Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making

Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making: "Empowered by the Internet, consumers can broadly express their skepticism of brand icons, demand the lowest prices and mobilize for action. In recent years, many companies have tried to influence consumers by generating their own favorable word of mouth. But measuring sentiment expressed in cyberspace -- whether provoked or not -- has always been difficult. The high-powered new technologies aim to fill in the missing pieces by searching, tabulating and assessing Internet postings.

To capture the chatter, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a giant in the industry, uses software that collects hundreds of thousands of comments a day. The technology can scan for specific companies, products, brands, people -- anything searchable. It can slice data into a range of categories to quantify the number of times a subject was discussed online, the individuals who mentioned it and the communities where it appeared.

The company, formed last week by the merger of BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek, also can assess the tone of opinions by analyzing writing style and even individual words used."