On MediaPost Cory Treffiletti comes up with an interesting idea: to use search engines tools to measure the buzz generated by advertising campaigns. The idea sounds extremely interesting, since it proposes a quick mean to measure brand awareness and intent. Basically Cory says that it will be cool to measure the buzz by getting numbers from Yahoo! and Google on how many times a brand name or any other relevant word is search in a given period of time
On the forum related to the entry a lot of marketers appear to be enthusiastic about it. I share the interest for this idea but I also have some doubts concerning the actual relevance of this kind of measurement. You don't get any information about users' demographics, therefore you can't be sure you actually generated the buzz in the right target audience.