One of the great things you learn in statistics is about emergent properties in large numbers. The basic idea is that as the number of things you are analyzing–be it people or neurons or stones on a beach–gets bigger and bigger, new properties emerge. These properties are not proportionate in any way to those that would emerge if the number of stones or neurons or people were cut in half. They would disappear altogether, or be diminished by more than half their size. Quite literally, emergent properties begin to happen when the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
This is why when your research people are trying to draw conclusions about markets, they want to have a large sample size. The more people you look at, the more likely that an observable phenomena–like the propensity to buy red clothes around the holidays–is occurring because it can be predicted by another factor rather simply occur by random chance.
The blogosphere is a perfect opportunity to leverage the power of those numbers to get a real handle on exactly what people think of your product. What better focus group than people who already have strong enough opinions on your area of expertise to blog about it? No matter what area you’re in, there’s probably a big enough sample size out there to get started.
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