Company announces product that analyzes consumer conversation to predict future trends.

There's been a lot of talk about marketers monitoring blogs and chat rooms to keep abreast of what's being said about their brands. But is it possible to tap these consumer-generated publications for future trends? Jonathan Carson believes it is.

Carson is president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, a word-of-mouth research and planning firm. This week at Ad:Tech in New York, Carson will be introducing NutritionBuzz, a product designed to deliver insights for the health, food and nutrition industries.

NutritionBuzz uses BuzzMetrics' Discussion Minor technology, which identifies the most influential consumers in an industry, tracks their unaided conversations over time and across numerous public discussion channels, such as blogs, list-serves, chat rooms and product feedback sites, then analyzes their conversations.

In this case, the company followed the conversations of 400 people within six categories: dieters; conscientious consumers (such as vegetarians); heads of household (stay-at-home moms with several kids); fitness buffs; nutrition experts and dietitians, and diabetics.

BuzzMetrics analyzed the key individuals' conversations with more than 160,000 other consumers across four million online posts in the last several quarters. Chatter was analyzed across hundreds of pre-determined keywords and phrases central to the food industry, including buzzwords, diets, brands, products, food categories and ingredients.

Carson found that these influencers’ conversations offer tremendous predictive value. "The panel demonstrated unique behaviors that could have predicted several major issues that recently blindsided food companies, including the consumer trans fat backlash and various low-carb diet trends," says Carson.

With four major food companies as clients, BuzzMetrics is now tracking these same individuals to help these companies prepare before new trends materialize.

"There's been a paradigm shift recently for food companies," says Carson. "They've always relied on staff scientists for information on what's to come. But the scientists told them the low-carb craze was a fad, junk science and would never hit main stream, so they were blindsided when it did. Now food companies can spot future trends by tracking consumers also."

Which has tremendous implications for marketers. Knowing what consumers' issues are can affect products released (Oreo introduced new products as a result of trans fat chatter), packaging, and marketing messages (think about how many companies are now advertising that their products are low-carb).

Of course this isn't limited to the food industry. Carson says that any industry where there's a core of individuals out there talking is ripe for analyzing future trends. His company has listened to consumers about mobile products, for example, and those setting up wired homes.

This type of forecasting is a new element to the buzz measurement BuzzMetrics and others like BzzAgent and PlanetFeedback have been doing for a while now. In October, for example, BuzzMetrics analyzed thousands of messages for Merck posted by consumers offering suggestions, opinions and concerns about the cholesterol drug Zocor's clinical trial results.

The firms involved with measuring word of mouth recently formed WOMMA (the Word of Mouth Marketing Assocation), an industry group dedicated to building a strong discipline around word-of-mouth marketing. A core goal of WOMMA is to help grow the acceptance and legitimacy of word-of-mouth as part of the broader marketing mix.

Carson is speaking on this topic today at Ad:Tech, and WOMMA will be making its formal debut.