Economist On Blog Monitoring

Today's Economist runs an article (sub) about companies listening to consumers (aka people) chattering online about brands and businesses.  At Collaborate we write reports for all sorts of companies based on user-generated content and the following resonated with me strongly: "Surprising findings arise because participants in discussion groups can say anything they like, whereas people answering a survey ask only the questions that researchers think to ask".  Of course, the next step is what companies do with these insights and how they bring them into their own processes.  Nick Mysore, strategy director at US food business ConAgra says: "These dicussion groups are very helpful to determine whether a trends is really a trend or just a fad...they help you get a read on the marketplace quickly and provide you with the baseline hypothesis that you can test further using conventional techniques."

Comments

[joy]

Nick Mysore has the right idea as you mine the blogs it becomes more and more important to take those insights into clear marketing programs. He did that well in the energy business