Forbes : Blogs offer marketers competitive intelligence

Large law firms are always looking for information to grow their business. The blogosphere, which I would guess 99.99% of law firms never look to for competitive intelligence, is a gold mine for such information.

Forbes reports:

For those in marketing, blogs can offer a real-time solution to spotting trends. BlogPulse, in our Meta Blogs category, allows you to track the percent of all blogs mentioning key phrases over a six-month period. I compared Sirius satellite radio to competitor XM (nasdaq: XMSR – news – people ), and Sirius (nasdaq: SIRI – news – people ), future home to Howard Stern, had more than twice the blog buzz, despite the fact that it has less than half as many subscribers.

LexBlog teaches its clients how to easily access and monitor such information so it can be done in minutes a day. Many clients use such information for blog publishing to grow their business. The smart ones will also be using information gleaned from the blogosphere for making strategic business decisions.