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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. '"
- Donchu h8 it when no1 sends grub cash?
- any company giving grub money gets my business!
- grub does so much and asks for so little.
- i'd buy an SUV if a car company gave grub some l00t!
Thank you.
Trolling is a art,
50% while be whiny, angsty teens complaining about the world in blogs with poor grammar.
The other 50% will be companies data-mining those blogs for insights about what kind of products to market.
Then again I could be wrong as this means that the internet will be 0% porn, which as we all know just isn't going to happen.
It's been a maxim in customer service for a very long time that a single angry customer cancels out the effect of twenty (or insert some 10 thousands of happy customers, simply because so many people are using the Internet for research now. We had an issue with Acer lately, started a campaign, got some great positions on general Acer related keywords on Google (thanks to a blog), and even ran some Adwords slating them. Hopefully it lost them quite a few sales.
;-) (There was also the case of the lock company whose locks could be picked with a biro pen, they failed to rectify the situation, and the blogosphere hit them hard.)
Likewise, I had an issue at a Travelodge motel, and they did not acknowledge my complaint at all. My story (on my blog) was picked up by a newspaper here in the UK and suddenly Travelodge were very apologetic. That said, Travelodge did a very good job of accomodating us, and my faith in them is very much renewed.
But, yes, blogs really amplify opinion, especially if it gets picked up by Google nicely
If the article had contained a SHRED of tech info, like how they hash l33tspeak, or why anyone would listen to whiny teenage messageboards, then it would be something.
As it stands, any idiot who would spend money to find out what people think through blogs is as good as broke anyway. There are too many trolls out there for this to work any better than focus groups. Next.....
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
After scanning chat room logs, Nokia has decided to add an a/s/l button to their next line of phones.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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?!
"Not everything bloggers have to say about brands correlates to the real world. Last summer, Umbria, working for a fast-food client, was monitoring Burger King Corp.'s Angus Burger and found it got some bad reviews from bloggers. Some were deriding Burger King's tongue-in-cheek TV ads that called the burger a diet food. Bloggers notwithstanding, the Angus Burger has become a hit.
In other news: Banana Republic cancelled a range of unisex one-piece pyjama suits, after discovering that its blog research didn't represent its potential market.
Or, in other words, "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
All this reminds me of the time I went to a boat show on Lake Union in Seattle. Boating is a big deal here. A guy was out in the lake on a sailboat, driving in circles, displaying a huge sign showing a picture of the bottom of his boat that was covered with fiberglass blisters, a manufacturing defect. The sign said "30,000 blisters, I'll never buy another again." I'm sure the dealer was cringing while thousands of potential boat-buyers gawked at the guy, but I also realized the guy must be incredibly bitter to spend a sunny summer day doing that instead of actually sailing. Now, though, you don't have to be bitter for more than about 20 minutes to get your complaint into a blog and into Google.