How do researchers use participant blogs and blog mining to gain customer insights?

With the use of participant blogs, researchers recruit subjects to blog about a specific topic on a regular basis over the course of a period of time. For example, subjects might blog about family dinner preparation over the course of several weeks or even months. In some instances, participants are able to see and comment on the blog posts of other participants. At the end of the research period, researchers code the resulting data to identify key topics and themes. In contrast, blog mining techniques listen to customers, rather than ask them questions. Blog mining involves using automated tools to find and extract information found on the web about a brand, and then using specialized software to analyze and make sense of these large amounts of text-based data.