Should Corporations be Monitoring Blogs?

Shel Holtz writes on the way in which Fortune 500 companies monitor the blogworld. He wonders if blogmonitoring should be a specialized function, or integrated into other media-gathering information.

How organizations deal with the blogosphere needs to be thought through carefully; there are significant differences between blogger relations and media relations, as Stowe Boyd suggests. How we monitor, though, should be based on a holistic view of the world as it intersects with the organization. We should add blog monitoring to the mix, not create a new function that fails to reconcile the intelligence obtained from the blogosphere with that obtained from the multitude of other channels in which our organizations are fodder for conversation.

Blogs are not a silver bullet, and blogs rarely solve problems on their own. They are great as force-multipliers, which is to say that blogs supplement and complement traditional marketing. I'm guessing then that blogs do a great job of supplementing and complementing traditional media-gathering.

This is the conclusion Shel reaches, and that tracks well with my personal experience writing market research reports. The best blogs are linking back to original sources, which is to say non-bloggy material, whether newspaper articles or research documents. The idea that blogging is separate, rather than already integrated to traditional intelligence gathering would seem to be a misunderstanding of why a blog is effective.

On a side note, if you're paying a set-up fee of $20,000 and $10,000 a month for an online tool to monitor blogs, you're overpaying. I'll do a better job and it's only $2000 a month.