Blog Hype is Over and Blogs as Core Tool Continue

I received an email survey today about the state of corporate blogging. (It was a bit more interesting for me because it is commissioned by one of our competitors.)

The hypotheses behind the survey seems to be that the hype around blogs has died down and now it's time for corporations to see them as part of their core communication strategy.

Questions also focused on what's next for corporations to follow in the world of social monitoring: online communities? second life? video blogs?

Facebook Becoming a Platform for Consumer Discontent

I have to give props to eagle-eyed Down Under colleague Lorraine Worley on this one. But it's a great example of new media impacting a corporation so I have to share.

Recently some students in England successfully used Facebook to take on HSBC, focusing their anger on a specific action taken by the banking giant -- its reversal of a decision to do away with interest-free overdrafts for recent college graduates.

Using Facebook's "groups" tool more than 6,000 students threatened a boycott, which seemed to work, because HSBC just decided to change course in their favor. The bank says it now wont be chargning studetns for overdrafts and would be refunding recent interest charges.

This is another great example of social networking sites being used to focus protests on niche decisions. This feels conceptually related to the concept of micro-trends.

We're done. Everyone who could possibly grasp it, now knows what a blog is.

It would seem that 80% of Americans now know what blogs are, according to WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), siting recent research from Marketing Daily and Synovate. Which, apparently, is the same percentage of Americans who can find the United States on a map, according to Aimee Teegarden.

I think this is not likely a coincidence but rather clearly means blogs have the largest mindshare possible. What chance do we have to reach that last 20%.

“Enhanced Speed Reading”

A colleague of mine, Lou Paglia, has a post about a genre of text mining / text analytics tools. I think of them as personal text mining applications. Greg Merkle calls them "enhanced speed reading" tools. These are things like Concept Q Pro, Concorder Pro and DEVONagent. I haven't tried any of them yet but will have to put that on my list.

Social Media analysis space dissected

I was told by a colleague about this very comprehensive summary of the Social Media analysis space, which was recently released by Apex, N.C.-based Social Target LLC. The company is run by Nathan Gilliatt who has a blog over at http://net-savvy.com/executive/

Dow Jones (vis a vis Factiva Insight) is covered along with 30 other companies. The report (which isn't free, btw) provides analysis of the social media space, comparing and contrasting them. Here's the list of companies included:

Attentio
Biz360
BrandIntel
BurrellesLuce
BuzzLogic
CIC
Collective Intellect
ComMetric
Converseon
CoreX Technologies
CustomScoop
CyberAlert
Digital Influence Group
Dow Jones (Factiva)
Ethority/Buzzcentric
Integrasco
Kaava
Market Sentinel
Millward Brown Precis
MotiveQuest
NetMap Analytics
New Media Strategies
Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Onalytica
Radian6
RTGI
Scanblog
TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony
Umbria
Visible Technologies
Waggener Edstrom

This gives a good sense of how active this sector is. There's a lot of interest among large companies to measure their footprint on the Web and this list shows there is no shortage of companies stepping up to the plate. Many of them are very small (and therefore out of necessity, specialized) though, and only a few offer comprehensive features and even a smaller number offer comprehensive content to go with them.