Good article in the New York Times today about Nielsen BuzzMetrics that has a couple of points I want to call out.

"……In a report published in September, Peter Kim, a Forrester analyst, said that brand monitoring appears poised for enormous expansion as companies shift priorities and resources in the $12-billion-a-year market research business. Emily Riley, an advertising analyst at Jupiter, predicts that companies will double spending on brand monitoring in 2007."

(Above) A “brand association map” drawn from online commentary about Nike, as compiled by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

"…..At the same time, new surveys show that 90 percent of consumers trust word-of-mouth suggestions, and that some make purchases based on such guidance. “Consumer-created content is still new enough that it’s much more influential at driving brand awareness than driving purchases,” said Ms. Riley, the Jupiter analyst. “People who read about something on a blog will generally do some further research, either by asking friends or through a search engine, for example, before forming their opinion,” she said. "

Sounds to be that bloggers and blog advertising is useful to get people interested in doing more research about your company - and if you have research tools on your site and make them attractive and easy to use - people will come and use them - and make their own decisions about weather to purchase anything or not.

BuzzMetrics is not cheap ( I knew that already - but the general pricing is revealed here):

"…..THIS service costs from $80,000 to $500,000, depending on how many of the client’s employees will use the database and search engine, the number of brands and competitors covered and the specific information sought. The Cincinnati office is led by former executives of two companies founded here during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. "

There's nothing new in this article except spending of brand measuring is set to double next year - but it's still such a small market and the products fairly expensive - I think it will take another 18 months for products like BuzzMetrics to really take off and make handsome profits. 

For one thing -  the price needs to come down - it's too expensive for most companies to afford and there's no doubt in my mind - the price will come down because there's more competitors right around the corner - and Google might become one of them - that will bring the price down REAL FAST.   

In fact, the thing BuzzMetrics ought to worry about ….. what if Google gets into the Brand Measuring market and makes the service FREE!  They could do that…they've done it with Analytics and they're doing it with a lot of other services.  This will certainly be an interesting topic to track in the near future as the race to brand measurement heats up.