Interesting piece from Joseph Mann, looking at the contemporary power of WOM. His figures on the increasing influence of WOM are spot on - with over 90% of consumers trusting WOM more than any other information source.  He's even going to trial his own WOM analysis tool based on some free to air search engines like boardreader and blogpulse.

I had a little play with each tool and both, for different reasons, can make it somewhat tricky to effectively analyse WOM. I used NIKE as a search term in both and this is what came back.

On blogpulse I got back 98971 results. The most recent results were from today - so top marks for timeliness. However, making sense of the volume of opinion would be daunting. Even by reading the top 100 you are only tapping into 1/1000 of the resultset. Is it prudent to base an assertion on this? Statisticians would argue not. And remember, things get worse when you start to research an industry or include competitor audits.

Boardreader is really pretty useless. Searching for NIKE brings back results from ages ago - November last year were the most recent results. Coupled with this, the other potential pitfall of using a forum search tool like this (same can apply to Google as well) is that some forums block spiders. This means that opinions in some huge and influential online communities never appear on search engine lists.

As well as the above limitations on the wannabe WOM analyst, there's another, more important factor to bear in mind. The other missing piece of the jigsaw is context - in other words a detailed undersanding of where conversations are taking place and who is getting involved. Even though a newbee blogger may have written a scathing critique of Nike's product quality, who's listening? This determines the overall impact of the negative coverage. The same message in a large international community may have hit a 100,000 people in one day. Then it really matters.