A number of big brand advertisers and marketers and experiment with developing ad campaigns based on what consumers are talking about on the web.
Monitoring what internet users say in their instant messages, social networks and blogs isn’t anything new, of course. There has been many a study telling us what the most popular brands discussed on the internet is (Apple’s iPhone, Vegemite, Starbucks and Microsoft just to name a few).
But now, marketers are using new technologies to scan the web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren’t—saying about their brands, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Marketers can then incorporate those findings into their more-conventional research to create specific text and photos for their ads given what consumers seem to want – or, what they say they want, at least.
Furthermore, once the campaigns are up and running, advertisers are using the same web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them.
Marketers have long drawn on information from the web to help them design their web sites and online marketing campaigns.
Now, more of them have begun to use it to guide their marketing across a range of media, including print and TV, and in choosing the overall strategy for those campaigns.
Digital marketing and advances in the technologies available to marketers and advertisers don’t just mean more channels to advertise – they mean more channel to listen, too.
Jason Falls, a social media consultant and blogger on socialmediaexplorer.com, said that it is “imperative” that companies and brands can gauge public opinion about them by listening in to online conversations.
He added that companies could also then interject in these discussions and that while marketers may not have control over the conversations, they should at least have a participatory role in them.
Services such as Google Alerts and searches on Twitter, Google Blogs and Bing can allow companies to keep track of conversations about their company.
According to recent research from Harris Interactive and Tealeaf, more adults are turning to social media to talk about problems they have had with brands and companies.
Here are some sites to help you:
and the old favourite, Google Alerts