Nielsen Online launches BuzzMetrics service in New Zealand

Nielsen Online has today launched its highly anticipated Nielsen Online BuzzMetrics service which will provide New Zealand’s first measurement and analysis of online consumer-generated media (CGM) on Internet forums such as message boards and blogs.

The BuzzMetrics service has proven a major success in the USA and Nielsen Online is now expanding its BuzzMetrics footprint around the world with recent launches including the UK, Germany, Australia and now New Zealand. The service will, for the first time ever, offer New Zealand companies the ability to track online discussion around their brands as well as track, analyse and measure CGM trends, issues, threats, opinion shifts, predictions, and other market-shaping forces.

On a local level, the BuzzMetrics service is tracking 3,972 unique New Zealand blogs, and since tracking began earlier in 2008 more than 15 million message board comments have already been picked up from over 650,000 unique individuals across the Pacific region. Globally, BuzzMetrics tracks more than 78 million blogs and 100,000 communities, with over three billion comments in its database.

“The Internet offers crucial opportunities for businesses to influence consumer perceptions of brands, products and services,” says Stuart Pike, Director, Industry Solutions, Nielsen Online “We are excited to launch this new offering to the New Zealand marketplace and, with the introduction of the BuzzMetrics service, we are prepared to focus with even more intensity on delivering the complete picture of online consumer activity and behaviour to our clients.”

Pike notes that the launch of the BuzzMetrics service presents a timely offering to New Zealand organisations given the growth of CGM in New Zealand and the increasing importance being placed on consumers’ opinions. Pike cites a recent Nielsen survey on the attitudes of online consumers around the world towards advertising which showed the most trusted form of advertising was ‘recommendations from other consumers’, cited by 78 percent of respondents. Furthermore, the third most trusted form of advertising (behind adverts in newspapers at 63%) was ‘consumer opinions posted online’, being trusted by 61 percent. [Source: Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey, 2007.]

“What consumers are saying about a brand can have more impact than all of the marketing activities behind that brand,” observes Pike. “It is vital that companies understand what is being said about their brands and the sentiment behind it – the ‘buzz’ – in order to keep pace with consumers’ attitudes and needs.”