There’s a growing market for online monitoring services in the US and Europe. The most prominent is probably America’s Umbria Communications, which, according to its own publicity, “collects the unsolicited opinions and perceptions of the online community (blogs, message boards, chat, etcetera) and turns it into actionable market research about companies, products, people and topics of interest”.

Umbria makes much of its “proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technologies”, while its British rival, Infonic, talks up its on-board human expertise in analysing the way “perceptions are shaped by a new breed of online opinion-leaders”. What both are doing is effectively blogging on a grand scale: finding the comment and venturing on what it means.

New Zealand’s oldest news monitoring service, Newztel, says it doesn’t do internet monitoring, but Jacinta Hennessey of Auckland-based NewsMonitor says she has seen enough evidence of demand to approach Infonic to begin providing a service for her New Zealand customers. As she points out, because it’s the internet, the monitoring could be done anywhere.

Auckland-based Pead PR probably has more to do with the blogosphere than its peers, but director Deborah Pead says that the blogs are “generally not as top-of-mind in our media schedule as print or broadcast would be”.

The major exception is in its brief for Microsoft’s Xbox games console. The debate about games largely takes place in online forums “and that’s the one area where we are probably most active”, says Pead. “We go in and identify ourselves as representing Xbox, and settle the query or correct the perception.”

She says blogs and sites on specialist areas, like video games, can be a PR nightmare. “The people there have an enormous amount of passion. The gamers can vent their spleen in the most ugly way. So that makes us nervous, because there don’t seem to be any rules of engagement, and I think it makes our clients nervous about blogs as well. It’s an area they can’t control.”

Pead does have some rules of thumb: “We would never, ever send a blogger a news release. They would probably tell us to get away and never contact them again. But we do feel comfortable sending them a link to something that they might be interested in.”
Pead also guided an online response for its client Healtheries New Zealand, after the recall of vitamins and supplements produced by the Australian manufacturer Pan Pharmaceuticals.

“Healtheries weren’t affected by the recall, because none of their products were involved. But there was a huge amount of anxiety about taking vitamins and health supplements, so we immediately switched their site around to provide an advice and information forum. That was useful — and it was better than the nutritionist having her phone ringing non-stop.”

In general, Pead feels the PR industry here has yet to come to grips with the world of online opinion the way the American industry has. She says the blogs and forums are “great for insights, they’re great for opinion, they’re great for research. You get a greater intimacy than from a newspaper article.

“It’s a huge universe out there and we don’t seem to have found a way to include it in our communication plans. I think that type of feedback would be useful.”