According to Louise Story, “consumer brand companies have long wished they could find a way to eavesdrop (legally) on customer conversations. Marketers can easily read Internet blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites, but what people say over coffee or across their cubicle remains largely unknown.” Conversation over coffee or across the cubicle isn’t special and here’s why…

After doing word-of-mouth marketing and brand intelligence — and having spent over ten years invested in online communities — I can say that online conversation is as intimate, honest, and revealing as it may be “over coffee or across the cubicle.”

In fact, I would posit that online conversation, in general, is more authentic because either anonymity is possible or people have a false sense of security when they are in bunny slippers and jammies all comfy at their computer.

Online, people feel safe and are relaxed and spending some time with people they are really intimate with — coworkers and and coffee dates are never that close, really.

Leveraging the Intelligence, market research, and collected polling data culled from “Internet blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites” is almost like researching chimps and apes from the point of view of Jane Goodall — close, without barriers and walls, accepted in the tribe — instead of in a nature reserve, a zoo, or on the dissection table.

Want me to paint my analogy against the wall, well, check this out:

My Online Brand Intelligence Analogy

Let’s consider the chimpanzee. There are several ways to learn more about the chimpanzee: through dissection, in captivity, and in the wild.

Although dissecting the chimpanzee to see how the physiology works is essential as a form of training and education, dissection doesn’t help with knowing the behavior of the chimpanzee.

You might be able to make assumptions about how intelligent it is or what it eats, but in terms of behavioral studies, its irrelevant. This is similar to posthumous studies of market data — there is no life there, only corpse.

Polling and focus groups are like observing the behavior of the chimpanzee in capacity — you have a living, breathing, chimpanzee, but you have one that is under stress, duress, and has been partially acclimatized to appeasing its handlers — it wants to keep safe, it wants to be fed, and it wants to get out — so observing chimpanzee behavior in captivity is like observing consumer or market behavior in focus groups — you have real-live response, but you have the response of something that is beholden to you, that is wondering what’s in it for me — you have corrupted behavioral data.

If you want to really know the true behavior of the chimpanzee, you need to observe it in the wild. And to get the best concept of the behavior of the chimpanzee, you need to become — or at least be accepted as — a chimpanzee.

Jane Goodall was a pioneer in the behavioral study of primates because she was accepted over time into the community of chimps. Online brand intelligence can study and report on brand and consumer behavior in the wild, in the wilderness.

Where behavior is true, honest, and living.