I have started to look into trend tracking and how trends become social media topics that rally people together.

Last night, following a genius episode of 30 Rock, I jumped on Google Trends to see if there was any activity around two phrases that they introduced to a network TV audience: “Fun Cooker” and “Hot Richard.”

As soon as the show ended, I fired up Twitter and searched “Fun Cooker” and received 10 results. Each time I hit reload the count jumped: 10; 14; 20. So that was enough to show that th eworld had a new catch phrase.

I jumped over to Google Trends to see what was happening there, and I found that “Hot Richard” was the #1 trending term. It is a term that generates relevant results (not going to link to them from here), but never generates traffic, then suddenly during the show it goes through the roof.

It will be interesting to see how these phrases start to appear over the next few days on Facebook and Myspace. I’ll check back in a month.