It is crucial for many companies to find out what their consumers think about their brands and products. Marketers are searching for new ways of discovering people's opinions about products or advertising campaigns, and internet tools can be very helpful in this process. Such internet customer-generated communications as blogs, chats or message boards can provide vital information and insights on branding and advertising.
Even though blogs for brand insights can be very valuable sources, at times it can be a quite difficult task to screen them. The amount of internet information and online communication is so large that screening it can be a rather tiresome undertaking. Nevertheless, such online research can be much cheaper than all the other ways to find out customers' opinions. The online chat is an inexhaustible source of information. Blogs for brand insights take the place of focus groups with several million of participants. Brand insights in blogs are available twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. Moreover, they allow the marketers not only to research any local market, but also the Global one.
The usage of blogs for brand insights can provide some vital solutions for developing new products or improving the existing ones. A good example of such solution can be the U.S. Cellular Corporation, based on their blog research results. They have discovered that many teens are concerned about exceeding their cellular minutes. In most cases, their parents were unhappy if they had talked too much on their cell phones and made them pay for extra minutes. Another problem, the teens have experienced with their cell phones, was about incoming calls. Thus, the solution U.S. Cellular offered, based on this research results, was the unlimited 'call me' minutes.
U.S. Cellular is a good example of getting fast customers' opinions and a product response. The crucial factor in this case was to determine the right customers' demographical groups. It was done through analyzing their language.
Some kinds of this service are available free of charge. Procter & Gamble Co., for instance, has a free Web site BlogPulse. Or Technorati.com and Yahoo's Buzz Index provide no charge blog insights online services, such as keyword searches or counting links from one Web site to another. However, a paid blog for the brand insights monitoring may cost to large companies up to hundred thousand dollars a year. Such monitoring services offer a wider range of information and ways of obtaining it.
Another important aspect of searching blogs for brand insights is discovering customers' complaints. There are always some unhappy or complaining customers. However, in the past some companies could neglect them with little harm done to their business, which now it has become a dangerous thing to do. The reason is that those customers may have blogs and share their negative opinions and first hand experience with a larger number of people.
As we can see, a blogs research may help companies to find out useful details and opinions of customers about their products. The branding process strongly depends on the customers' perception and such information can be vital for the future companies' development.