|
|
|
Blogs - The Future Of Media Or Just The Future?
8 Mar 2006
Tim Houghton, New Media Intelligence
|
|
The debate as to whether
blogs will replace newspapers is currently hotly debated.
This is extremely unlikely - they will co-exist. Instead blogs
should be of interest as sources of user data that will help
marketers identify future trends.
Currently one of the hottest debates in the media sector is
over blogs versus traditional media. Which will win? Which
will survive? Nervous newspaper groups are experimenting with
blogs and other new forms of media like podcasting as they
fear a further loss of audience share. But in some ways this
debate seems a little sterile and off the point. The obvious
answer, that there will be room for both, doesn't make for
exciting headlines but I suspect it will be the end result.
More
interesting than that for me is the fact that blogs are one
part of a huge trend right now for user generated content.
Whether it's teenagers on MySpace, budding photographers on
Flickr or wanabee journalists on LiveJournal, users are writing
for themselves. This content creates an incredibly rich source
of data on what actual consumers think, feel, say and do.
And of course consumer data is one of the touchstones of modern
marketing success. Where would Tesco be without its ClubCard
data? (Answer about where Sainsbury's is).
|
So how exactly can
this rich data source be accessed and analysed?
Blogs and other user generated media can be used as ways
of getting feedback from consumers about the products they use.
For example, we know from our work
that the major mobile phone companies are increasingly monitoring
consumer review sites such as DooYoo and ReviewCentre.com in order
to quickly assess which phones and features are hot and which are
not. Marketers like Procter & Gamble are also investing heavily
in web content in order to trigger online conversations with consumers,
for example with their Pampers nappy brand.
On a more complex, but more interesting level blogs are being
used predicatively, to identify issues before they break out into
the mainstream media. Blogs are thus
providing an input into what corporate intelligence professionals
call a Strategic Early Warning System (SEWS). They can be a way
of identifying "weak signals", trends that are already
present but not yet mainstream. This is an important technique,
for in an increasingly fast changing and unpredictable marketing
environment, traditional techniques such as extrapolation yield
poor results.
But how to go about this when there are literally millions
of blogs? At time of writing the
leading blog search engine, Technorati, covers 30 million of them.
Here's a (fairly) simple three step approach to Identify, Monitor,
and Evaluate these "weak signals".
Firstly identify they key
issues you want to track for. Scan user generated and traditional
media to identify key concepts and trends, look for surprises and
the unexpected. This will create a matrix of issues to monitor.
Secondly monitor this "issues
matrix" and see how it develops over time. A key factor here
seems to be the rate of change in the volume of mentions. As an
issue starts to gain momentum and cross-over to the mainstream it
becomes of interest to marketers. Look for example at how the debate
on obesity has moved from the edge to the centre of public conciousness
in the UK. And this is not just talk: Britvic's share price recently
took a hammering after it reported falls in the sales of its fizzy
drinks.
And thirdly one has to try
and evaluate not just momentum but weight. This is very difficult:
Is the issue a frothy bubble that will pass or a secular trend that
must be addressed? An example of this is music downloading. The
music industry seems initially to have thought this was a fad or
a minority activity encompassing the Napster service and not much
more, it was only much later that they seem to have grasped that
this was a powerful trend and it took a non-music industry entrepreneur,
Steve Jobs of Apple, to figure out a way to capitalise on it.
|
|
There are
two basic evaluation tools. One
is to estimate audiences,
the other is to track links. Audience data is available from
a variety of sources such as Comscore and Nielsen. It works
well in calculating audience data for major media sites, less
well when looking at hundreds of smaller media properties.
Link data is much more widely available and works on the premise
that the most influential articles will be linked to most
by others. A more sophisticated version of link popularity,
PageRank, was Google's underlying technique for delivering
relevant search engine results so the method has validity.
Link
and audience data do not provide a definitive predictive capability
but if an issue has momentum, audience and is generating lots
of links it is certainly worthy of attention. So what can
this type of analysis show? The popularity of the Arctic Monkeys?
Yes. Who is likely to win the next reality TV show? Quite
possibly. An insight into which market segment will see fastest
growth? Maybe. As science fiction writer William Gibson stated
in a now famous quotation, "the future is already here.
It's just not very evenly distributed." Blogs may give
an insight into that future.
|
Courtesy
Google News, 999today
|
|
|
|
