Blogs are growing into the ultimate focus group - cries Brian Morrissey in Billboard (20/06/2005). He cites the case of US Cellular who wanted to reach college age consumers and speak to them on their own terms.
The company commissioned Umbria Communications and G Whiz to eavesdrop the blogsphere and examine postings relating to mobile phones.
Its interesting, as in a previous posting I referred to RSS possibly turning blogging back into a one-way communication channel allowing corporations to pump out information unquestioned. In this case linguistic analysis was used to carry out quick and dirty market research to listen to what the consumers had to say. I suppose its the flipside of that RSS coin.
The research was employed to shape a TV advertising campaign based around the themes they discovered.
One advantage to this kind of research is that the results would be less prone to bias the subjects are unaware that they are being observed, and you could argue that the opinions expressed are therefore more genuine. However, who is motivated to blog about their mobile in the first place? Someone who may feel unduly passionately about how good or bad it may be so this in itself could create distortion.
It is however, and interesting example of how the Internet is enabling better environmental scanning in the world of Corporate Communications, especially among some of the hard to reach segments of the population.
Matt
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