Umbria Connects Marketers with Bloggers Through New Research Offering

	December 18, 2006 | Umbria Connects Marketers with Bloggers Through New Research Offering
	Umbria Connect™ enables marketers to identify and connect with industry bloggers
	Boulder, Col. – (December 18, 2006) – As the blogosphere continues to grow in importance to marketers, outreach tools have failed to keep pace. Umbria Inc., a market intelligence company that specializes in blog research and consumer generated media (CGM) for market insight, today released Umbria Connect™, a service that provides URL source lists to companies eager to connect with individual bloggers who are passionately blogging on topics of high interest.   Umbria Connect gathers input from publicly available CGM sources to locate individual bloggers writing about topics or themes of interest to marketers. Umbria then sells the blog URLs in blocks of 25 on a subscription basis – with either monthly or quarterly updates – to help marketers engage with this important and constantly evolving audience. Clients can use Umbria Connect to: Seed a community of passionate supporters for: Product/feature attitudes and usage trends Word-of-mouth campaigns Test marketing and advertising concepts and positioning Test receptivity and feedback to product ideas, new applications, and/or product line extensions Build custom marketing panels that provide objective feedback Gather information on competitive perceptions and insight “Umbria Connect is a natural extension of our blogosphere segmentation capabilities,” said Janet Eden-Harris, CEO, Umbria Inc. “This new offering enables us to support our clients close the loop on the blogosphere research and put the analysis to work in their individual outreach campaigns.” Several of Umbria’s clients across various market segments have had exclusive access to Umbria Connect over the past several months, and now Umbria is offering this data to any interested organizations. More information can be found on Umbria’s Web site at http://www.umbrialistens.com/products/connect.php. . ABOUT UMBRIA Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes the unaided opinions, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the online world (comprised of blogs, message boards, Usenet, product review sites, etc.) and distills it into actionable insights about companies, brands, products, people and issues. Umbria analyzes voices of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion, offering in-depth insights for some of the world's leading brands, including Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, Wild Oats and many others. For more information on Umbria, please visit www.umbrialistens.com.