and try to group them into clusters.

Step Three: Consolidate Ideas

Multiple clusters may be related to the same bigger concept – this phase is where I go from over 50 ideas to my final 15.

Step Four: Name The Trend

Part of the fun of trend hunting is naming each concept. My book Likeonomics, for example, was a leading trend from 2011.

Step Five: Create Presentation

For me, a visual presentation is where I can share each trend along with reach examples of visuals that illustrate it.

So there you have it – a visual description of my process for spotting trends. Now that you know how I approached it, here’s a short roundup of the first 7 social media focused trends that I shared during my presentation, along with a short list of the examples that I used for each. These will be included in the full trend report which is coming out on December 5th, and tomorrow’s blog post will be about “Shoptimization” – the first trend in my report.