I decided to supplement the work we’ve been doing with the Brand Passion Index to highlight ConsumerBase‘s ability to mine social media sources for brand-specific consumer ideas and verbatim. My brand of choice for this particular ConsumerBase adventure? The very recognizable, and apparently all-purpose, household name, Alka Seltzer.

Using ConsumerBase to research brands and the chatter about them, I have access to an enormous amount of information, some of it very surprising and unexpected—who’d have guessed that Snickers pair well with Madeira wine (see my earlier blog post for more inspiring wine matches)?! While a few of the results are just fun and quirky, many others can prove to be a real “aha!” moment for researchers and brand managers—genuinely useful insights that can lead to new products, applications or markets.

To demonstrate the power of ConsumerBase to read and understand millions of sites, postings, tweets, etc. on the Web and unearth some real gems, we put it to work on Alka Seltzer.

Our search revealed a range of uses, functions and thoughts on Alka Seltzer within the social media universe:

• Use Alka-Seltzer instead of baking powder to make a cherry cobbler qualify as a healthy snack.
• Children with any type of flu symptoms should not take aspirin or any medicine containing aspirin such as Pepto-Bismol and Alka-Seltzer because it could lead to Reyes Syndrome.
• Alka-Seltzer is cheaper and safer than most proprietary cleaning products, and is sometimes already in the home.
• My husband won’t even take Alka-Seltzer because “braving” the symptoms becomes a testosterone-soaked badge of manliness, like “walking it off” or “taking it like a man.”
• I just found out I am pregnant and the heartburn is excruciating but I can’t take Alka-Seltzer or anything with aspirin. Help!

So what do you think? Alka Seltzer as both a cleaning product AND a healthy baking alternative? Let me know your thoughts – and what brands you’d like some insight on next time.