In the blog reporting services we create for brands, one of the most difficult aspects to get right is the balance between meaningful aggregated trends and actual grassroots conversation. Uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis picked up Hill and Knowlton's Niall Cook here last week for presenting blogging conversations only as trends. Niall is a good guy and he responds to Jeff's point as a comment - but it's an important point. While the huge number of aggregation systems out there are able to provide an overview, none of them are nearly sophisticated enough to provide an understanding of what is being said by individuals. Sometimes, people are surprised to hear our answer to the conundrum of understanding what hundreds or even thousands of blogs are saying about a brand. Our cunning strategy is....
...we read them! It's the only way to understand what is actually being said by customers. We are often asked to categorise these conversations and while this can be done to a point the reality is that conversations are like snowflakes - they all look the same at first but each one is entirely different.
However, there is a deeper note here. So much new web activity is being activated at an individual level. If you aren't prepared to actually get involved beyond aggregated trend charts then you just can't realise the benefits. We'll stick with that method and just hope the semantic web catches up at some point...
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