• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 28, 2010

Visible Technologies plans to release social and search tools that allow marketers to support online campaigns. More than a year in the making at a cost of about a million dollars, Visible Intelligence organizes searches and analyzes massive amounts of data through what the company calls a "search-and-relevance engine" built on similar technology to Google.

Counting hashtags and Facebook fans no longer works because businesses need to sift through the spam and elevenths signals to capture real, actionable information to support key initiatives. So, Kelly Pennock, who moved into the CEO role at Visible from chief technology officer earlier this year, spearheaded the project and built the vision for the new platform and company.

Pennock says available technology has not kept pace with the opportunity to integrate social and search, so it requires a leap beyond existing social monitoring tools.

Data and system integration tools allow users to integrate the platform with customer relationship management (CRM) tools and business intelligence (BI) systems to tap into social data across enterprise business applications. The platform also provides the ability to share data and easily engage among users and departments to create more meaningful and targeted customer experiences.

Information is processed and returned to users in about 30 seconds, compared with about 20 minutes for other platforms, according to Debbie DeGabrielle, CMO at Visible Technologies.

About a dozen Visible clients have been testing the platform since early September. The platform goes out and collects brand mentions in the form of data from a variety of social sites across the Web. It mines the data to look for specific mentions of a campaign or spokesperson.

Wading through data that offers no value to the campaign can cost big bucks. So, aside from the ability to pull in data from a variety of social sites like publicly available information on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Visible built in sorting capabilities, language support, and analytics to measure the campaign. It also provides sentiment score, media type and geography.

There were plenty of challenges to building the platform because it identifies word order, proximity of two words to each other, type of media, and length of document. It also supports multiple languages and offers insight into sentiment. It sorts through an "overwhelming amount" of data to determine whether someone searching on the word "cruise" means Tom Cruise, cruise missiles or cruise ship.