Blog Analysis

Blogs are important for a number of reasons:

• What is being said about your organisation in the ‘blogosphere’ can be crucial to its reputation
• Bloggers are, inherently, important advocates on the topics they cover.  Knowing and understanding what they are saying provides valuable intelligence not only on your organisation but also on key issues and market trends
• All blogs can be highly influential.  Even those with a small number of followers are only one click away from potentially influencing a huge audience.  Similarly, it only needs one journalist to carry out a single search identifying an issue on a blog for it to be exposed to thousands – or even millions – of people

Spectrum can track blogs collectively and individually, in real-time.  Users can also view and explore content of the blogs and link through to the original website using Spectrum's KWiC Content Search tool.  The following chart is based on analysis of energy blogs targeted mainly at consumer audiences and shows the association of key factors with British Gas.  Not surprisingly, the British Gas branded Websaver 3 is most closely associated with the company in the blogs over the period monitored during May 2009.  Of some concern for British Gas, however, given the audience for the blogs (see below) is that the company is more closely associated with 'expensive' than 'cheap' despite having just announced a 10% cut in energy prices.

The chart below shows the association of Websaver 3 with British Gas in energy blogs over a weekly period during May, 2009, on a twice daily basis at 2:45am and 2:45pm (if you're wondering "why 2:45am and 2:45pm?" the answer is that this captures posts from the previous evening and lunchtime, when most people are likely to be commenting).  As Websaver 3 is the cheapest online dual fuel tariff from British Gas (at the time of writing), its coverage in energy blogs is obviously very important; and from the chart it can be seen how this drops significantly on 15th May, 2009.

The following chart is based on the same analysis of energy blogs as above but this time shows the coverage of key issues 'environment' and 'dual fuel'.  From this it can be seen that dual fuel drops at a similar time to the above coverage on Websaver 3 and that coverage of environmental issues falls over a similar period, providing reasonable evidence that both are being covered in the same media. 

Spectrum's blog analysis can also be used to monitor and track the effectiveness of annoucements on the blogosphere.  For instance, the example below shows the impact on energy blogs of the government's announcement to introduce smart meters to every home in Britian.  As well as overall impact the analysis can be broken down into fine detail to meet a client's specific requirements, such as key messages delivered, spokespeople quoted and many others.

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