Viriginia Postrel’s latest NY Times article, Getting a Bead on ‘Buzz’, explains what researchers found when they studied what people were saying about new TV shows on various Usenet groups (on-line discussion groups):
First, they discovered that online conversations did help predict which shows would succeed — a somewhat surprising result in itself. Usenet participants are not necessarily typical TV viewers.The Usenet discussions may have directly influenced new shows’ reputations or, perhaps more likely, the online comments may have reflected offline conversations. (Negative comments were relatively rare; three-quarters of the postings in a subsample were either positive or mixed.) In either case, this result suggests that marketers can tap Internet forums to see how their products might fare.
Second, the study found that how much buzz a show gets does not predict much about how it will do. Who’s talking matters more than how much they talk.
This result runs contrary to common marketing practice. Most buzz trackers, from marketing scholars to public relations firms to the Yahoo Buzz Index, simply measure how much people talk about something. More word of mouth, they assume, will spread the news faster than less.
That sounds logical. But it turns out that volume by itself did not predict future sales — or, in this case, future ratings — all that well. Volume mostly reflected past ratings.
Another factor did, however, predict whether a show’s audience would build over time: dispersion, or “entropy.” This technical measure essentially picks up how widespread the discussion is. Are comments concentrated in a few specialized groups, or does the show interest people in many different groups? Word of mouth spreads more quickly when it begins in different places or among people with different interests.