• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 20, 2010

To help marketers navigate an increasingly friend- and follower-centric media landscape, comScore on Monday debuted a social media monitoring service dubbed Social Analytix.

Powered by the Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform, the service will attempt to provide clients with real-time updates about what consumers are saying about their brands and products online.

"The emergence of social media in the past few years has helped usher in the era of the digital consumer, where one's brand equity increasingly relies on what people are saying about it in the digital environment," said Steve Dennen, comScore vice president.

The Radian6 technology, which operates independent of the comScore global consumer panel, claims to capture mentions across more than 150 million social media sources worldwide including blogs, discussion boards, video and image-sharing sites, as well as top social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Answers.

"We built our platform to analyze not only social media conversations, but also the metrics of the social Web," said David Alston, vice president of marketing & community at Radian6.

The comScore Social Analytix will monitor consumer-generated word-of-mouth brand mentions, and gauge consumer sentiment toward their brands, products, and competitors.

It will also help brands respond to potential customer service issues as they arise, and help identify social media influencers, reach out to them, and form relationships with their customers.

A recent study conducted by UK-based marketing services provider Alterian suggested that 66% of marketers would invest in social media marketing this year. What's more, according to eMarketer, the ad spend on social networks is set to hit $1.7 billion this year -- a 20% increase year-over-year.

It's not surprising, then, that comScore isn't the only firm investing heavily in social media tracking.

Just this past June, Nielsen Co. and management consultant McKinsey & Co. unveiled N M Incite, a joint venture to monitor and analyze the impact social media has on companies. Per the deal, Nielsen's existing social media tracking division, BuzzMetrics, is becoming part of MN Incite.

At the beginning of the year, meanwhile, Dynamic Logic partnered with buzz-tracking firm Cymfony to incorporate social media feedback into its flagship AdIndex brand metrics platform. AdIndex measures online branding impact using traditional yardsticks like awareness levels, purchase intent, message association and recall through opt-in surveys. Per the Cymfony deal, Dynamic Logic combined those metrics with analysis of discussion about brands across social networks, blogs and the like.