Cymfony Meshes Blog, MSM Monitoring

Cymfony, a media-monitoring firm, is expected today to officially launch a new product, Orchestra, that monitors both blogs and mainstream media for mentions of particular brands or industries. While Cymfony has offered blog monitoring and mainstream media monitoring in the past, Orchestra combines both features into one Web-based platform.

Orchestra's text-mining tools cull blog posts and newsletters for relevant information and opinions about products--cost, safety, and design, for example--determine whether the article/post is positive or negative, and measure the volume of the comments. The data is then collected in a set of charts and graphs that can be e-mailed, printed, or simply viewed from the browser. Users can choose to slice and dice data by a variety of categories, including topics and brand names. Users also can view data trends over time.

The service is being launched today after a closed beta test, which began in June. Roughly a dozen of Cymfony's existing clients participated, in industries including automotive, telecommunications, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, and high-tech software and hardware.

Julie Woods, Cymfony's executive vice president for strategy and marketing, said many of the clients were asking for a product that combined traditional, online, and consumer-generated media monitoring service. "We found that so many of our clients who were getting traditional media also wanted a view of the online discussions," she said. "There's a real need to understand what people are saying and connect if you can--and overall, to improve their service quality."

The service is customized for each individual client, so that the issues that pertain to their industry are covered by the reports. "We've worked with many different industries, so we've built up a library of issues," Woods said. "We tune those depending on the environment. In the CGM world, people talk about design in a different way than in the traditional media world."

Next story loading loading..