Market research firm Umbria has introduced a service that connects marketers with individual bloggers who are discussing marketers' products, and it's marketing the service as ideal for seeding a community of supporters for word-of-mouth campaigns; testing of concepts, positioning and new product ideas or line extensions; and gathering competitive perceptions and insight.

Umbria Connect pulls information from publicly available sources to provide URL source lists for companies to reach out to individual bloggers writing about specific topics, writes BtoB (via MediaBuyerPlanner). Umbria's lists are sold in blocks of 25 or by subscription.

Marketers can locate bloggers by gender and age that are already engaged in discussions of marketers' products (and those of their competition), according to Umbria.

Umbria Connect provides a monthly or quarterly list of bloggers' URLs based on selects for age and gender, and those that spoke either positively or negatively about the identified topic of interest.