Why companies monitor blogs

(continued from previous page)

The Intelliseeks and BuzzMetrics of the world are finding fertile--and lucrative--ground to till with the monitoring and analytic tools and products they offer their clients.

MacDonald said that Intelliseek's clients sign up for contracts that average $75,000 a year and can range from $30,000 to $500,000. Similarly, Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing at BuzzMetrics, said the firm's clients pay anywhere from $30,000 to more than a million dollars for its services.

"What we're saying to (our clients) is that it's pretty important that you listen," MacDonald said. "Your customers are listening. Your customers are using the Internet to search. It's keyword-dense. It's contextual. When you type in a product name into Google, you may run into the company's Web site, but you may also run into 10 people who have had an experience with it."

Ear to the ground
It's not clear how many companies are monitoring the Internet for brand mentions. Nor is it clear how many of those businesses hire outside help to do the research, or invest in both in-house and outside services.

One example of the latter is Hewlett-Packard, which is a BuzzMetrics client and also has an internal program.

"We pay attention to the blogosphere," said Scott Anderson, HP's director of enterprise brand communications, in a talk at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco in December. "Our audience is online. They're having discussions about us and about our competitors, and they're talking about the marketplace. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it's important for us to pay attention to what's being said out there."

"When consumers have their own pen, they may not call in anymore."

--Steve Rubel, CooperKatz

Effectively, Anderson said, HP considers bloggers--especially chief-level executives, journalists and "influencers in our market"--to be valuable filters for what people think about its products and services.

"The blogosphere is a great place for customer intelligence," he said. "Things are happening very fast. Bloggers are considered to be people with real strong opinions. So it's a place where people are being really honest about what they think."

Naturally, there are countless small companies that want to keep up with what is being said about them online, but can't afford an Intelliseek or BuzzMetrics.

For them, said Steve Rubel, vice president of the Micro Persuasion practice at CooperKatz, which consults with companies about monitoring the Internet, there are a number of free and low-cost tools that companies can use to gain insight into how their brand is being talked about online.

Among them are Technorati, Google Blog Search, Hubsub and Icerocket, Rubel said.

"Those are very good if you have a manageable volume," he said. "If you have anywhere from single digits to 50 to 100 posts per day (about your company), you can probably manage that. With a huge brand, you need some tools to help you manage that. Otherwise, it just becomes too time-consuming."

Rubel pointed to public relations nightmares like that precipitated by Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis' much-publicized rants about his bad experiences with Dell and its customer service operation.

"When consumers have their own pen, they may not call in anymore," said Rubel. "They may choose to blog about it, because they think they'll get quicker service. Everyone has seen through different examples that they have to grapple with this."

To that end, Rubel said he recommends that clients keep what he calls a "lockbox" blog. He described it as "a blog you keep behind glass. In case of fire, break glass and blog."

The idea, he said, is that companies need to be able to quickly respond to crises and to do so in a medium that bloggers respect.

Ultimately, the point of tracking what online consumers are saying about brands is to be able to react quickly if something bad happens or learn from the good things people say. Either way, though, companies are learning they have to pay attention.

"The whole point," MacDonald said, "is if a company's not listening, they're not going to pick it up."

[bostonmarketing]

HubSub???

I think you meant PubSub, not HubSub.

John Cass
Backbone Media, Inc

[heystoopid]

Well, we know of one corporation who doesn't listen

Well, we know of one major corporation, who chooses to ignore all customer feedback, and fails to listen, It's CEO, Thomas Hesse in November said "most people don't know what a rootkit is, so they shouldn't care!"

Oh well, such is life, where all customers are to be treated like sheep, and fleeced on a regular basis!

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[Below Meigh]

Blog Exploitation?

You mean that my opinion (views) are making someone else a profit!!!

Guess its time to trademark my blog and any info that is contexted, mined, reproduced, copied, transferred, referenced, blah blah...is violation of my blog copyright and entitles me to royalties on companies like Buzzmetrics digging.

[markroberttwilson]

Blog and news feed aggregation

These are incredibly expensive services. Simply using reBlogger (<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.seodata.com/reBlogger_Website-based_Aggregator/rt-8_default.aspx" target="_newWindow">http://www.seodata.com/reBlogger_Website-based_Aggregator/rt-8_default.aspx</a>) will provide the same features and ability, but at a far reduced rate.