Digital media are mostly regarded in terms of their capacity for carrying our messages - the 拢2.8bn that is spent on online media and the thousands of websites that this funds are a direct product of this.
But for all the effort that goes into advertising on the internet, a tiny fraction goes into using it as a research tool - perhaps a reflection of the fact that as marketers we are often better at talking, than we are at listening.
During the past two years we have understood something new about the web; that its true power comes not from the ability it gives brands and companies to speak directly to consumers, but from that it gives consumers, or people, as they like to regard themselves, to connect with each other.
As these billions of conversations have unfolded, marketers have started to understand that there is value in listening in.
Social networks, blogs, forums, Twitter (a mobile social tool) and review sites are bulging with conversations that people are having about brands - often referred to as buzz. Sometimes they are saying nice things about you, often they are brutally slagging you off. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of what is being said - to understand who is talking, and the significance of those conversations.
There are lots of tools available - paid-for ones such as Onalytica and Buzzmetrics, that give us breadth of coverage, as well as dozens of free tools including Blogpulse, Technorati, Icerocket and Tweet Scan.
Between them, these systems allow us to build a picture of what people are saying, who is saying it and how much. However, knowing what to look for is not enough. The sheer volume of data means we have to know what to ignore, too; someone criticising a brand in a blog that is read by only two people is probably not going to be a priority.
So, typically, a researcher is looking at three dimensions of buzz - influence, popularity and sentiment. Flemming Madsen, founder of Onalytica, explains the difference between influence and popularity well; in the area of childhood obesity, Jamie Oliver is popular, but if you want him to reflect your views, you'll find it hard to get to him. Oliver gets his information from the National Obesity Forum - in this context, it is the forum that is influential - get to it, and you might get to him.
Sentiment is harder. Although there are tools to measure this, their results can be unreliable, because at the heart of it, they are measuring humans, and humans are inconsistent. Also, a teenager describing something as 'bad' can mean the exact opposite. Any machine would struggle to make sense of a post such as this (genuine one): 'This w3b syt is gud bcoz t3er3 is lwds of p3opl3 tht r g3tting bulli3d so b3at th3 bulli3s nd I am gunna do a page on my w3bby about it cya,' So humans are needed to comb the data and distil the sentiment from it.
Put this in place, and you have a thermometer of great sensitivity, which you can use for long-term projects such as new product development and brand tracking. But the real power of this technology comes from its immediacy - the almost real-time feedback you can get from the world.
Gauging the impact of a new TV campaign, an early-warning system for PR outbreaks, a customer-service listening post - these are uses to which buzz marketing techniques are already being put.
So, despite the 拢2.8bn we spent last year on talking to consumers online, we may yet discover that the real value of the internet to marketers is not in the voice it gives us, but the ears.
- Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level
30 SECONDS ON ... FREE BLOG RESEARCH TOOLS
- BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Created by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, it applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to unearth trends within the blogosphere.
- Technorati is a web search engine for searching blogs. It competes with Google, Yahoo! and IceRocket and in December 2007, it was indexing more than 112m weblogs.
- Founded by US software entrepreneur Dave Sifry, its headquarters are in San Francisco.
- It has won several awards and was nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices, but lost out to Flickr and Google Maps.
- Icerocket is based in Dallas, Texas, and backed by US billionaire and entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
- Tweet Scan is a real-time search engine for posts on Twitter, the free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send text-based posts called 'tweets', to the Twitter website.