A good piece from Knowledge@Wharton on the future of blogging contains this telling comment on corporate blogs: The “danger” is that corporations might not “understand the culture of blogging” and produce content that contains carefully vetted material instead of spontaneous writings that appeal to blog fans. Indeed, corporations are allowing employees to keep blogs, and in many cases encouraging online diaries. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, General Motors and Boeing are just Continue reading →

Crises affect all companies, all brands. For the best-run companies, they can be an opportunity to re-establish a personal link with the consumer. For poorly-run companies, they can be very dangerous indeed. At Market Sentinel we specifically address the online aspects of a crisis – adverse commentary and how to respond. But in truth the response online must be of a piece with every other action taken by the company. Continue reading →

A recent piece in the UK’s PR week quoted some work by Delahaye identifying the proportion of negative commentary about brands and companies in different media. In messageboards 11% of comments are negative, in news coverage 13%, but in blogs 23% of all comments are negative. So why are bloggers so negative? One reason is that bloggers want to be controversial. They are generally looking to get as many incoming Continue reading →

Our customers ask us to monitor particular pages. It could be a blog, a message board … it could the product page of a rival company … it could be a search page on Google or another search engine. We can produce RSS feeds from anything. Then we ping the site and when it updates, we update the feed. The result is that any site on the web can produce Continue reading →

Market Sentinel came into this world by accident when a large technology company rang us up in August 2004. We had an algorithm called myrss.com which simply stripped out content from a standard HTML page and turned it into an RSS feed. These guys were interested in tracking what CIO’s were saying about their latest hardware. Could they use this tool to strip out content from message boards – they Continue reading →