I've talked about this ever since i started blogging and got the opportunity to discuss it with Jim McGee when i met him.  I see a lot of potential in using blogs as a market research tool, as a tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, as a tool to observe groups of people, as a tool to collect data - there is live content there, consumer speak in real time, jazz play through comments and trackbacks with thoughts bouncing off more thoughts, stories and analogies and some really neat suggestions and wishlists.   

Jim blogged thoughts that the market research industry should be exploring, right after our meeting :

"In the marketing research context, blogs are a disruptive technology. Instead of having to generate data by way of surveys or focus groups with whatever artifacts the process introduces, blogs provide direct visibility into customers. Instead of having to connect potentially artificial samples back to the actual market, now you have to filter real market behavior, interpret it, and make sense of it. That presents two challenges to market research functions. First, market research staff have to develop new skills. For that, they would do well to pay attention to Dina. Second, management of market research needs to spend some quality thinking time about what to do with access to this new kind of market data.

The opportunity that blogs introduce into the marketing research equation is to create the opportunity to identify and run multiple micro-experiments in the market. Those that succeed get the resources to scale, those that fail generate some useful data and are quickly shut down. There are challenges, of course, especially given how quickly ideas spread in a connected world, but that should be offset by the speed with which experiments can be identified and run. Worth thinking about."

And i picked this cool term from Preetam Rai's blog - "blogo-pologist" (as in anthro-pologist) in the context of research !  After all blogging is a culture, bloggers form communities, blogs are social with overt and more tacit 'rules' and norms governing them.  And they're dynamic and vibrant eco-systems.

Is netnography what blogo-pologists do ?  Should i put this on my resume :):):)

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