Eavesdropping to discover what online consumers want

When it comes to finding out what consumers want from an e-commerce site experience and product selection, the best place to go, of course, is the horse’s mouth. But rather than performing surveys or hosting customer forums, some newer technology on the scene is enabling e-retailers to discover what the horse’s mouth is saying without the horse knowing.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics, for example, is a research firm that specializes in measuring consumer-generated media. Its technology and services interpret unstructured, Internet-based text on blogs, social networks and product reviews to provide data on consumer sentiment related to products and brands.

Text-mining software and web search spiders crawl around the Internet picking up tidbits of information on a product or brand. The firm then applies analytics and artificial intelligence applications to what is a vast amount of data to derive conclusions based solely on what consumers are saying—or in this case, writing.

“It’s one thing to have questions to a detailed survey answered by a panel of 1,000 consumers, but it’s a very different thing when you find and make sense of the opinions of 3 million people,” says Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing at Nielsen BuzzMetrics. “There are a lot of tools out there on the market, and there is no shortage of data. The challenge now for e-retailers is making sense of the information.”