Blogging

Blogs, Forums, and Market Research

John Bradley "JJ" Jackson

04 Dec 2007 • 1 min read

You may not be a blogger yourself, but reading blogs written by your competition and your customers may prove to be a great way to conduct market research. Increasingly blogs, along with forums, are becoming honey pots for people to gather insight and information about products, companies, and industries.

Blogs and forums are creating communities for people to express themselves about their wants, needs, and desires. For example, discussion groups are common in the financial arena as investors share their insight about stocks and companies. Check out Yahoo! Finance and you will see what I mean.

Blogs are a great way to understand your competition and the messages that they send to their customers and partners. While it is common for a big company to use a Public Relations firm to assist with blog publishing, many smaller firms will freely tell the world how they feel about things.

Sun Microsystems has embraced blogging as a company and has over 4000 individual bloggers; this candid dialog makes for instant communication with their customers. The downside to Sun is that the same commentary is available to read by their competition.

Customer forums are cropping up everyday in virtually all industries from consumer products to professional services. Many of these forums are highly specialized. For example, I read a forum for Corvette enthusiasts called the Corvette Forum (http://www.corvetteforum.com/) which allows people like me to share their thoughts about buying, selling, and maintaining Corvettes with other Corvette owners. This forum has no affiliation with Chevrolet, but you can bet that the folks at GM read this forum religiously.

Consider setting up a RSS feed to search for subjects of interest to you and your business. For the average web surfer, RSS provides a way to see at a glance if your favorite blogs have updated their content. Using a simple RSS feed reading program, you can subscribe to the feeds from any supporting site to get this information and link directly to the new articles that interest you. You can set up the RSS feed to find articles or blogs by keyword.

Let the research begin.