Jazz Odyssey

"The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter."

This interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discusses the growing use of companies that mine data from blogs and other online discussion forums.  

I’ve long been a proponent of employing this strategy as I think the inherent objectivity in data mining provides more accurate feedback than a focus group where the quality of our questions determines the quality of the answers.  My major concern with this growing trend is reduction in the accuracy of the results…since many companies have long histories of hiring marketing organizations to create the appearance of online buzz by sending street teams onto public forums to artificially hype movies, music, products and services, how can we be sure that what’s being measured is genuine?  If companies like Trendum, Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics can filter out those types of "artificial" postings, and providing the software being used to analyze the discussion is well conceived, the potential here is high.