A new Belgian company is using search, blog and discussion forum data to track fast changing cultural trends.

Measuring the Zeitgeist

John Battelle opens his latest book, The Search, with the story about how he stumbled upon the first edition of Google Zeitgeist, Google’s list of the current most popular search phrases.

”By watching and counting popular search terms, Zeitgeist provides a fascinating summary of what our culture is looking for or find interesting, and, conversely, what was once popular that is losing cultural momentum.”

He then goes on to tell the interesting story of Internet searching.

But wait a minute! What if someone kept the focus on the trend part of the quote above? What if someone took the Zeitgeist concept one step further and decided to use search results as a tool for analyzing the public interest in any topic of relevance?

Following the online buzz

This is exactly what the Belgian company Attentio is doing.

Cofounder Simon McDermott describes it this way in his blog:

“We look at buzz and chatter that originates through the world wide web and other digital media and show our clients the impact of marketing events on levels of interest generated by consumer generated media (blogs, chat groups, discussion forums etc.).

“It is quite an exciting area because for the first time, you can really follow word-of-mouth as it grows and diminishes!!!”

Using blogs for trend research

For companies trying to survive in a world with constantly shifting fashions and trends, this could be very useful information, indeed. The fashion industry already hires people from the club-going “in crowd”, trying to get a forewarning of next year’s craze.

Furthermore, most companies make use of press clippings and news surveillance to measure the effects of their PR campaigns.

Attentio is trying to do something similar online, by analyzing the chatter in weblogs and discussion forums.

The blog- and discussion sphere is now so large that it can be used to get a rough picture of the recent trends. Moreover, these sites are often updated daily, meaning that any analysis based on the content of such sites could be fresh as well.

The company

The idea came from the entrepreneur Per Siljubergsåsen, the principal founder of the Norwegian shopping search engine Zoomit (now part of Yahoo’s Kelkoo).

The two met at the MBA programme of Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, which also explains why an Irish-Belgian and a Norwegian have decided to place their company in Brussels. It also help that the Brussels region is supporting the company with seed money.

The company already delivers data to selected European companies, particularly as regards analysis on the effects of ad campaigns and promotion. These companies need to know whether their message gets through, and Attentio is doing their best to tell them.

“Customers like Intel and Johnson & Johnson see potential in our market intelligence application as a way of measuring marketing return-on-investment. A profound challenge for today’s marketers is measuring the effectiveness of their expensive campaigns,” says Per Siljubergsåsen.

At the moment Attentio is delivering their data and their analysis through weekly or monthly reports sent to the customers. They are, however, planning an online reporting system.

According to Simon McDermott, the goal is to get thousands of clients, maybe also from outside the company sphere.

NGOs may for instance be interested in following public opinion on themes close to their hearts. Political parties and organizations could use such a tool to get an indication of what “people” are talking about right now.

The sources

We asked McDermott where the company gets its data. He says that they collect some of it themselves by spidering blogs and discussion forums.

Moreover, they are using metasearch data, i.e. search results from search facilities that gather listings from several search engines at once, including blog search engines, news aggregators and domain specific search engines.

Attentio is trying to get the large search engine companies onboard, and is willing to pay for access to their indexes. So far, however, Google and Yahoo! have not seen the potential of this new market.

The spam problem

Recently search engine spammers have started to use blogs to generate search engine fodder, i.e. pages that will be listed by the search engines and that can be used to sell products or ads.

There is even software out there that automatically signs up the users to online blog tools, harvest (i.e. steals) content from web directories and sites, and generates blog entries.

Even if this noise can be said to reflect current trends, Attentio is doing their best to filter it out.

The future

What Attentio is doing may herald a new area of search engine utilization, where search engines are not only used to find information, but to gather insight into the interests of communities by proxy of web content producers.

The question is when the search engines themselves will wake up and see this opportunity.

Attentio
“You learn the difference between class discussions and business reality, Simon McDermott on the International Full-time MBA Programme” Orator The House Magazine of Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School (PDF)