Blog Analysis as Market Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Sep 23, 2009
In the Dock: Blogs, charged with the crime of wasting market-research resources.
The Prosecution: Gartner research director Gareth Herschel
In one of last week's keynotes at the Gartner CRM conference, Analytics-to-Action: Key Analyses for Customer-Centric Decisions, Gareth Herschel dismissed the value of blogs as a source of MR insights. He said that Gartner clients had seen marginal-to-no ROI from their investments in blog content analysis. "It's eye candy: management likes to see it." Similarly, Gartner clients have seen no ROI on connecting customers to their social networks. In terms of concrete ROI, Gartner advises its customers to instead learn the language of the Voice of the Customer by asking more open-ended questions in surveys and then text mining the responses.
The Defense: Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence for J.D. Power
In an interview by Adam Sultan of Marketing Sherpa, Janet identified the following applications of blog content analysis for market research:
- Brand monitoring, especially of competitors' brands
- Trend analysis - tracking studies
- Customer profiling - with analysis across the posts of a single author providing a richer look at customers as individuals
- Unmet needs identification - reading blogs to learn product and service frustrations, wishes and ideas.
The jury: Out
I will recuse myself, since clearly I like Gartner's answer that surveys are more valuable than blogs for market research.
What would you say? Would you be a witness for the defense or for the prosecution?