Cool 2008: A farthing for your thoughts

The Gartner "2008 Cool Vendor in the High Performance Workplace" is:

SEATTLE, Aug 13, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media monitoring and engagement solutions, today announced it now analyzes more than 100 million social media conversations -- from blogs, wikis, forums, Twitter, social networks and other online hubs -- to help brands engage with consumers online, enabling the company to quadruple its sales in 2008.

They gain actionable intelligence for "brands":

Visible Technologies captures and analyzes the entire conversation thread, including comments, where 70 percent of social media conversations occur. By allowing customers to listen to, learn about and engage with customers online, Visible Technologies has seen sales rise 300 percent this year, compared with the second half of 2007.

They are "analyzing":

Visible Technologies analyzes an average of 425,000 unique pieces of social media content per day on behalf of its clients.

For what clients?


Relevance inside Chatter:

With a broad view of the online landscape, Visible Technologies enables brands to focus on relevant content within the chatter and gain actionable intelligence in order to interact effectively with consumers. Industry validation continues to provide proof of the critical nature of accurate social media-tracking.

Quotes

"Companies are increasingly trying to determine how to embrace social media strategically and tactically. Clients who want to get actionable intelligence from the full thread of conversations choose TruCast for its comprehensive analysis of both the original content and ensuing comments. Our extensive data and work with leading brands show clients how and where to engage when they want to address customer-service issues, gain insight for media buying or drive community activation in a campaign. We are pleased with the momentum we've built as brands continue to invest in this channel for engaging with their customers." - Adam Selig, CEO of Visible Technologies. link

“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation management system. Online reputation is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable...”- Clive Thompson $

Hello?

Does anybody making much of Friendfeed, Seesmic, Qik, Pownce, twhirl, Phrazit, fire eagle, Dopplr, etc., make anything of this?

Are our innocent joies de Tweet enabling market impetus for deep, always-on, persistent and panoptic commodification, archiving and monetization of what used to be considered our interiority -- motions of the soul?

Smear in the web mines

Today I visited what might be my kid's kindergarten next year - very cool school - hope he gets in. It's not one of those Hahvahd-bound $23,000-per-year gold-plated shoelace places, it's a public school with dedicated staff working with kids. For some reason, the whole place just glows.

That and a few other tasks have slowed my efforts to assimilate and usefully write about FASTForward08 -- it's getting there. I am unable to resist this lousy photo I took. You will note that the 90-foot-wide TV screen up there is sufficiently bulky that it was last used for the 2004 Democratic Convention -- at least that's what one fellow said, who seemed to know.

But it's the statement that got me wondering if there is a Jacques Lacan School of Marketing somewhere, perhaps in Oslo, where FAST hails from?

Or even more wondrous, if those who are exploring search in the deep ways that were suggested at this conference have performed their own searches in the nether places of the psyche before taking their quest to the loomings beneath the surface of the web...

Of this I'm sure: there's a lot more to this craft of deep search* than can be found in Horatio's business plan.

*e.g., listen to how FAST ceo John Markus Lervik talks about search in this clip

with Jerry Michalski.