Keith Schneider has a pretty good article about our company (Nielsen BuzzMetrics) in the New York Times. One of the challenges of writing about us is the rather complex history of how this particular group of individuals happen to all be working for the same company albeit in at least 4 locations: Trendum bought BuzzMetrics bought Intelliseek which bought PlanetFeedback. (Note that the article elides the Intelliseek/WhizBang!Labs event which, as it turns out, proved important.)
Part of the article that really caught my eye was the following passage:
For now, it occupies a sweet spot in a promising new industry, but should search giants like Google move more aggressively into its market, BuzzMetrics may find the going tougher.
“Search is at the core of everything Google does and we are more committed to improving search than ever before,” a Google spokesman said in an e-mail message. “We will continue to innovate our search technology to provide users with the fastest and most relevant search experience on the Web.”
This sounds a little like the kind of thing that might have been said when Google entered the blog search space. It seems easy - intuitive - to fear this type of move, but one can never quite tell what the outcome will be. Experience and expertise is, in itself, a barrier to entry. In addition, the type of text mining that customers require in this space is very fine grained, something which the search giant hasn't really shown any interest in. Personally, I believe that as long as Google thinks in terms of 'search', they aren't going to be able to adapt to the potential of applications which use text mining and other forms of analytics to deliver intelligence and, may I use the term?, knowledge.
If you ask established players in the enterprise social media analysis space whom they fear competitively, they'll actually point to two different areas. The first is the content platforms themselves - for example, imagine MySpace selling analytics of its content. The second is consumer facing social media search engines and portals - for example, Technorati selling analytics derived from its database of blog posts. In both cases, the analysis is provided by third party NLP and text mining systems. This is why, as I pointed out earlier, the WhizBang!Labs part of BuzzMetric's pedigree is such an important part of the story.
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