Blog Monitoring – Managing Perceptions in the Blogosphere

Blogs / Social media has become a major force in the media world. We can see blogs playing many roles. Some roles which seem to be very promising are

a) Knowledge Sharing
b) Changing opinions of people – against individuals, companies and even countries

While sharing was always possible thro’ web pages, finding a relevant blog and reading posts/ following up makes learning quick and effective.

When a blogger finds an issue with your product, he can quickly spread the message and drive your future customers away and make your present customers suspicious.

[This means - I will be able to spread the (obviously real) message that Anna Nagar - Vasantha Bhavan's Idiyappam is far better than Chinthamani Balaji Bhavan’s Idiyappam and in turn change the Idiyappam sales in Balaji Bhavan and Vasantha Bhavan.
Dear Vasantha Bhavan – Wait for some more years (and retain the guy who makes the Idiyappam in your payroll, if your KM practices are not good enough ). ]

People like Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine generate lot of interest on the issues they focus on.

I think any company will want to know what the blogworld is talking about it and its products. An application which helps companies to track the blogosphere will be a must for most of the companies in the days to come.

After some googling, I found that IBM has already released a software in Nov 2005 which they call as Public Image Monitoring Solution (That’s why they are IBM!). This solution gives better insights of the comments about products/companies appearing in blogs by using techniques like text mining.

Cost of the above S/W: For minimum config - 1 Lakh USD + IBM Consulting Fees.
If the consulting fees is included and if the client wants more than a minimum config , it may even reach around One Crore Rupees(How many zeros are in a Crore?) Definitely not affordable for even a Medium size org.

I came across this excellent link which offers many ways to do this by setting up alerts in various sites / accessing many services manually.

An application with a basic crawler/ways to consume the available services and a decent mining will be enough for an SME. There is a scope for developing an application affordable for SMEs and may not have very advanced features IBM offers.[Of course there is a risk that at some point of time Google will say they are releasing the Beta of Google Perception:-)]

I think in the days to come, Application Service Providers / BPOs will offer Perception Monitoring as one of the services.