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. '"

Comments

frist post

[Anonymous Coward]

frist post !!!11

Please Tell Me It's A Joke

[canfirman]

This has to be a joke. You can't be seriously telling me the US Government wants to collect personal data from various minsitries and sources and hold all of your sensitive data in one database? Aside from the privacy issues, that's a cyber-crime waiting to happen. Could you imagine hackers trying to get into that database? All of those students' identities would be stolen and destroyed by illegal activities. Surely the DoD knows this as much as the next guy.

Oh, and I love the line:

The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.

And how much do you want to bet the government could be talked into selling that data to private businesses for marketing purposes?

Either it's a really bad idea, or this is a really good joke.