Bronte Media

Hockey sticks might make powerpoint candy and analyzing online behavior and opinion might offer a glimpse of marketing nirvana but just ask Howard Dean about drawing conclusions from mis-sampled ‘Internet buzz’.

It’s important to note that still only 8% of Internet users author a blog.

Monitoring blogs and message boards is usually the primary methodology of agencies interested in measuring buzz but that’s mainly because it’s technically possible to do so, rather than the best way.

I’ve long believed the search queries of the major engines is a much more reliable indicator of intent, as practically everyone who has an Internet connection uses them. Yahoo and, if I remember correctly, Altavista, used to ride a gravy train of press mentions on the back of them. Recently launched Google trends, a black box graph with no disclosed y-axis shows generally that interest in Snakes on a plane fell off pretty precipitously in about June. The shock that it did so poorly on its opening weekend is no doubt a contributor to the recent up-tick.

Does the Internet suck as a predictor of success? I don’t think so. Blogs themselves do. But other behavior, like search data to size the scope, combined with blogs and Myspace and message boards to judge the opinion don’t suck. Indeed movies, where the demographics skew heavily to 18-34 year olds, probably have the lowest margin of error among categories. Lowest obviously being very relative.

One thought in my mind was with the buzz building a crescendo, why wasn’t the movie released on this wave of euphoria? Why wait another 3 months in this ADD-soaked world? An analog to the print-media-world-will-never-again-break-a-story phenomena?

Either way Mr Card, your street cred is shot