There's a new Guide to Social Media Analysis recently published by Nathan Gilliatt of Social Target, who blogs at http://net-savvy.com/executive/. This guide is hefty, and includes 31 profiles of a wide variety of companies (including Collective Intellect) that offer services related to social media monitoring, analysis and consulting. You can read more about it here and purchase your very own copy here.
I'm heading to two conferences this weekend in the San Francisco area. The first is @ Supernova2007. SuperNova is advertised as:
Business, technology, and social interactions are decentralizing, tearing apart industries with the force of a supernova. Intelligence is moving to the edges, through networked computers, empowered users, fluid digital content, distributed work teams, and powerful communications devices. Business models are under pressure as end-users gain greater control, computing becomes a commodity, and companies collaborate across geographic boundaries. At the same time, new opportunities are emerging through social software, pervasive wireless networking, massively multi-player virtual worlds, and distributed e-commerce, among other trends.
Sounds like fairly heady stuff right? I certainly hope so and will be looking to connect with a few of the thought leaders out there including Paul Kedrosky, Lada Adamic (an advisor for CI), Julie Hanna Farris, Udi Manber, and others. The second is Foo Camp 2007 sponsored by O'reilly. This is an invite only event sent out to thought leaders on the web. One of my heros, Paul Graham, who turned me on to Ruby in his book "hackers and painters" will be there and am greatly looking forward to the dialog. The agenda is worked out by the attendees on Friday evening and everyone literally camps out on the O'Reilly campus at night. Should be very interesting times.
My last company was coined as Business Activity Monitoring or BAM by Gartner, the sages of Information Technology almost a year after we started. The current business that I founded in 2005 could use some naming standards as well. There are a lot of companies out there touching various aspects of this market that label themselves as Buzz Monitoring or WOM (word of mouth) monitoring or Vertical Search or Competitive Intelligence or Media Tracking or Brand Monitoring or Knowledge Management 2.0 or blah blah blah. Driving a standard naming convention removes the veil of market confusion driven by fragmented marketing messages. So, Gartner, Forrester, IDC and others if you are listening let's not wedge this area into one of the existing boxes. Also, this is much bigger than just calling it Buzz Monitoring. Instead, let's call it Media Activity Monitoring (tada, trumpets and such).
Media Activity Monitoring covers: