Comments as market research

Blogs, wikis, communities, etc. are a great way to reach out to customers and to start the "marketing" conversation. Another great feature of these technologies is mining all of the comments to conduct market research.

I have recently been reading a lot of the comments on The Boston Globe's website, in particular, about the proposed tax increases here in Massachusetts. If I were a politician I would be reading the overwhelming critical comments and wonder about my future if I supported the increases. Some articles produce 100's of comments that provide great insight into the issue as well as alternatives to help solve the crisis. These comments may be a politicians nightmare, but they are a market analysts dream.

The current methods of focus groups, surveys and phone interviews are certainly useful, but gathering reliable market intelligence in these ways is time consuming, inconsistent and unreliable. What good is running a survey if you only get 15 responses? It would be so much easier if you could mine comments to see immediate feedback on product concepts, positioning statements or other elements you are trying to test and gather feedback.

Obviously, there are many analytics out there such as Google analytics and others (see a good overview of some tools here). However, these tools appear to only provide tracking data on site visitors, sign ups, etc. I wonder if there is a firm out there that can mine comments and provide an analysis of the content for reliable market intelligence. Anyone know of such a firm?

UPDATE: Just came across a firm called Crimson Hexagon, Crimson Hexagon's VoxTrot listening platform provides companies with actionable insight into consumer opinion of their brand, product, or market. VoxTrot technology can identify opinion from large quantities of text, whether it's an in-house content repository or the vast blogosphere. Pretty cool.