My recent blog post, Listening to the Loudest Voices, may have been a bit too negative. In the post, I cited research from CARMA International, a media analysis firm, about how bloggers see big retailers.

I focused on only one side of the study—the negative retail commentary—and ignored the genuinely positive reactions some bloggers have to some of these big retailers. Chris Scully, the author of the study and a vice president at CARMA wrote me an e-mail pointing out where his findings disagreed with my conclusions. Here’s what he wrote:

Hi Harry,

Your post that discussed CARMA’s recent study on CGM coverage of leading retailers just came to my attention. I’m not sure that I agree with several of your conclusions, based on the research we did for the study.

In particular, we did not find it to be the case that “The lesson here is that while bloggers can tell you what you’re doing wrong, they don’t often reward you for what you’re doing right”. Costco’s performance in our study demonstrated that bloggers sometimes write frequently about what a company is doing right, as did the showing of the other wholesale and club stores. In fact, bloggers frequently praised Costco for the quality of their product and service offering and for their great prices.

I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that “when consumers are pleased with a company’s ads, logos, branding, customer service, community interaction and financial performance—they probably aren’t rushing to their computers to blog about it.” Earlier this week, we released another study based on our research of the blog coverage of the retail industry that contradicts this claim. Our research showed that:

1. Bloggers wrote favorable posts about the retailers more often than they wrote unfavorable ones by a considerable margin;

2. Bloggers wrote great posts about the retailers – or what we call intensely favorable posts – just as often as they wrote scathing posts – what we call intensely unfavorable posts -- about the retailers.

Chris Scully

Vice President

CARMA International

Here's a link to the new study Chris mentioned: The Negativity of the Blogosphere

And here, again, is a link to a PDF of the original study results: Retail Sector CGM Study