Bloggers are more honest
Blogs Without specialized search engines, you'd be hopelessly lost in the jungle of blogs. The Umbria search engine is particularly useful for advertisers.
Communication media of the future: weblogs, or blogs for short, are
Online diaries in which the authors can discuss any topic at will.
can pour out. Any reasonably savvy Internet user can create a blog
start. So it's no wonder that there are already more than 25.5
million blogs, and around 50,000 new ones are added every day. 90
percent of blogs come from the USA, and more and more Americans are accessing
one of her favorite topics: consumer goods. Products of all kinds are relentlessly criticized in the blogs or
have also been recommended to others: Teenagers like to be told about
TV series, cell phones and computer games, techno-geeks criticize
the latest laptops, and housewives warn against unsuitable
Can openers or inedible apple porridge.
For marketing companies, these online tirades represent a valuable
source of information about their products. "Marketing professionals start
to understand that they can communicate directly with customers without having to
the usual middleman in between," says Brad Adgate,
Research Director of the marketing company Horizon Media in New York.
"Customers are much more honest and direct than if they were, for example
would participate in a focus group." Adgate believes that the
Internet will soon drive traditional focus groups to extinction
because many of the participants in the survey were not able to identify with a
certain social pressure and therefore often do not honestly express their
Give your opinion.
Umbria has its nose in front
But because an entire staff department of interns is also involved in reading
would be overwhelmed by 25 million blogs, several bloggers have
search engines specialize in their daily evaluation. In the
In the US press, the Umbria tracing service has recently appeared particularly frequently,
because, alongside other providers such as BuzzMetrics, WebFountain from IBM
or Intelliseek is not only effective, but also inexpensive. For around
60000 dollars a year are paid to companies such as the telephone company
Sprint, gaming specialist Electronic Arts and the German
Software giant SAP provides detailed information on how its products and
services by an online-savvy public.
The effect of advertising campaigns or the image of competitors
can be analyzed in this way. "This is important for the
particularly important aspect for advertising companies: insights
to find out how the competition's products are received," says
Umbria spokeswoman Willow Baum.
With the help of such blog analyses, a number of telephony providers realized,
how worried many teenagers are about their cell phone service. They talk about
complained about the limited number of telephone minutes included in the contracts.
of their parents, and that at the end of the month they will receive their cell phone
have to switch off to avoid paying for the excessive minutes.
have to. One provider, US Cellular, then modified its offerings
and immediately placed various TV commercials with the message that the
minutes of incoming calls would no longer be charged, which in
was applauded by the blog community.
Another company that has worked successfully with Umbria,
was an unnamed confectionery manufacturer that had developed a new product with
low carbohydrate product to the market. The idea was a
Reaction to the general hype among the population about diets with little
carbohydrates, such as the Atkins diet or the South
Beach Diet. But because every year in the USA a new
miracle slimming cure is doing the rounds, the manufacturer wanted to
to find out whether Atkins and Co. were still "in" at all. The result
was unmistakably negative: Because more bloggers are now writing about it
complain than rave, the product was not expanded any further and the
discontinued at the end. "The companies save a lot this way
Money," says Baum.
A manufacturer of communication devices also benefited from the new
Method. The idea was to introduce a new smart phone, a
Combination of cell phone and Palm Pilot. The analysis showed that many
women over 40 prefer this combination and, moreover
wanted more audio options, while men of the same age
were more interested in the capacities of data transmission. The
As a result, the company offered several models and launched for
both demographics a marketing campaign.
Gerti Schön
