Brands scratch at the surface of online conversations
Published by Siddiq Bello May 19th, 2008 in Conjecture, Tech Musings.
Last week I looked at two social media services and wondered why brands weren’t taking advantage of the wealth of information about the products and services, being offered directly from their customers. Ad Age must have seen my post because they responded with a piece about a company which is hawking a brand monitoring service that is raking in the loot. The company, MotiveQuest, offers month long studies of the chatter happening about and around brands for $30k to $75K.
While I havent seen any of these reports, based on the description in the article they seems fairly superficial. They are only using keyword matches and user tallies to provide brands with “insight” into what people are saying. While I’m sure its a huge leap over what they had previously, that is to say nothing, simply giving demogrphic information based on keyword matches isnt really pushing the boundaries of what possible and knowable. When digital agencies start offering psychographic profiles and “viral value” of users that discuss a product online and then help brands engage with them is when it will get really interesting.
3 Responses to “Brands scratch at the surface of online conversations”
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Hi (can’t tell who you are from the blog
I’d be happy to take you through some of our work if you’d like to find out first hand if it is superficial or not. Your description of our work isn’t even close to what we are doing - otherwise companies wouldn’t hire us. They would just use Google - right?
If you’d like a first hand look, contact me and we’ll set up some time.
tobrien at motivequest dot com
TO’B
MotiveQuest LLC
Google alerts are a wonderful thing arent they…
Tom I’d be happy to be taken through some of your work and proven wrong about its superficiality. However, I disagree that the service I described would not be used by companies, these days you can get companies to pay for almost anything if it helps them better understand their customer.
PS: Those turkeys looked pretty tasty. I couldnt help wondering if the smoking process didnt fully negate any of the health benefits of buying an organic turkey? Isnt that kinda like buying organic cigarettes?
Hi Siddiq:
Sorry - didn’t see your response to my post. If you contact me directly I’ll be happy to schedule some time to talk about what we do.
tobrien at motivequest dot com.
Thanks - looking forward to meeting.
TO’B