Blogs Growing Into The Ultimate Focus Group (AdWeek.com)

In promoting a new calling plan this spring, U.S. Cellular wanted to reach college-age consumers and speak to them on their own terms. While normally that might mean convening focus groups, commissioning surveys and poring over market-research reports, the Chicago company's youth-focused ad agency, G Whiz, decided instead to listen to what their potential customers were saying on their blogs.

Through Umbria Communications, a market-research firm in Boulder, Colo., G Whiz was able to eavesdrop on blog conversations. Umbria used linguistic analysis to ferret out U.S. Cellular's target group and collect cell-related blog postings. "We were more of a fly on the wall," said Bethany Harris, svp and director of client services at G Whiz in New York, a WPP Group shop.

The feedback showed Harris just how attached young adults are to their phones. They complained about unwanted calls that drag on and on, eating into their minutes and forcing them to turn off their phones toward the end of their billing cycles, leaving them feeling isolated from their friends. G Whiz quickly crafted four TV spots that played off those themes. In one, a man in his early 20s has to listen to one of his buddies who calls from a concert and holds the phone up for him to hear the music. On-screen copy reads: "With U.S. Cellular, you get Unlimited Call Me minutes. So even when people waste your time, they don't waste your money."

"We find Web logs are a very rich source [of market intelligence], because people don't just go to talk about a recent movie, they go to talk about their lives," said Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Umbria, which was founded in March 2004 and counts Sprint and Electronic Arts among its clients.  [Yahoo! News: Technology News]

Reminds me of a comment Jim McGee made after we met in Boston last year :

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.

Some other tools I'm exploring for market research :

• News aggregators
• Tags like with Flick'r and Del.icio.us
• Skype, now vskype too ! and IM
• Podcasting, Skypecasting