Sparked by a survey that Brian Oberkirch at WeblogsWork is getting underway, an interesting conversation has been taking shape on the Naked Conversations Blog (see comments thread) about blog monitoring as an emerging service/business opportunity among PR and marketing firms:

“I’m still learning to master Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and Bloglines. I’ve abandoned a few others. For businesses just trying to get their arms around it all, these tools are as hard to master as they are important to understand. This is a place for a PR agency to jump in. Use them to listen and learn for your clients. Serve as an early warning system for what is being said by both topic and company.”

I have to admit, at first pass, my reaction to this was a little like “well, yeah!?” I think most PR folks are pretty damn good when it comes to traditional news scouring and analysis, and serving as the eyes and ears for their corporate clients, so it seems only natural that PR teams would carry the responsibility for monitoring the blogosphere too. In fact, I think this function of keeping a pulse on industry chatter, be it traditional media or otherwise, is hands-down, just critical to a program’s overall health and strategic direction.

Some firms are already outsourcing this function of a program to third-party measurement and analysis companies in very much the same way they have outsourced traditional news monitoring. Others are taking the DIY approach, using a combination of lightweight tools like internal reporting blogs, team wikis and specialized search engines to get the job done. I think with both approaches there’s a fair and formal up sell for a value-added service, it just comes down to the unique needs of the client.

Each has its own challenges too, btw: the outsourcing option remains problematic given the fast-moving nature of blogosphere discussion and the limitations that come with real-time tracking, while the DIY approach relies primarily on human tracking and analysis, and typically the hourly billing rates ($$$) that come with that.

Finally, I’ll just add that when it comes to tracking and analyzing online discussions, it’s my experience that marketing folks tend to see this as a function of taking a macro-level snapshot of the company’s overall brand perception and health, whereas PR teams are much more engaged at the micro level, focusing on issues and responses.

I touched on this subject a few months ago with more thought/detail (see “Mining and Monitoring the Conversation Gap“).

Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

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