London Part II of III - Trend-Spotting with BlogPulse

While in London I delivered a presentation at a Pharmaceutical Competitive Intelligence conference. 26 January 2006 | Untying the Distribution Challenge detailed several aspects of how to build a blog-driven market monitoring and early warning system. Based on requests for a copy of the presentation, it was well received. One example worth sharing related to how blogs play a role in interpreting markets.

Intelliseek created BlogPulse, a tool that monitors blogs and allows you to graph trends. One of their "Featured Trends" compares the incidence of the terms Cancer, Heart Attack, and Stroke.

You can see that the Cancer term beats Heart Attack and Stroke 4 to 1. You can also see a dramatic spike in Cancer interest in early August 2005.

Here is the rest of the story. The word cancer is used for many purposes. Diving into the search result on cancer, you will find more than a few results using the term Cancer for non-medical terms. Caltechgirl uses the term politically "to spread the cancer of empire." She is one of many that seem to relate the Iraq war to Cancer.

Diving into the search results clustering around August 9, I can see that the chatter is a result of Peter Jennings losing his battle with cancer and Dana Reeves (wife of Christopher Reeve) beginning her battle with lung cancer.

So what? These blog posts don't provide new information. They do provide interpretations of existing, public, information, which in CI terms is considered secondary source. The graphical view provides insight into the secondary source and, in a way, provides a ready feed and interpretation of what individuals are thinking in the aggregate and at the individual, primary source, level. I will leave the interpretation of those trends to the pharma companies, but will suggest that they can determine when a trend opens up marketing opportunity, warns them to steer clear of certain topics, and helps them identify niche markets.