Helping image-conscious firms cut through the latest blog fog.

It wasn't so long ago that a company that wanted to know how people perceived it would hire a market research firm to conduct a survey.

Not anymore, according to Chas Salmore.

"The days of focus groups and expensive research projects are gone forever," said the chief executive of Marketingworks Inc. "Over the Internet, people aren't shy about providing their honest opinions and feedback."

Executives at the nearly 28,000 market research firms in the U.S. might disagree about the obsolescence of old-fashioned questionnaires, but even mainstream pollsters like Zogby and Harris have moved online.

To help companies access Web-based opinions, Marketingworks has created a program to measure a company's image on blogs, message boards, forums, chatrooms and online social networks. The Los Angeles-based company has teamed with Nstein Technologies Inc., a data-mining firm in Montreal, and International Business Machines Corp., to produce the software program MPWR (pronounced "empower").

The program crawls the blogosphere and other user-generated media sites, as well as news feeds. It then condenses the findings into reports that allow companies to know in real time, what people online are saying about them. Nstein has configured the system in 17 languages.

"It is humanly and financially impossible for a company to manually track, organize and analyze this massive amount of information in a timely manner--too many sources, too much information," Salmore said.

On the technical side, IBM supplies the Web crawler and Nstein handles the text analytics and computational linguistics. According to Michel Lemay, vice-president of marketing, Nstein developed "automated sentiment analysis" software about two years ago while working for clients like the British Broadcasting Corp., Time Inc. and VNU.

"It's almost impossible for humans to find relationships between concepts and entities in millions and millions of digital documents on the Web," Lemay said. "From a social point of view, the big trend is consumer generated media; from a technology standpoint, the big trend is computers' ability with text analytics to analyze this media and rapidly extract meanings, relationships and sentiments."

MPWR analyzes and divides Web comments into three categories: positive, negative and neutral. It also measures the significance of the source. For example, a story on a major newswire normally carries more import than a rant about a product on an engineering blog--unless the product in question happens to target the engineering market. Because of these differences in audience and context, client companies can customize the software to determine the importance of sources.

When monitoring online chatter, the software has a constantly updated dictionary to understand the meaning and tone of messages. That way, a comment describing a sports car as having "a lot of horses under that hood" is analyzed as a positive description of the vehicle, not a statement about ranching.

Customized programming enables MPWR to spot trends (since it monitors in real time), focus on certain product attributes, or compare a brand to its competitors. But Salmore said many clients focus on the first graphic in the report--a bar chart that shows the negative, neutral and positive chatter depicted in the familiar stoplight colors of red, yellow and green.

Marketingworks has an exclusive deal to offer MPWR on a hosted basis, meaning companies can use the system for specific campaigns or limited-time projects. Under Marketingworks' standard plan, each client pays a monthly fee for the service, which requires two to four weeks of lead-time to set up the crawl criteria.

Prime market

While individual bloggers vary from the scruffy student to the political curmudgeon, the overall segment presents a prime target for advertisers. "Blog visitors are disproportionately likely to be affluent, young and broadband-enabled," according to an August 2005 report from Comscore Networks called "Behavior of the Blogosphere." That behavior included about 23 hours per week spent online for bloggers, compared to 13 hours for the average Internet user.

In terms of universe size, the study tracked 400 blog domains and counted 50 million individual U.S. Internet blog-readers during a three-month stretch, or one sixth of the national population. "While it's difficult to define where the threshold lies for 'mainstream media,' one could argue that with approximately 30 percent of the U.S. Internet audience now visiting blogs, this medium is quickly approaching that status," the report stated. Political and news blogs accounted for nearly half (43 percent) of the traffic, followed by "hipster lifestyle" blogs (17 percent) and tech blogs (15 percent).

Besides the MPWR project, Marketingworks specializes in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns on the Internet, which Salmore sees as a complementary service to monitoring the Web. Public relations representatives known as "brand ambassadors" go into chatrooms or blogs to spread positive buzz about a company or correct misinformation. The ambassadors identify themselves from the company or brand under discussion and deliver client-approved messages. If they can offer new or behind-the-scenes information, the Web communities usually take quick interest. By "respectfully entering message boards, blogs, social networks and chatrooms, word-of-mouth shapes opinions," Salmore said.