Andrew Walmsley on digital: Master the art of eavesdropping

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 £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.