...Kalehoff, vice-president of marketing at BuzzMetrics, said the firm's clients pay anywhere from $30,000 to more than am dollars for its services.
"What we're saying to [our clients] is that it's pretty important that you listen," MacDonald said. "Your customers are listening. Your customers are using the Internet to search. It's keyword-dense. It's contextual. When you type in a product name into Google, you may run into the company's Web site, but you may also run into 10 people who have had an experience with it."
Ear to the ground
It's not clear how many companies are monitoring the Internet for brand mentions. Nor is it clear how many of those businesses hire outside help to do the research, or invest in both in-house and outside services.
One example of the latter is HP, which is a BuzzMetrics client and also has an internal programme.
"We pay attention to the blogosphere," said Scott Anderson, HP's director of enterprise brand communications, in a talk at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco in December. "Our audience is online. They're having discussions about us and about our competitors, and they're talking about the marketplace. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it's important for us to pay attention to what's being said out /there."
Effectively, Anderson said, HP considers bloggers — especially chief-level executives, journalists and "influencers in our market" — to be valuable filters for what people think about its products and services.
"The blogosphere is a great place for customer intelligence," he said. "Things are happening very fast. Bloggers are considered to be people with real strong opinions. So it's a place where people are being really honest about what they think."
Naturally, there are countless small companies that want to keep up with what is being said about them online, but can't afford an Intelliseek or BuzzMetrics.
For them, said Steve Rubel, vice-president of the Micro Persuasion practice at CooperKatz, which consults with companies about monitoring the Internet, there are a number of free and low-cost tools that companies can use to gain insight into how their...
