Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making
By Steven Levingston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 3, 2006; A01
ConAgra Foods Inc. got an early warning from chatter on the Internet that
the low-carb craze was fading. The huge food company seized the chance to
promote an alternative menu, its Healthy Choice soups, entrees and lunch
meats.
"By utilizing online message boards you pick up nuances in the marketplace
-- customer statements, thoughts -- that enable us to distinguish whether
something is a trend that has long-term impact or a fad that will be
short-lived," said Nick Mysore, director for strategy and insights at
ConAgra, which also produces Butterball turkeys, Chef Boyardee ravioli,
Rosarita refried beans and scores of other products.
For companies like ConAgra, the individual opinions blasted out in
cyberspace are becoming an increasingly powerful force. Together, they form
the fabric of online word of mouth that can determine the hottest new
product, make or break a TV show, or set off a customer revolt. Eager to tap
into the buzz, a growing number of companies are turning to sophisticated
new technologies that track what's said on Internet social networks, blogs,
message boards, product review sites, "listservs" -- wherever people
congregate publicly online.
The comments are particularly valuable for measuring customer sentiment
because they're gut-level and spontaneous. "Internet word of mouth is
extremely important," said Steve Rubel, a marketing expert and senior vice
president at Edelman public relations. "You see what the most vocal
consumers have to say about you and about your competitors -- and they're
saying it without necessarily knowing you're watching them."
Following online conversations is the latest attempt by companies to grapple
with the growing clout of their customers. Empowered by the Internet,
consumers can broadly express their skepticism of brand icons, demand the
lowest prices and mobilize for action. In recent years, many companies have
tried to influence consumers by generating their own favorable word of
mouth. But measuring sentiment expressed in cyberspace -- whether provoked
or not -- has always been difficult. The high-powered new technologies aim
to fill in the missing pieces by searching, tabulating and assessing
Internet postings.
To capture the chatter, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a giant in the industry, uses
software that collects hundreds of thousands of comments a day. The
technology can scan for specific companies, products, brands, people --
anything searchable. It can slice data into a range of categories to
quantify the number of times a subject was discussed online, the individuals
who mentioned it and the communities where it appeared.
The company, formed last week by the merger of BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek,
also can assess the tone of opinions by analyzing writing style and even
individual words used. For example, if a blogger is discussing a new
sport-utility vehicle and says he loves it but isn't pleased with how it
handles, the software is clever enough to score the posting as an overall
positive with a negative on the handling.
By trawling in cyberspace, ConAgra sensed that consumer interest in portable
snack foods is growing as people's schedules get busier, the kind of
intelligence that helps guide expensive decisions on research and
development of new products. Spurred in part by remarks floating around the
Internet, Mysore said, ConAgra is exploring possible new snack foods, which
it won't discuss for competitive reasons.
As a food company that uses lots of chicken, ConAgra also scours the chatter
online to understand customer perceptions and fears of avian flu and better
plan its response should it hit North America.
"What kind of thought processes are consumers going through?" Mysore said.
"As an organization, we are able to leverage that information to
strategically create marketing programs to address that issue."
Companies that track online word of mouth emphasize that it is only one of
many tools they use to assess consumer sentiment. Focus groups, surveys and
other offline research complement information gleaned from cyberspace.
"If I were a company, I wouldn't necessarily make any enormous decisions
based just on what people are saying on blogs or messages boards, but it
certainly can help point you in the right direction," said Tim Calkins, a
professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of
Management.
Hewlett-Packard, the computer and technology company, lately has picked up
from cyberspace that customers really hate leaving their computers at shops
for repairs; far better, the company learned, is having technicians repair
the machines in homes. "What that makes us do is that when we think about
investing more in that area, we say, yes, it's positive to do that," said
Rickey Ono, business strategy manager for HP. "We drill into the individual
comments and it helps to justify our expenditure on in-home repair."
Even NBC's weak Olympics ratings were partly foreshadowed by chatter in the
blogosphere. A sweep of postings shows that conversations about the Olympics
peaked around the time of the opening ceremonies then fell off precipitously
to just above the low hum weeks before the Games began, according to an
analysis prepared for The Washington Post by BuzzMetrics. The survey, which
measured the quantity -- not the tone of the statements -- also found that
bloggers posted their thoughts about the hugely popular Fox TV show
"American Idol" with just about as much frequency as they did about the
Olympics.
Specific comments online offer a deeper glimpse into why viewers may have
stayed away from NBC's coverage. "I hate the Olympics," said one blogger
called TinaPoPo. "The Olympics are so boring and they disrupt my regular
TV-watching schedule. So I hate them."
Another touched on NBC's competitive troubles. The Olympics faced off not
only against ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" but also the latest installments
of "American Idol." "Why am I posting about the Olympics anyway?" wrote a
blogger called Todd-tastic. "American Idol is on tonight." NBC's ratings
were sharply lower than those of the last overseas Olympics.
Even a sports fanatic like Jill Manty, who ran an Olympics blog, had divided
loyalties. She told her readers during the first week that she would skip
NBC's coverage and instead tune in to "American Idol." Her voice was just
one in the nonstop conversation across the Internet, where millions of blogs
compete for attention. But in the banter that forms Internet word of mouth,
her lone opinion reverberates.
"It surprises me that it is possible to create something that can have that
much impact on how people view what's going on in society," Manty said of
her blog.
source:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201
829_pf.html