One Red Hot Country Mama!

I joined an American Marketing Association Webcast yesterday about how companies, big and small (ie. my clients) can use blogs to forsee trends and improve products. I’ve been to a number of these webcasts, and often they devolve into a sales pitch… but this one was probably the best one that I have been too.

They had speakers from both Forrester Research and from Umbria, a company that specializes in getting marketing intelligence from the blogosphere. The Umbria speaker definitely stole the show with some of her insights and case studies. The idea is that companies can use blogs to listen into conversations about their products and services in a way that they never could before… since it is all public.

"As people blog about the new iPhone, what they thought of Borat and how they take their cookie dough, they provide a wealth of unsolicited opinions that can be mined for valuable information about how a target audience thinks — and consumes."

Basically, Umbria does a search on blogs for a product or trend using the standard tools (Technorati and Google) or something similar except they remove all of the spam – this represents a huge amount of blog posts (creating fake blog posts is a way to improve search engine rankings). They are then able to approximate the age and gender and location of the blogger based on a number of criteria, such as language, paragraph length and timing of posting. Some of the measures seem arbitrary and I don’t agree with them (ie. they said that it takes women two paragraphs to say the same thing that men say in one). However, they do pull some interesting information.

You can see here, a press release on their recent study on Organic and Health Trends. An interesting finding that she mentioned is that a lot of people love going to Organic Foods stores because they enjoy the samples . I think companies like Umbria and the Attention Company have it right – listening is important.  I am looking forward to see how this idea fits into the dusty world of traditional market research.