Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The opportunity/necessity to monitor the web as competitive factor

Blogs are now the fastest growing information source. Their strength is measured by the number of links from other bloggers, creating an intricate web of connections capable of widely distributing information.

There are million pf blogs, mostly insignificant, personal, with a big rate of growth ( and of dead...) , thousands new ones every day. Among them the most part is probably useless but the remaining part is useful. For example a complete, unedited, uncensored official report, about the death of a secret service agent in Iraq, mr.Calipari, led to its huge distribution, even though not produced by a recognised press agency.

A new category of Net.Surfer born: the influencer.

Who he/she is him?

He/she is a blogger or a member of a community who has a big reputation for what he has create in the past. Many other web people read his posts, and his messages, or through the RSS (really simple syndication) files other people publish on their website its thoughts or read him by means of an RSS aggregator.

He is the new opinion maker, he doesn’t write on a newspaper or doesn’t do interview in television, but for the same reasons he is considered as credible by others, because his idea isn’t influenced (in the reader’s mind) by external editorial choice.

In Italy a satirical actor, Beppe Grillo, has the most visited blog, because he has reduced his presence in TV shows, and was able to foreseen some important financial scandal of italian company.
Beside some consumers associations are represented by him in stakeholders meeting.

In USA candidate team made many effort to monitor blogs or/and to involve the most known bloggers in political campaign. Their influence could be felt outside the Net too.

This revolution is changing our way to see the world. Internet is the new big domain of information, but we need new tools to distinguish information from the noise.

The determining of the trend and the communication perception has to be kept up with the new tools and their consequent social changes in order to keep “knowledge” as a competitive factor. Processes that can understand the opinion-making methods and the ability of the influencers are fundamental, mostly as regards networked media, that is to say, where the opinion is formed and what the media is addressed to.

For this reason a new system should realize the search for public contents in a more intelligent way in order to:
- Extract implicit data from not structured information
- Monitor the opinions and trends
- Apply algorithms of competitive intelligence
- Influence the sharing of knowledge

We could apply our information management tool to different application fields

- Marketing:
>> brand and product reputation monitoring
>> emerging trend tracking

- Knowledge management
>> intelligent search
>> elearning
>> company knowledge management

From an article of Kenneth A. Sawka of Outward Insights:

The proliferation of information available on the Internet, combined with the myriad of IT tools available to help manage and handle that information, is creating new challenges for intelligence analysts and decision-makers alike.

Advertising agencies can now add a new asset to those already available. The communication paradigm is now migrating from mass communication to one-to-one communication. The preferences expressed by bloggers in theirs posts, the searches that customers carry out and other personal data present on the web (my birthdate on Myspace, my name is Carlo Bruno or "hurra, I have retired” on my blog), all build a map of personal iterative or punctual needs, such that a marketing manager can now target people with a very personalized advertising message (real time event driven!!) which is therefore more effective.

The announcement by Facebook of its new advertising system is only one explicit realization of this concept, but how many others out there are already operating?

c.b.

related post: Facebook (italian), Banking 2.0 (italian)

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