Watch The Blogs! (says Jupiter)

Former Jupiter colleague Julian Smith just published a report on the need for brands to watch the blogs. Mr. Smith says:

"Organisations ignoring community-based influencers face the danger of small-scale disgruntlement being exposed to a mass audience, resulting in a disproportionately large-scale public relations problem that can directly affect their bottom line."

Clear, that.

I don't what's inside the new report, but I know that when I was at Jupiter, we looked at this a good amount. One of the things we discovered is that, while many companies claim to listen to consumer voices online, it tends to be done in a sort of ad-hoc manner. That is, one person maybe has an RSS feed. Or potentially the agency does the occasional search.

The real opportunity, of course, is to solidify this practice. With offerings from companies like BuzzMetrics, Brandimensions or Umbria, there's no real reason not to move past just checking in to having an actual data feed of this info.