Memewatch: Social Media Analysis or Blog Relations?

Over at the Church of the Customer, Ben McConnell suggests that corporations are going to have to find or train people to track what’s pertinent to the business in the blogosphere:

[from Job title of the future: social media analyst]

All of this seems to point toward a new job responsibility inside companies whose growth depends on word of mouth: social media analyst.

If a social media analyst could port into Technorati’s data warehouse (or BlogPulse’s) and rely on her imagination and knowledge of company strategies to create her own, real-time dashboard of gauges, maps and charts of what’s being said online, she would probably become the company’s most foremost expert on trends, word of mouth and the democratization of culture.

Yeah, but maybe that’s too remote: all that staring at graphs and so on, like the foo-foo dust that business intelligence firms peddle. I think it is more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.

[pointer from Mike Manuel]