Big Business Turns to Blogs for Marketing Research
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Written By Reprise Media | June 23, 2005 | Share This
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Teens live in morbid fear of exceeding their cell phone minutes, while their parents no longer regard bagels and bread as dietary outcasts. Drug warnings like “has been linked to risk of heart attack and stroke” aren’t a dealbreaker for most and the toddler set has a love affair with mini-vans.
While revelations such as these aren’t new for marketing research, what is new is how they were obtained.
More and more marketers are combing blogs to get insights and information on their brand, products, and ad campaigns that otherwise would be hard to find.
This article in the Wall Street Journal talks to several firms which make their living by providing blog and blog-related research. It’s a lucrative field, with blog-monitoring costing big companies anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 per year.
Of course, with tools like BlogPulse and Technorati, which allow you to enter a few keywords and access a list of all the blogs that are returning results with your name/brand/etc., some would question why there’s a need for such a service at all.
The “human element” is what these firms bring to the table, according to Bernice Cramer, vice president of market intelligence for Polaroid Corp:
“If you look for it manually, you’ll spend months searching through a lot of junk.”
On another blog-related note, while looking through the want ads on Craigslist for extra freelance work I came across this listing for MSN Bloggers. MediaPost has noticed the same. A lot of the bloggers they talked to were skeptical whether MSN could get this off the ground. Nick Denton of Gawker says:
“The idea doesn’t seem particularly interesting or new.”
As if snarking about celebrities is a groundbreaking endeavor. But yea - MSN has a lot of past (and present) mistakes to make up for in this area (China controversy, etc.).
Topics: Blogging |
The information on your customers and prospects collected from blogs should only be used to enhance other primary and secondary research you are using. The blogs should be just one component of a more comprehensive plan to understand your market. Remember, on the blogs, we don’t necessarily know demographics and other attitudinal and behavioral information that helps marketers and researchers fully understand the target market and the ways we can most effectively reach them