Note: This story is available on both Industrial Market Trends and the International Association of Online Communicators Blog. We will share comments from both audiences in order to open up the dialogue and share ideas in true blog and wiki fashion.

Over the last two days we discussed blogs and wikis as internal collaboration tools as well as outward facing communication tools.  Here is an approach I have never considered.  Focus Groups.

A recent article from AdWeek, Blogs Growing Into The Ultimate Focus Group, discusses how U.S. Cellular used blogs as an alternative to focus groups and surveys.  reaching out to blogs across the net and scrape them for analysis.  The concept of monitoring and analyzing feedback from blogs as you would a focus group is an intriguing concept.  U.S. Cellular used linguistic technologies that were capable of determining the age of the writer through the language and writing styles.  With this technology they searched through the blogosphere and extracted comments made by their target group.  These opinions were then analyzed.  The analysis created was used to develop marketing and advertising efforts to answer concerns as well as highlight the items and services users wanted.

Analyzing comments on blogs across the Internet provides a window on opinions in free and open environments.  The belief is that these opinions and comments are more open and honest and can be used in marketing strategies.  Companies are beginning to see an opportunity to learn from these frank and intimate online conversations.
 
Again, the risks we discussed yesterday are still an issue.  When a companies attempted to insert their PR and marketing messages into blogs they created a backlash.  When blogs were perceived to be exploited by greedy companies they generate the ire of the blogging community.

There is also another implication here.  When you blog, your opinions are part of the public domain and can be indexed, analyzed and classified.  A little big brother?

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