Blog Monitoring and Analytics.

Ran into a firm called "Collective Intellect" during RSA week over at the Ziff-Davis briefing. Their product, mediaintellect, was different enough of an offering that I thought I would make a comment on this concept. While not security oriented, they are Blog oriented. They advertise "Real-time actionable insight from social media monitoring and analysis"€.  Basically they monitor blog traffic and content for market research and feedback. Good product? Bad Product? I have no idea.   The people I met from the company were nice enough, but there is something about 'predictive marketing intelligence' for social media that makes me uneasy.

A Rothman-esque 'So What?' is in order here. What are they going to do for you? Are they going to tell you if your corporate blog sucks? Or they can tell you your marketing campaign sucked because some bloggers they read said so? Is there really a way to do this based upon traffic and key words? Can you really quantify brand influencer's? And you want this service why? I got to wonder if this an angle for PR & Analysts to re-insert themselves into the process now that their opinions are not interesting enough to generate their own readership. Blogs Analysts: can they provide value or are they simply parasitic?

Clearly Blogs have upset the PR apple-cart.  And I can see how mediaintellect would to fill a need for PR and Marketing departments to make some sense of Blogs and use them to their benefit.  But I read Blogs that are decidedly non-corporate for the reason that I don't want to wade through the endless controlled-sanitized-non-informative-corporate-attorney-approved marketing spin that most companies pump out. It is marketing influence I am trying to get away from, and this tool/service provides those organizations a way to monitor and affect the very medium I use to avoid their influence.  ~Shiver~  Maybe I am overly sensitive and this is simply a natural evolutionary step based upon the fundamental change in media and broadening of audience, such as Black Hat changing to look more and more like the RSA conference with each passing year.