If you haven’t read PRWeek’s annual measurement feature (reg req’d) by Erica Iacono, it’s worth checking out. She talks about the movement of PR toward embracing social media measurement and integrating it with traditional media measurement. She also emphasizes a growing understanding that market influencers could be journalists, analysts, bloggers or some combination of those things.The article also features a profile on Sun Microsystems, a Biz360 client. It outlines their integrated measurement strategy that includes domestic, global and social media analysis. This approach to understanding their market has lead to a change in the way they announce products:

Working with Biz360, the company has segmented the top 300 bloggers that it considers to be individuals that can ‘move the market.’ Sun tracks them on a monthly basis as far as what announcements they pick up and what issues are important to them.

This measurement strategy has impacted the company’s outreach to the community. When it came time to announce the launch of Solaris, a new operating system on the Open Source platform, the PR team made the decision to launch it into the blogosphere first.

Erica also references the biggest measurement story from last year, which focused on how P&G had discovered through market mix modeling (MMM) that PR had the highest ROI among the marketing disciplines in four out of the six brands it tested. David Rockland of Ketchum predicts that MMM will soon be the standard for measuring “quick sale, non-durable consumer goods.”

With increasingly sophisticated measurement and budgets on the rise, I think we’ll be hearing more about placing PR results in a larger business context.

We’re launching MarketIQ today to fill a gap we’ve been seeing in marketing blogs. We find plenty of surveys, stats and commentary on the changing media landscape and its impact on marketers. What we see less often are data-driven examples of the changes taking place.

We’ll contribute to the conversation primarily through market analysis on current events, work that we’ve done with our clients, and other interesting examples we run across. From these discussions, we hope that strategies for leveraging social media and new perspectives on age-old marketing issues will emerge.

That said, we won’t be able to resist sharing interesting research, our own commentary or the occasional update on our company, so expect some of those posts as well.

As our founder, You Mon Tsang, always says – we’re helping marketers balance the art with science. We’ll supply the science and our perspective. We’re hoping you’ll bring the art. After all, it’s how you interpret and use intelligence that makes all the difference (just look at the ongoing political debate over U.S. intelligence for a great example of this subjectivity).

A little bit about me… my name is Brian Glover and I’ve been with Biz360 for four years (which is at least 12 in start-up years). I’ve worn many hats, from PR to product marketing, and have been focused most recently on our blog analysis offering. Before I came to Biz360, I worked in the PR department at Documentum (now part of EMC) where I was a Biz360 client. Before that, I spent two months making pizza and cinnamon buns on Whistler Mountain in Canada while living as a victim of the dot com bust (a story for another time).

In the spirit of openness, I’d like to start off addressing a question we’re sure to get – why are we just now launching our blog? I’d like to say we’ve been too busy researching blogs, building great blog analysis technology and developing services to show our clients the impact of new and traditional media on their business (that wouldn’t be completely far-fetched), but the reality is there isn’t a good enough reason for not starting sooner. As a new participant, we look forward to your feedback along the way.