Tuesday, 23 August 2005
Interesting Perspective on Blog Analytics - Use People!
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Lisa Poulson, Managing Director of Technology Practice at Burson-Marsteller, San Francisco writes:
She also says that her corporate clients have moved from wanting to blog to wanting to monitor blogs.
She's got some good stuff, but I think her sentiment can be generalized to any MR - You need some smart folks who understand the methodlogy and the research results to make sense of any MR data. True with blogs, true with surveys, true with focus groups, etc.
If I were a blog analytic provider, I think the question I would be asking is what can I do to cut her interns 40 business days to 40 business hours, or whatever. Hmmm. I think I might try to get a hold of Ms. Poulson and ask her just that.
While all of the blog search companies are now fast at work creating tools that do spiffy charts and graphs, (as ever, the wonderful engineers at the blog search companies are doing what engineers do – thinking about numbers, algorithms, ways to automatically generate data) my clients want qualitative analysis. What are the verbatim quotes? What do they mean in a larger sense? What are the big themes? What should we do with this data? No matter what anyone says, semantic analysis and sentiment analysis are a long way away from being truly accurate or truly useful.
She also says that her corporate clients have moved from wanting to blog to wanting to monitor blogs.
She's got some good stuff, but I think her sentiment can be generalized to any MR - You need some smart folks who understand the methodlogy and the research results to make sense of any MR data. True with blogs, true with surveys, true with focus groups, etc.
If I were a blog analytic provider, I think the question I would be asking is what can I do to cut her interns 40 business days to 40 business hours, or whatever. Hmmm. I think I might try to get a hold of Ms. Poulson and ask her just that.
Posted by at 8:27 PM in Word-o-Mouth
