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WSJ Story: Blogging and Marketing Insights

The front page of this morning's Wall Street Journal Marketplace edition features an article entitled "Marketers Scan Blogs for Brand Insights."  Intelliseek is featured in the story, but more importantly, the article underscores the very real potential for brands to harvest meaningful brand insights from unaided consumer conversations.  Some excerpts:

• "... a growing number of marketers are using new technology to analyze blogs and other "consumer-generated media" -- a category that includes chat groups, message boards and electronic forums -- to hear what is being said online about new products, old ad campaigns and aging brands. Purveyors of the new methodology and their clients say blog-watching can be cheaper, faster and less biased than such staples of consumer research as focus groups and surveys.
• "Marketers say bloggers' unsolicited opinions and offhand comments are a source of invaluable insights that are hard to get elsewhere. "We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror," says Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, a Chicago public-relations firm.

Word of 7/13 Mouth Research Conference

If you are serious about web measurements and research, don't miss the first ever research conference of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)   The event will take place in Chicago on July 13th.  Top firms in the WOM/CGM industry will be presenting papers on this topic.  You'll be among the first to see cutting-edge work in word of mouth research. Intelliseek will be presenting several times during the conference, including on the issue of "emotion" and "wordof mouth. Clients and friends of Intelliseek can receive a discount. Just use the Intelliseek code:

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Meet the Bloggers: Inaugural Interview

Today we officially kick off an Intelliseek sponsored series of podcast interviews entitled "Meet the Bloggers." We'll use these easily downloadable interviews as an opportunity to educate folks about the vast diversity of bloggers out there. Who are they? What makes them blog? How specifically are they using blog technologies, and what can we learn from this? In addition to popular bloggers, we're also going to focus on on lesser known bloggers who are doing really interesting stuff. Today, I interview Jay Stockwell, who during the day wears the Intelliseek VP of Sales hat. In the off hours, he's an aspiring comedian who is using the blog publishing format as a vehicle to promote and communicate his work. Recently, he discovered "podcasting" and we'll be covering this topic in this interview.

Download jaystockwell_cgm.mp3

Employees and Blogs

The topic of "blogs and employees" is receiving considerable attention right now.  Yesterday, USA Today featured an excellent (and quite in-depth) story on this topic, and last night I was interviewed live by anchor Erica Hill of CNN Headline News.   As we've discussed in so many of our Intelliseek webinars, especially last week's on this topic on employees and blogs, companies need to think proactively about employee blogging politicies.   This is already beginning to happen with many companies such as IBM, Yahoo, and GM.  The key is to strike the right balance between employee empowerment and loyalty and the need to keep proprietary, confidential, or compromising information from spreading via blogs authored by company employees.  The reality is that just about every blog author out there makes some reference, often peripheral or tandential, about his or her work experiences.  Most is innocuous and benign, posing no risk to the company.  In fact, as I explained to CNN, if you pay close attention to BlogPulse trend charts, you'll find that more people talk about positive work experiences than negative work experiences on blogs.  Net, many companies (like Microsoft) are benefiting from employee evangelism and advocacy as expressed on blogs. 

Enhanced BrandPulse Measures Consumer Influence, Sentiment

Knowing that influential consumers are active on the Internet is one thing, but having the ability to measure their influence -- that's another thing altogether, and it's one of the newest features in an upgraded BrandPulse solution from Intelliseek. An "Influence Tracker" that identifies consumer blog authors and tracks activity on their blogs is just one of the new BrandPulse features. Others include upgraded sentiment mining technologies, new search and relevance filters, a "wish list" generator based on consumers' ideas/suggestions, and enhanced reporting features that make it easier to create customized reports