Companies are increasingly making use of the opinions that people express on the Internet about services and products. They do this in order to detect trends at an early stage and to respond to them in a timely manner. A result of this is, for example, the product line of the food company ConAgra. By means of an analysis of what is said on the internet about its own eating behaviour, the company was able to respond in good time to the declining interest in low-carbohydrate food and to introduce an alternative range of healthy products. ConAgra also uses online public opinion to determine, for example, how the fear of bird flu influences the popularity of chicken as a food product. Another example is HP, which recently decided to assess the viability of repairing faulty computers in people’s homes from now on. The company decided to do this after reading extensively on the internet that people find it very annoying to leave their PC at a store to be repaired.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics is a company that makes smart use of the corporate desire for what is going on on the Internet. Software from this company collects and analyzes all the writing on hundreds of thousands of weblogs, forums and other places where people express their opinions. This database can then be searched on the basis of, for example, a product name, person or brand, after which it becomes clear how and how often the internet population talks about this. The application is also able to determine whether the search term is used in a positive or negative context, including any nuances. The chance that the Internet will become the only source of information about public opinion is nevertheless small. Traditional tools such as focus groups and surveys are still in vogue. Marketing professor Tim Calkins of the Kellogg School of Management also advises companies not to use the Internet as the sole source for important decisions. He does recognize that blogs and discussion groups can help to get an idea of what is going on among the target group.