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WSJ Article on Scanning Blogs

I spoke with Bill Bulkeley of the Wall Street Journal this week for his recent article (subscription required) on scanning blogs for brand insight.  It was interesting speaking with Bill as his angle was to show the value premier marketing organization with existing established market research garner from doing CGM analysis.  It is important to see that online marketing intelligence is gathered not only from blogs but also other forms of consumer-generated media including message boards, usenet group and live journals.   Marketers can’t ignore both the opportunity to leverage this discussion to their competitive advantage and the potential danger these discussions pose to their brand reputation. As Bill points out, it is insufficient to provide insight from only a simple keyword search showing the number of posts that match the keyword.  Using Natural Language Processing technologies allows Cymfony and others to provide customers more intelligence about issues while eliminating thousands of irrelevant mentions. Companies that have multiple brands, product lines, product attributes, spokespeople, employees and competitors cannot find everything being said about even using extensive human resources. In this flood of information there is simply too much noise. A company really needs to dig deeper to discover what is being said, including finding relationships, sentiment and trends.  Such information allows companies to pick up on the important issues before competitors do. 

By conducting a deeper context analysis of discussion, marketers can understand what is important to different audience segments. For instance, analysis we've done in the automotive sector shows that there are very different issues popping up in discussions by car owners vs. those shopping for a car. This is important because owners have tremendous influence over potential buyers.   Using context analysis solutions similar to Cymfony's Digital Consumer Insight (DCI), marketers can further classify discussion according to the attributes they think are important and discover many new ones that they weren't even tracking. This allows them to segment comments by buyers vs. owners and helps in targeting opportunities as well as issues.

Posted by Andrew Bernstein on June 23, 2005 at 01:44 PM | Email this post Permalink

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