Slashdot Mirror
Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Paying tens of thousands of dollars to companies that scan blogs helps companies decide on products and advertising, the Wall Street Journal reports. For example, the practice helped U.S. Cellular better understand prospective teenage customers: 'Using technology from Umbria Communications, a Boulder, Colo., company that aims to identify demographic groups online based on their speech patterns and discussion topics, WPP's G Whiz concluded that teens were really anxious about exceeding their cellular minutes, often because parents make them pay if they talk too much. The teens also resented being ambushed by incoming calls that pushed their minutes up. U.S. Cellular says that led U.S. Cellular to offer unlimited call me minutes.' Also of note: Intelliseek's Pete Blackshaw 'says companies used to dismiss vocal complaints from one or two consumers as an aberration. But now, they have to pay attention because now those complainers may have blogs. '"
They want their glaringly obvious marketing strategy back.
Is this just posted here because it has the word BLOG in it?
Trolling the trolls who troll the trolls since '92
And I say good! It's about time that the individual had an avenue to have his/her voice heard as loud as the corporation. For years bad support, overseas support, etc. has ensured unhappy customers, but on an individual level, so many were powerless to do anything about it.
Now a single complaint on the blogsphere can not only garner support through trackbacks of other complaining customers to create a virtual web of action, but a single voice can now have an adverse effect on sales for even the largest corporation.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Now you can safely say that your blog is helping someone else get rich with no requirement to remember you in the credits! I would definitely say this is a rights issue.
Imagine some company reverse engineer a number of different software programs (word processors for example) to find similarities between codebases -- how is that any different? What I write in my web blog is my IP just as that code is the company that packaged their code into a product. I think we can honestly say this service doesn't care where they pull the information from (although it would be hard to keep track of it all of it, but that's only a side issue). Isn't this the basis of copyright -- credits and permission?!
I have to admit, this is honestly a decent idea. The thing I have noticed about 'blogs' and journals and such is that they've made expression on the internet much more coherent than it used to be. Once you weed out all of the "OMFG! I was so...", you only have to scan for keywords to find out what is on the mind of the writer. I've seen documentaries about traditional marketing, and the methods were atrocious. Usually, the market researcher would do a street study and find a handful of the trendiest people for the demographic and ask them their questions. Now, they can practically run a spider on blogspot, modblog and livejournal and have results that aren't so biased on personal appearance and managablity.
Besides, if they ran a study and hit http://fiz4pope.modblog.com/, then we'd be in for a hell of a surprise. Or maybe I'd just be locked up.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Or, in other words, "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true..."
:)
A perfectly valid point, but that's the beauty of Google's PageRank (when it works, of course). One raving lunatic could put up a page describing how he got screwed by, say, ThinkGeek. He could detail how he bought a shirt and it arrived too small and the company refused to issue a refund, etc etc.
If it's a real problem, then others will probably have had similar experiences, write about them, link to each others blogs, and so on... until the pat-on-the-back web gets dense enough to move up the Google rankings.
If the truth is that the guy ordered a medium shirt for his 400-lb carcass, and tried to return it after a 4-hour pizza buffet binge, and sent it by carrier pigeon with a note saying "SEND ME ONE MILLION DOLLARS OR ILL BLOG!"... then nobody else will link to his blog in a "me too!" context, and it will have no effect.
So, it's not "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true." It's "I saw it in the first page of Google results, so it must be true."
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Did you update your blog to reflect that Travelodge had restored your faith in them?
that's the problem with blogs - people often *don't* update the story and all that's left behind is the negative press.
(Granted, this happens in the MSM as well - doesn't make it any better)
No. Complaints about aquarium supplies. Why make better products when you can sue to shut the complainers up?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sure we have them. They cost ~4 times as much per minute though, so unless you almost never use the phone they are a waste of money. This article is about teen girls who have a reputation of talking on the phone for hours every day. Pre-paid cards would be more expensive for them.
There is a good chance that the teen's parents are intentionally buying them phones with less minutes than the kids want, in teach them a lesson in budget. (Might be misguided, but since I'm not their parent I'm not going to judge) Having the ability to go over minutes can be nice in an emergency situation.
Cell phone minutes here are cheap, so long as you don't talk too much for you plan. For the right to call anywhere in the US (compare to the whole of Europe) as much as I want (That is how much I personally want, YMMV) on my cell phone, I pay just a couple dollars more than my local phone company wanted for the right to the same, except the calling area was limited to the nearest city.
Our system is different. Not better or worse, different. I pay for incoming calls (they are part of my included minutes, so it never costs me extra since I don't talk that much), but in return this means I can sue telemarketer who call me for the time used, because they are costing me money. I don't get cell phone spam as a result, while when I was in Europe a few years back I did (I has a Europe cell phone for that trip).
Another advantage is I pay, so I'm concerned about costs. With your system you don't care how much it costs someone else to call you, so you don't shop around for who has the best incoming deals. Thus the phone companies have no incentive to compete on incoming price - the person who pays has no control of those costs!
Overall it costs significantly less to talk on the phone over in the US. My friends and I think nothing of calling each other, on our cell phones, and talking as much as we want. SMS is popular over there in part because cell phone time is so expensive that it is worth dealing with the bad UI on your phone to type them - we just make a phone call for the same thing. (though I agree in many cases the SMS would be better - if the UI to enter them wasn't so bad)
The systems are different. With ours we have to worry about going over minutes, while yours only worries about cost when you call. In theory the cell phone coverage is better in Sweden, in practice you are unlikely to go to areas without coverage in the US. Different. Looking at both systems objectively, I prefer ours. YMMV.