Saturday, May 20, 2006

Corporate Blogging and tools to look at trends

daniela barbosa Saturday, May 20, 2006 1 comment :

i have posted a couple of time on corporate blogging and i am constantly talking to my work colleagues as well as my customers about the importance of monitoring customers through not only their corporate sponsored blogs, but their employee blogs as well as consumers commenting on those companies and their products and services. Regardless of what industry the client is in- the message is becoming louder and louder- you need to listen and join in the conversation.
According to an article in PR Week this week about how Blogs are just a reflection of overall consumer empowerment trend... There are about 37 million blogs out there... 75,000 new ones each day, a new one each second... half of which will be inactive within three months. About 50% of blog writers are under 30, and 57% are male - a reversal of the gender balance three years ago. The largest number (37%) are in Japanese, and about 30% are in English. Only one in five US consumers has ever read a blog, and half that many have read one in the last week. But, significantly, 67% of journalists say they read blogs at least weekly, and about half of those say they get story ideas from blogs. ...(on average, blog readers spend 20% of their waking hours online - twice that of the non-blog reader)....

The article however did not see the power of the few-focusing on the fact that a small amount of consumers actually read blogs- the following posts discuss the importance:

Is the Fortune 100 Participating in the Blog Conversation? Published New Communications Review By Eric Mattson - Where eric asks- 1. How often do other major corporations get talked about? 2. Are they participating in the online conversation?

Applying Opinmind to Eric's Mattson's Fortune Blogging List Published Saturday, May 20, 2006 by Jeremiah Owyang. Where Jeremiah uses Opinmind to present instances of positive mention (+),and instances of negative mention (-).

OK folks what follows is blatant Factiva promoting- but hey i have unlimited access to this tools and i actually use them! and remember- The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer. So in responding to the following two posts about Fortune 100 corporations and blogging i used the Factiva services to do some comparisons with mainstream media:

Over the last few weeks many bloggers have been using new services like Google Trends to do visual comparisons of whatever they are posting about. Visualizations are a great way to

view large amounts of content and with the new tools out there they are pretty fun to play around with and help validate their points. It is like an economics class- look to the data.

Factiva has for years been working on tightly integrating visualizations into our products. I went ahead and used two premium services - Factiva Search 2.0 and SalesWorks- Note although Jeremiah mentions Factiva analytics services neither of these are doing pure media Analysis which the Insight suite of products covers.

The results can be seen here in PDF format and include:

Media coverage graph for each company by corporate entity (ticker) for the last 90days against Jeremiah's sentimeter by Opimind.com.

News Clusters for each company : The News Clusters filter utilizes text mining technologies to identify top trends, relationships and patterns within the search results in this case the companies i searched. News Clusters examine the first 100 articles to find repeated occurrences of hidden ideas or trends so you immediately uncover information from deep within your search results. The more mentions that larger the words

Comparison list of the 17 companies that the posts discussed, with graphical representations of # of employees, locations and industries across all the companies as well as some financial information for each company ranked. All together the employee population across these 17 companies is around 4.9 million employees and they probably touch a large amount of the global population of 6.6 billion so i am sure that even beyond the main stream media that Factiva covers, the blog searches through Technorati

, the googling and the Opmind that the three of us have done there is much more customer feedback out there.

Of the 17 companies- i have personally had interactions with 7 of them as a client in the last 2 yrs and know that my collegues who work with the others.

Note: addition post publishing- Factiva Search 2.0 is in Beta- if you are interested in giving it a whirl in order to submit feedback to our product group let me know.