Analytics and enablers: The continuing debate

<![CDATA[Doc Searls has a long summary of the small storm building around Peter Hirshberg’s reported comments about a Technorati enterprise service, which I wrote about yesterday. He rides to Technorati’s defense, unnecessarily, I think, because no one disputes marketers need raw data about what is being talked about.
I’m a little surprised that Doc’s take on the information is that people have “jumped to conclusions based on what one guy said,” since that is the very essence of blogging: A single correspondent reported something that would have otherwise been ignored. A lot of people are very interested in how Technorati might make money and, more to the point, help them make money.
Technorati is over-reaching, as an entrepreneurial company often should. Bully for them.
I’d like to find a way to use the Technorati data to build metrics that expose the value Marc Canter wrote is worth billions and billions of dollars, but because of Technorati’s struggle to find its business model, it has been hard to make a deal, and there are other fish to fry. I’m more than open to finding a way to work with Technorati data—I’ve tried—but we also want to work with Bloglines, PubSub and myriad other sources of raw data; everyone of these companies is affecting the distribution of value and Persuadio’s view is that a third-party analysis is what customers need to decide how to work with these aggregators and invest in advertising.
Apparently, there is some doubt the enterprise service exists. The fact is there is a real service, which I am told Technorati has been pitching to PR firms for approximately $100,000 a year. It is not “repurposed content” (as I said yesterday, Technorati is too smart for that) but a kind of early-warning system that looks very much like what you see at Technorati.com, with a heavy emphasis on watchlists. It still points users to the original posting for complete text, as the Technorati site does today.
That’s useful, but, as I said, Technorati is also shaping the discussion. Google many topics today and you’ll see the Technorati tag page near the top of the results; at Persuadio, we find that a tagged topic is often skewed by Technorati’s presence in the market, which is one part of our analysis of influence and value in the conversational market.
Sure, we haven’t exposed a lot of that to the market, but it’s early. Very early, as Doc Searls, points out about the entire marketplace. We’re working with early customers to define what they need to understand, as well as building our own algorithms to identify value and influence within the conversation.

Technorati Tags: influencenetworks, marketing, Persuadio, DocSearls, Technorati

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