Gleaning consumer intelligence from blogs and podcasts
Jinfo Blog

By Patrice Curtis

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Introduction

Blogs and podcasts provide intelligence for consumer trend monitoring. In conjunction with your existing consumer intelligence (CI) resources, social media can highlight significant issues that affect your brands, identify competitor weaknesses, opportunities in the marketplace and those specific to a brand. Monitoring blogs and podcasts can help you develop actionable solutions to fuel your organization.

Although social media includes blogs, podcasts, wikis and more, this article will just explore the first two, and will demonstrate how monitoring and analyzing what consumers create on blogs and podcasts can enrich our understanding of their needs and desires, and thus support our CI efforts. We will start with a brief explanation of blogs and podcasts; identify a few tools that will ease monitoring requirements; and conclude with a few ideas for analyzing blogs and podcasts to identify consumer signals and trends.

Social Media Space

Your company may have a competitive intelligence system in place, but now you need to incorporate online social media sources as well. Social media - weblogs (blogs) and podcasts - provide a powerful peek into the minds of consumers as content creators. Because of this, the social media space represents a powerful resource in the search for deep insights into consumers.

The term 'social media' refers to World Wide Web services that let people collaborate and share content online. Blogs and podcasts are popular services that now have millions of people sharing and collaborating online, both for personal and professional use. Recent FreePint articles have covered the technology underlying social media, as well as some handy and informative applications of them [e.g. <http://digbig.com/4hjxx>]. Both have grown dramatically in usage in the past two years. For example, there are currently an estimated 6 million podcast listeners, and some observers believe that number will swell to over 50 million by 2010.

Today, blogs and podcasts have grown to form the cornerstone of social media. The power to create their own content has empowered consumers of everything from designer purses and high-tech gadgets to enterprise-wide IT solutions, to state their point of view unequivocally and directly to anyone who will listen. And to guide readers and listeners to those opinions, social media search engines and content aggregators have sprung up, to make consumer-created content (a subset of user-generated content) easier to find.

Emerging opportunities

Consumer intelligence is both process and product. Social media are a rich vein to mine for insight into what customers want and need, as well as to understand how they behave. To turn this raw material into decisions and actions, we need to be able to identify the social media our customers are using, and then apply a set of tools and processes to acquire and manage, over time, the abundant flow of information.

Strong intelligence products -- reports, graphs, presentations and the like -- tell a story. Effective knowledge workers create order from the chaotic, esoteric, and unrelated. Blogs and podcasts, if we listen dispassionately and with an open mind, make our storytelling easier: our intelligence products can incorporate stories pulled directly from what consumers say, rather than strictly from what we observe.

A typical scenario I've encountered is a healthcare client who wants to protect their brand and extend their reach within existing shareholders. For example, in providing monitoring services for hospitals, I have found that local and regional newspapers and TV stations often play up relatively rare negative events, such as lawsuits, parking problems, and noise issues. An occasional article will be positive, perhaps discussing the availability of new procedures and new medical equipment. But in monitoring blogs, I discovered patient-driven stories: couples who had babies at a hospital provided glowing stories, sometimes rich in detail about the wonderful care mother and baby received during their stay. Patients for other procedures provided insight as to what could be improved, in an informative rather than accusatory tone. This feedback allowed hospital executives to emphasize a different story when speaking with their shareholders, and provided an opportunity to reach out to these consumers who otherwise would have been unknown.

Even beyond the consumer's statement, social media give us information about the information: who is participating in the discussion, for instance, and what kind of vocabulary they use to express themselves. Two examples of how the meta-information can enrich the overall intelligence: Demographics and Language and vocabulary.

Demographics

Each social media website will appeal to a specific demographic, which must be kept in mind when analyzing content creator activities. For example, while there are certainly some 50-something grandmothers uploading cell phone photos, most content creators of this sort will be younger.

Language and vocabulary

Social media search engines provide important data through tag clouds and through lists, such as the week's top ten tags and/or blogs. Tags are words that content creators use to describe their works <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud>; in effect, they are keywords, guides that lead content users to the posts of content creators. Analyzing tag clouds - groups of tags within content - provides powerful insight into what blog and podcast content creators and users are interested in. It's also important to note that a flurry of activity (blog posts and discussion in podcasts) around an area of interest can peak quickly; without ongoing monitoring you risk ending up with a 'false positive' for a sustained trend.

Working backwards to characterise a community

As with any audience-focused research initiative, it's critical to understand the nature of the audience. Analysis of blogs, podcasts and the data surrounding them is an excellent way to gain an understanding of the individuals who use those particular nodes of social media, and thus put the information into context.

Tag clouds, for example, can be used to build up a picture of the demographics of particular sites. For example, if you look at the tag cloud on del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us/tag/> you would see a heavy weighting of technology-related words, such as: ajax, apple, css, linux and Web 2.0. Knowing this helps you to analyze what type of consumer uses that site, and correlate it to the site's popular tags.

Social media sites may also provide an analysis of their site users. A number of options exist to analyze the podcast space. Podcast Alley <http://www.podcastalley.com>, for example, provides a Top Ten and All-Time Most Popular list. Podzinger <http://www.podzinger.com/ZingIndex.jsp> provides lists of the Most Listened to Podcasts, and Most Viewed Video Podcasts. Podcast.Net <http://www.podcast.net/browsetags> is another good site to check.

BlogPulse provides some of the best tools to ferret out trends. You can find trends created by BlogPulse Trends <http://www.blogpulse.com/trends.html> or you can create your own Trend Search <http://www.blogpulse.com/trend>. Daypop provides a variety of statistics related to specific blog URLs. The statistics includes Word Bursts and Top Wishlist <http://www.daypop.com/blogstats>. Bloglines <http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs> provides information on the Most Popular Feeds, the Most Popular Links, and the Newest Feeds, ranked by the number of mentions. Green and red arrows denote change in popularity in the last 24 hours.

If you are interested in visual information, try Flickr and PhotoBlog.net. 'Interestingness' <http://www.houserdesign.com/flickr> provides an easy way to view Flickr photos. Another option is PhotoBlog.net <http://photoblog.net/?action=keywords>, which provides the current Top 100, the most popular in the last 30 days, and the all-time favorites.

By maintaining a list of tags along with the source for each list, you can begin to build a database that allows you to cross-reference and correlate individual tags or category tag clouds that will clearly illuminate consumer interests as articulated in the social media space.

Like much of the web, corporate blogs of social media web sites can be a good place to keep track of what the company is exploring for future product and service roll-outs. These blogs also provide excellent signposts of the direction social media sites are moving in response to user (consumer) needs. For example, BlogPulse's blog is geared toward pointing us in the direction of trends we might otherwise not catch <http://blog.blogpulse.com/>.

Finally, experts within specific industries, such as public relations, actively monitor and comment on the social media space. Podcasts such as For Immediate Release <http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz/> and On The Record <http://www.ontherecordpodcast.com> provide rich information on the convergence of public relations and social media (though not exclusively). Global advertising agencies have blogs that speak to how the social media space is changing advertising.

Finding active consumers

To find active consumers -- those creating content in the social media space -- we need to bridge the divide between the language of our organizations and the language of content creators.

First, identify keywords that will lead you to the information you seek. Your search terms are critical, so err on the side of too many rather than too few.

Next, find out what sort of results you get from searching blog and podcast search engines. While you should search blogs from Google <http://blogsearch.google.com/> or Yahoo! <http://digbig.com/4hdys>, a social media search engine offers deeper results. Here are some of the more popular search engines.

- IceRocket <http://www.icerocket.com>
- Technorati <http://www.technorati.com>
- Google <http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch>
- BlogPulse <http://www.blogpulse.com>
- Blogger (Google-owned) <http://www.blogger.com/start>
- Bloglines <http://www.Bloglines.com>
- Feedster <http://www.feedster.com>
- del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us/>
- Podcast Alley <http://www.podcastalley.com>
- Podcast.Net <http://www.podcast.net>
- Podzinger <http://www.podzinger.com>

The final step, before we beginnning monitoring, is to match keywords with the tags created by active consumers. Content creators - active consumers - rely on tags to help other consumers find them. Tags have become the glue that connects content creators and content readers/listeners, and is a critical component in monitoring consumer trends. Over time, the use of tags results in a 'folksonomy', a user- defined, keyword system in which tags are defined by users rather than by a provided vocabulary. Unfortunately, folksonomies often diverge from keywords that researchers might use.

Because tag clouds provide an excellent way to identify the most popular terms, you can use them in reverse. Rather than matching keywords you choose in advance, let them lead you to toward what seems popular.

One of the best websites to see tags in action is Squidoo <http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses>. This site allows users to set up a web page where they control the content. Squidoo has a number of tag clouds that will help get you up to speed. Each web page (Squidoo calls them lenses) has the tags prominently displayed. In addition, the site has a number of tag clouds compiled based on popularity, category, etc. You could be lost in the clouds for hours, but you will come out with a better understanding of tags, tag clouds, and consumers active in the social media space.

Matching your keywords with folksonomies will be a fascinating process: you may find your assumptions about the way your organization identifies a potential or existing market may differ significantly from the way consumers describe that same market.

For example, a client wanted to add a label to their product that emphasized it as an excellent source of calcium for those who are lactose intolerant. However, research in the blogosphere revealed that, while a critical consideration, it was not sufficient to make a consumer buy. Consumers made purchasing decisions based on taste and texture factors.

Once we have identified tags, and the search engines and aggregators that cater to the consumer we seek, it is to time employ tools that will make it easier to monitor available data.

Monitoring tools

Aggregators, online news readers, browser plug-ins, and third-party companies provide tools that will simplify our monitoring.

Aggregators and news readers -

Two tools that will really simplify our social media monitoring are aggregators and news readers. Both serve the same function: they allow us to subscribe to information that is then 'pushed' to us via RSS feeds, rather than requiring that we visit individual blogs, search engines, or aggregators.

News readers are software that you download to your desktop. Aggregators provide results through a website. For a list of several news readers for Mac and Windows, try the no-frills list from RSS Info <http://blogspace.com/rss/readers>. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for each individual term, simplifying your monitoring.

Google <http://www.google.com/reader>, Bloglines <http://www.bloglines.com>, and Yahoo! <http://my.yahoo.com/s/rss-faq.html>, <http://news.yahoo.com/rss> are examples of aggregators. All require that you have an account.

Unlike news readers or aggregators, a browser plug-in does not require opening a piece of software or surfing to a particular website. A plug-in exists within your browser as a separate window, and works behind the scenes, constantly updating your RSS feeds. Pluck <http://www.pluck.com/products/rss-reader.html>, Sage and diggbar (a Firefox add-on to search Digg <http://www.digg.com>) are three examples of plug-ins.

Despite the popularity of RSS feeds, you may still find that a site does not offer a feed for a particular web page. QuickBrowse <http://www.quickbrowse.com> provides a simple way to grab many web pages at once and have them displayed in one long web page that you access either online or that is emailed to you daily at a time of your choosing.

Conclusion

Consumers have always wanted to be heard, have always wanted their desires to be taken into account in the creation of new products - haven't you? Consumer trends begin life through a series of small or big signals. Through monitoring and analyzing the social media space, of which blogs and podcasts are a critical part, information professionals can provide a valuable, valid new voice within consumer trend monitoring - the consumer's story directly from the consumer.

Related FreePint links:

• 'Information and Libraries' articles in the FreePint Portal <http://www.freepint.com/go/p69>
  
  
• Post a message to the author, Patrice Curtis, or suggest further resources at the FreePint Bar <http://www.freepint.com/bar>
  
  
• Read this article online, with activated hyperlinks <http://www.freepint.com/issues/040506.htm#tips>
  
  
• Access the entire archive of FreePint content <http://www.freepint.com/portal/content/>
  
  

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