• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2011

The Meltwater Group generated more than $100 million in revenue last year, serving more than 20,000 customers. The social media and news monitoring company said Thursday that it has acquired IceRocket, a real-time social search engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Meltwater, pegged as a $15,000 startup 10 years ago, plans to generate another $100 million in the next three years from its social media business under the guidance of its founder CEO Jorn Lyseggen.

"IceRocket will continue to operate as a free stand-alone search engine and its technology will be integrated with the Meltwater Buzz product," said Lyseggen, who expects all IceRocket employees to join Meltwater.

IceRocket is one of the last stand-alone real-time search tools remaining, after Collecta and OneRiot shuttered their real-time search services.

So why would a social media company want to acquire a real-time search company when others have abandoned the service? "You have to know the buzz of the beast to optimize messages," said Marty Weintraub, founder of aimClear and author of Killer Facebook Ads: Master Cutting-Edge Facebook Advertising Techniques, published in August by Wiley/Sybex.

There are other social media services, including Klout, Sysomos and Radian6, among others. Some create "imperfect solutions" -- platforms cobbled together to tackle the impossible problem of monitoring chatter across multiple sites.

Weintraub, a big fan of IceRocket, said the company took the "meta search engine" approach to indexing social years ago, long before it was sexy. They try to "index the indexable."

Webliquid, which provides insights on consumer behavior, estimates that approximately 150 companies provide some level of social media monitoring services that help marketers better understand online social marketing. Nearly three-quarters of marketing executives counted in a recent survey actively monitor social media through the use of either paid or free tools.

The Webliquid study reveals that 62% of marketers plan to increase their social media monitoring investment in the coming year, 37% plan to keep it the same, and the remainder will decrease. The majority -- 59% -- rely on Google Alerts to monitor social buzz.

Meltwater's acquisition of IceRocket is akin to Google's acquisition of PostRank, Weintraub said. Social media monitoring continues to emerge, but for now it remains "very, very difficult, slow and incomplete." Even Google Alerts leaves a "huge amount of the online universe undiscovered."