You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis®, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal™ for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment®, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report - Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media - the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM - health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

This past Friday, I participated on a panel with Jim Nail of Cymfony at Bulldog Reporter’s Advanced PR Technology in Practice conference in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was online measurement and was moderated by Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom. There were two overarching themes that came out of our presentations and Q&A. The first is that the movement of content online, the expansion of social media and the development of free and premium services for tracking all this new content make it possible to measure much more than you could just a few years ago - and get the results fast.

The second is that there is now more reason than ever for PR measurement to be placed in a business relevant context. That could be correlating results with internal marketing data, such as Web traffic or lead generation. Jim suggested that internal PR leaders get to know the folks doing marketing mix modeling (he referenced a PRWeek story - reg req’d - about P&G using market mix modeling to determine that the ROI from PR was higher than other types of marketing for four out of the six brands tested). It could also be correlating PR with changes in public perception using social media as a proxy. The ability to change opinions and behavior has always been the promise of PR. Measuring that change usually required surveys, focus groups or Web site data (how did you hear about us?). Social media changes the game by allowing PR to quickly assess public sentiment broadly or compare the buzz of individual news articles in the market.

There were many other notable sessions that day, athough I wasn’t able to attend them all, so I’m just going to note a few things that stood out for me. Dan Gilmor provided an overview of how citizen media is changing journalism and how the public consumes information. He even addressed the folly of citizen media, citing an example of a photo-shopped image of a man standing against the rail of one of the twin towers with an airplane in the background heading toward it.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR actually convinced me that the press release is not dead. At Biz360, we talk about how the rise of social media has made it possible to take your message directly to your target audiences. Jamie talked about how press releases, properly optimized for search, often rank above actual news stories on Google News and that you can take your message directly to the public in this way. His advice is to use Google Trends to figure out the top relevant search terms for your press release, use those terms in the headline and first paragraph and include hyperlinks throughout the body to drive users to your Web site (let me know if any of this works).

So if the press release isn’t dead, it’s definitely changing. Brian Solis of FutureWorks PR talked about how to write a social media press release that includes includes social bookmarks from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr and other Web 2.0 goodies. Naturally, at throughout the day, attendees asked if companies would eventually ruin social media. I expect this to be a topic at the upcoming WOMMA Summit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics here, Eric Schwartzman’s post includes links to all of the presentations, including mine. He also set up a del.icio.us page where the speakers could share links to supporting materials.

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.