What are they saying about us?

Editor’s note: Hugh Davis is co-founder and executive vice president of Wilton, Conn., research firm Greenfield Online.  Mike Oberholtzer is director of operations at Hall & Partners USA, Chicago.

Market research has almost always been structured one way: a client wants to know how consumers have acted in the past, where their “heads are at” in the present, or how they’re likely to react in the future. Typically, clients hire market researchers to execute a market research project that consists of posing critical questions to be answered by target audiences. This tried-and-true methodology has existed since the 1950s and provides not only answers to marketers’ questions but has helped them determine market opportunities, understand the competitive landscape, innovate new products and refine packaging.

In a perfect world, market researchers would always be able to engage consumers one-on-one on the phone, online or at the mall to get the information their clients need. But, more and more, busy consumers are making it clear they will only respond to requests for this information on their own terms, and at a time that is convenient for them.

What if market researchers could be more become even more proactive? What if it were possible to leverage a vast repository of information that contained the answers to questions about consumers’ opinions, as well as answers to questions that researchers hadn’t even thought to ask yet? What if researchers could tap into this resource in order to extract answers about consumers’ connections to their clients’ products in the past, present and future? This type of intelligence could be used proactively by market researchers and marketers alike.

Have the upper hand

The digital revolution that is occurring today is a confluence of revolutions in media, consumer behavior and marketing. Consumers have always aspired to have the upper hand in the marketer-consumer relationship. What’s new is that consumers have now acquired immense powers to take that control. The Web enables consumers to express their innate yearning for control and natural inclination to be proactive. Consumers can now explore, play, connect, transact and, importantly, be heard (whether they are brand advocates or detractors).


People use the Web as a sounding board to express their opinions about everything from technology to travel to tiramisu. Around the world, more than 1 billion people - about one-sixth of the global population - use the Internet. And, increasingly, Internet users are becoming bloggers.

Because of the unrivaled anonymity afforded by the Internet, as compared with other communications mediums, users feel comfortable expressing themselves honestly and openly. The Internet has always been a means of self-expression and blogging has evolved as a result.

In addition, blogging has become a creative alternative to the traditional means of sharing or publishing information, and many blog sites are becoming recognized as a legitimate supplement to commercial media, or a place to gain knowledge about people, places, ideas and, of course, brands.

This is not a new phenomenon, however, and advances in digital technologies - like blog mining - are making it easier for market researchers and marketers to tap into this huge resource of consumer data. As consumers take advantage of the Web to help shape their relationships with brands and take active control of defining their brand experiences, marketers can view the analysis of what they are saying as another valid resource of consumer opinion.

Phenomenon has spread

Bloggers are no longer a select group; the phenomenon has spread across the general population. This move to the blogosphere, a concept that means all blogs are somehow interconnected as a community or social network in cyberspace, is only natural because the Internet is populated by people who strive to speak out and be heard. The Internet is a virtual sounding board, and everyone is an author. From Facebook to MySpace to YouTube, people are leveraging social networking Web sites and others to make their presence and preferences known.

When someone begins writing a blog, their circle of influence increases exponentially as their readership grows, and ultimately in some cases, even among the news media. Marketers need to be aware of the important pieces of consumer feedback discernable from the bloggers’ postings. In addition, marketers should take notice of the bloggers’ distribution, reach and readership.

The viral spread of blogs and bloggers has created a huge reservoir of information of which researchers should take notice. Just look at these figures:

  • Globally, there are now at least 70 million blogs in existence. Sixty-three million blogs have been created on eight leading blog hosting sites that host one million or more blogs alone.
  • More than 12 million American adults currently maintain blogs. Six percent of the entire U.S.  population has created blogs.

And the blogosphere is home to a vast population of blog readers as well, expanding a bloggers’ sphere of influence to an almost unimaginable degree. For example:

  • In the U.S.  alone, more than 57 million people read blogs.
  • More than 120,000 blogs are created every day. There are more than 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
  • 22 of the 100 most popular Web sites in the world are blogs.
  • 37 percent of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
  • Blogs have become “legitimate” news sources for many consumers, and blog sites like perezhilton.com, slashdot and others have reached record numbers of visitors.

Businesses have begun to understand the value of the blogosphere both as a community of consumers and as a resource for important information about consumer behavior. In fact, 89 percent of companies surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.

Here’s why:

  • Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.
  • 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.

All that is available

Market researchers are challenged with the responsibility to collect all of the consumer feedback data that is available, anything that may provide the answers clients seek, whether by surfing the Web, blog mining or gathering intelligence from key influencers.


The open source nature (free from the influence of specific questions) of Web-based blog information engenders a level of quality difficult to achieve outside of the blog environment because it helps businesses view their products through consumers’ eyes, without preconceived questions - i.e., the buzz factor. This lack of bias can be incredibly valuable in the early stages of a campaign when determining brand positioning. In addition, blog mining can be valuable for maintaining a pulse on consumer opinion over time and observing trended data.

Think of it as the Jeopardy! of market research; the answers are out there for questions that haven’t even been asked yet.

That said, we believe the appropriateness of buzz monitoring varies depending upon the client and/or the situation. We find it’s most useful for clients who want to determine the level of buzz surrounding the launch of a new product or campaign, an extremely positive or negative story in the press or competitive activity. For some clients it may be necessary to monitor buzz throughout the year, for others it might only be necessary when something significant occurs.

Missing out

Consider your next research project. Perhaps you are trying to uncover consumer opinion about a particular product or service from a specific demographic, which may be made up of core users of your product.


Are you missing out on new product uses that you might not have imagined? Are you neglecting valuable information from non-core users - people who may be using the product in different way?

Take, for example, Breathe Right strips, Hush Puppies shoes or Red Bull energy drinks. All of these products were launched and targeted for specific uses. Over time, as the products were exposed to more buyers, new product uses and user groups began to emerge. Because market research studies are intended to capture the opinions of core users, or specific demographics, companies may have missed valuable feedback from non-core users. With Breathe Right strips, the product was marketed and intended for use by athletes, but sales began to increase as a sub-group of the general population (snorers) were directed toward the product, in many cases by their physicians.

Of course, this is a fortunate problem to have, but imagine the benefits of this intelligence in the early stages of a market campaign. Do you suppose the users might have been blogging about the success they were having? What about the spouses of the snorers? How many of them might have been blogging about it?

Gauging the effects

Can you imagine assessing the impact of a PR disaster in real-time? Or gauging the effects of positive PR? Data collection could prove an invaluable tool for gauging the mood of consumers relative to PR disasters. For instance: How are consumers reacting to a food distributor’s efforts to repair damage in consumer confidence after inadvertently distributing tainted products? As mentioned above, blogs and bloggers have influence; their views are posted for all to read. With real-time feedback in hand, imagine your company’s ability to plan disaster recovery.


And, taking this thought a step further, think about monitoring changing perceptions after your company has made changes to its product or service. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to measure the goodwill or positive feedback generated and to have the intelligence you need to better message these changes?

Let’s look at a recent Hall & Partners client experience. The client, a dynamic new category entrant with a loyal following, was steered toward blog mining to monitor Internet-based buzz following a particularly negative incident that received a lot of publicity.

Traditional methods (omnibus and tracking research) showed within the first week following the PR blitz that the vast majority of category users were aware of the incident and that some negative attitudes had surfaced about the brand. Web monitoring showed a corresponding spike in mentions for the brand, but it was discovered within the first week that the most active and vocal consumers were quick to rise to the brand’s defense and point out how other brands had suffered similar service issues. So, while the volume of discussion about the client’s brand increased significantly in the first three weeks following the incident (three times the usual amount), the proportion of negative buzz was not any higher than what was seen before the incident occurred. Then, through continued monitoring, it was determined that the more positive view of the brand’s advocates spread through a larger group of consumers.

In this case, Web monitoring was important in two ways: First, it clarified the real nature of the brand buzz out there. Secondly, it clearly demonstrated the power of vocal, active digital consumers. Importantly, just as we are seeing with relationships between new and traditional media, new digital research is complementing traditional research rather than taking its place. In this case, the Web monitoring provided a robust, real-time pulse about consumer sentiment while traditional tracking provided depth of understanding among category users and client loyalists to supplement the Web monitoring trends among a broader online population.

Blog mining is a new means of gathering consumer feedback that should not be dismissed. That said, it is not an ideal means of gathering feedback in all cases, nor do we view this as a research replacement. Blog mining should be considered a research supplement, one that yields rich insights that may not be possible via traditional methodologies as evidenced in the case study above.

Mine the wealth

The technology exists today to mine the wealth of consumer information out there in the blogosphere. New data mining/predictive software uses “bots” (also called Web crawlers or spiders) to journey around the Web gathering very specific information. These scripts (small bits of software) methodically browse the Web for the right information - the information it is programmed to find.


We view Internet-based data collection as an excellent way to supplement traditional marketing techniques with unbiased, real-time consumer data. We now have an opportunity to incorporate behavioral data (monitoring what people really say and do on the Web) with attitudinally-based research findings to make sense of the new, digital consumer. Researchers can be there to mine all the Internet-based information available to help clients deliver better products and services.