Active Monitoring and Passive Intelligence

One of the major challenges facing those of us that would track online media has been establishing (honestly) the balance between the active and the passive.
 
While Monitoring is deemed often tiresome, repetitive, junior, low value, loss-leading and 'agency', trend analysis or Intelligence is considered insightful, senior, high-value, high-margin and 'consultancy'.
 
Most of the available tools and methodologies pander to one of the two extremes, in part a reflection of the ambitions of their buyers (and sellers). The trouble is that not even extremely clever people spend their entire day doing clever stuff. And a lot of the 'intelligence' is automated enough to streamline and enhance the more passive aspects of digital media monitoring.
 
Some of the same considerations apply to blog aggregation tools such as Newsgator and Bloglines.
 
I look forward to seeing a new generation of tools that reflect a greater understanding of what people actually do, as opposed to what they think they do - or worse still, what the programmers think they do!

Published 03 August 2005 10:19 by Guy Howard

Comments

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  Tony aka MediaResearcher said:

  Guy- I fully agree with you in respect to the fine balance between the active and passive, especially when considering what to report on and which conversations to participate in and continue. But I believe that the intelligence culled from active monitoring (I call it active listening) doesn't necessarily have to be acted on immediately, although it depends on the information. What I've found is that funneling that intelligence to the appropriate person within an organization (whether it be marcom, engineering or customer service) is the way to walk that fine line and make sure the intelligence falls into the right hands.
  August 11, 2005 17:03
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  David Phillips said:

  Spitting tin tacks is fine until you swallow one so I will be very polite.
  
  For two decades i have been one of those PR 'evaluation' geeks (which probably makes me a preek).
  
  In the late 90's I presented a paper to the CyberAlert monitoring conference which showed how monitoring development can move from data to knowledge to intelligence and insights and thence to transactions. From low value to mega value.
  
  Today, the technology is able to accepts all manor of feeds/clips and data, de-duplicate, identify concepts, monitor change and identify the most potent to most dull information (not just blog/media coverage).
  
  Why stop at intelligence and why use people?
  
  I still hear people tell me that monitoring/evaluation for 'favourability' cannot be automated or that it can,t identify the mission critical post/article etc. They are just wrong and live in some backwater and think 'drill down' has something to do with oil production. You can have it all. There is no difference between monitoring and intelligence it's seamless and a computer programme.
  
  But... and its a big but, most of the people I know in this sector will not do this work for consultants because its too expensive to have to sell to a wet behind the ear exec in every account team in every office.
  
  While the client has gizmos, the consultant still marvel at the nicely turned out clip books. Some intelligence!
  August 19, 2005 17:41