Looking for brand insights in blogs

Tags: Communication, Marketing

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on companies like Intelliseek that scan blogs for word-of-mouth about brands. The article does a good job because it doesn't oversell the idea:

"Walter Carl, a professor at Boston's Northeastern University who has studied 'word-of-mouth' communication and marketing, says blog-watching services 'are very useful for quickly getting the lay of the land' in trends and consumer reactions. Still, he says, it isn't clear how closely online comments mimic the 80% of 'word-of-mouth' that still occurs face-to-face.

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."

That's a great point. No one should consider an opinion in a blog to be comparable to real market research or testing. But for a quick real-time sample of what people are saying, they are invaluable.