The Guardian reports that corporations are starting to notice how blogs affect their brands:
The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.
Olympus, for example, has devised a new marketing strategy to embrace the medium. Whenever a new camera is approaching its launch, details are passed on to prominent blogs, a spokesman reveals, because the sites are crucial to getting interest ahead of the launch as well as getting early feedback on what the public thinks of the new model. [N.B.: I wish I could get some wineries doing that for me!] ...
The classic case of what can happen if you do not tune in to the blogger came with a flood of bad publicity for Maytag, a top-end washing machine manufacturer in America. Complaints about one of its models not emptying properly, and so smelling out kitchens, had been appearing on many blogs until they finally hit the site of Bob Vila, presenter of a popular property show called This Old House. It resulted in national press coverage of a problem that Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, believes could have been nipped in the bud, had the company been alert to the power of the blog.
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