Factiva is looking to cash in on companies wanting to monitor what bloggers are saying about them, with a new service that searches blogs and message boards.
Revolution magazine reports that the company has built the facility into its Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence service, which monitors mainstream media.
As the result of a partnership with Intelliseek, it can now track more than 11,000 websites, and more than four million of the most active blogs and message boards.
From the intro to Factiva’s press release:
Factiva®, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, today announced the availability of Factiva Insight™: Reputation Intelligence, a powerful new tool that for the first time empowers executives to monitor known issues and discover emerging opportunities and threats from across the mainstream media, radio and television transcripts and consumer-generated content, including blogs and message boards, in one solution. It also enables executives to create effective reputation and brand management strategies that tie to business objectives and drive competitive advantage.
Details in the press release.
(Hat tip: Joel Cere)
Sounds like a pretty useless service – why don’t they just put their company name say ‘British Gas’ into Technorati? Even better, start their own blog and let their customers tell them what they think. I think all companies should run a blog
http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/8/5/1110901.html
“Why don’t they just put their company name say ‘British Gas’ into Technorati”
– Because that won’t give the full picture. I’m not saying that Factiva have the wonder-product, but monitoring online PR and marketing campaigns isn’t as simple as typing a phrase into one search engine. As a PR consultant I will give this product a go, as it may be quicker than doing it the manual way.
‘Connected’, Why do you think all companies should run a blog? Do you think they should disclose who the blog’s author is? Neville, what are your thoughts? I like your blog though, will add it to my blogroll.
Blog cuttings service
Factiva has released a press cuttings service that monitors blogs and online message boards. It’s good to see a large media monitoring firm providing such a service that can take the hassle away from us PRs so that we can
Lol nice point about posting who the blog author is but I represent only myself, not my company. I post under an alias as I don’t want my views messed up with the views of the company i work for -particularly if someone from my company sees my blog and thinks I’m trying to speak on their behalf.
Connected, I’m the CMO at Factiva. In response to your comment above, the problem is threefold: 1.) Blogs and consumer generated media are only one of the many media forms; 2.) If you work for a big company like, say Coca Cola (14,761,031 mentions across traditional media, blogs and consumer generated media in the past 90 days) the volume is so large that it is virtually impossible to get to all the conversations, much less fully understand what is being talked about. 3.) keyword searches (on Technorati, Google etc.) are just that: keyword searches. Factiva Insight tracks all aspects of a company including products, executives, competitiors, and then uses powerful analytics to track known issues and discover emerging issues all in a single application.
Getting that clear and complete picture fast results in competitive advantage because they can both spot and act on problems and opportunities sooner.
I completely agree with your point that they need to participate in the conversation, either through their own blogs, or participating in other’s.