And are not afraid to pay a healthy price for that information too. Environics Communications, a PR firm in Canada is helping a “leading financial services” company to monitor the blogosphere. While its had its role in politics for quite some time now — some argued that the resignation of Trent Lott from the Republican Senate leadership was directly related to blogging efforts — it looks like blogging is moving from the fringes to the mainstream from a business point of view now.
As a cautionary tale, the article also mentions the outrage over the Edelman/ Wal-Mart PR disaster that I thought was confied only to the blogosphere.
And Environics isn’t the only company monitoring the blogosphere for their clients.
TechDirt, perhaps more known for its biting commentary on Web2.0 issues, offers a similar service called “TechDirt Corporate Intelligence”, where they’ll also assemble through a technology called “InfoAdvisor”, what sounds like a blog roll that tracks a issues around and about a given company.
Although tech related bloggers feel that they’re blogging in a vacuum (or perhaps, a chamber) sometimes, and although the same journalistic standards may or may not apply to us, perhaps we should all be aware that the off-line world is watching what we say.
Because for some industries, remarkably enough — your opinion matters.
