Qualitative Research in the 21st Century
Listening instead of asking
How blogs provide a new way to better understand market trends
François Laurent and Alain Beauvieux
Abstract
About 70 million blogs have been created worldwide with around 9 million of these being created in France, the genre is referred to as the “Blogosphere”. The more influential blogs are from professionals. However, it is noted that the sixth most popular Blog in France is from a housewife who publishes cooking recipes.
In addition, while most of the blogs are from the “long trail” and usually agreed as being generated by people who, individually, have no particularly large influence, the huge number of their sum total gives them a real authority when considered as a whole.
Only basic tools are available to investigate the “Blogosphere”: search engines from Google and Technorati for instance have great difficulty in accurately indexing and representing the content held within the “long trail”. In their indexing processes they also include many general news, press, media and private company sites as being blogs. In addition no analytical functions are offered in order that the contents of these millions and millions of pages can really be understood.
An extraordinary new field of investigation is offered by the Blogosphere as millions of instances of electronic data can be processed by software programs directly. This paper will explain how to study what is said on Blogs thank to two kinds of complementary tools: the first one to access the sources and to collect any relevant information from the blogs, comprehensively and continuously; the second one to analyse this collected information, and in particular, carrying out some semantic analysis.
François Laurent
ADETEM, France
After 8 years as “Consumer Insight and Prospective Marketing Manager” in Thomson Group (Consumer Electronics), François founded ConsumerIn-sight in January 2007 with the goal of adapting marketing and research to the new Empowered Consumer born with Internet and Web 2.0.
François is Chairman of Adetem (National Association for Marketing), member of the scientific committee of Irep (National Association for Ad-vertising) and Doctor in semiotics.
He wrote several books dedicated to market research; “La grande muta-tion des marques high tech” was distinguished l’Académie des Sciences Commerciales in 2006.
His blog is http://www.marketingisdead.net
Alain Beauvieux
AMI Software, France
Alain Beauvieux is the CEO of AMI Software and is responsible for directing all commercial and marketing activities for the company and chairs the Board of Directors. Alain began his career at IBM where he spent 10 years and occupied several positions, in particular, directing a team of engineers specialised in the development, sales and marketing of software for speech processing and translation. He was subsequently promoted to "Marketing Director for Speech Products" for the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to joining GoAlbert Alain spent two years as Sales and Marketing Director for LexiQuest France and was previously with IôDP, a start-up specialising in Medical imagery. Alain has a doctorate in Data Processing, with thesis on Artificial Intelligence, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University. He has studied at several management schools and the IBM school of commercial development.
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