• by Shankar Gupta , June 19, 2006

Showing the growing importance to marketers of consumer-generated media, word-of-mouth analytics firm Cymfony today will bow a blog and wiki dedicated to studying the interplay between traditional media, social media, and the public.

The initiative, dubbed "Influence 2.0," aims to explore the influence that social media and traditional media have on one another as well as the influence they have on consumers, said Cymfony Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Jim Nail.

Nail said the blog and wiki will examine the influence advertisers can exert on the social media and ultimately the audience, beyond simply PR and advertising. "It ain't all just about spin," Nail said. "In this transparent world, at the end of the day, if there's nothing behind those messages, you're going to be exposed."

In addition to the Influence 2.0 blog and wiki, Cymfony is also planning several new products in partnership with blog search technology firm Sphere and others. Using Sphere's blog search, the company is planning to soon create a qualitative ranking of bloggers by influence. And next month, Nail said, Cymfony plans to announce a new technology partner that will provide a natural language processing algorithm to search for less high-profile posts and blog entries about companies that may not yet be on the radar. "It'll allow us to do a better job at finding stuff that we don't yet know to look for," he said.