THE SOCIAL TIMES — Position2 recently launched a new product in the social media analytics and engagement space. Brand Monitor is a platform that enables companies to listen, discover and engage with social media conversations in real time. A cloud based platform, Brand Monitor helps companies track and monitor conversations across millions of blogs, micro-blogs like Twitter, social media, forums, news, video and photo sharing sites...

ADVERTISING AGE — The role of a "chief listener" evokes images of fuzzy sweaters, chamomile tea and sitting around with a patient ear. Instead, try sifting through unstructured data and building complex queries. "We get about 300,000 new mentions of Kodak every month and we don't censor the comments or videos people create about our company," said Beth LaPierre, Kodak's chief listening officer, a role that's just starting to crop up in a few major marketing organizations and involves decidedly non-touchy-feely tasks. "I've spent the past five months defining how we handle those data via technology and tools." The big task? Data mining -- and figuring out who needs the information...

ATTENTIO BLOG — My god, its sexy. Gatorade (part of the Pepsi empire) have a beautiful social media command centre. It’s in Chicago and has a bunch of screens (6 main screens) and room for 5 analysts or community managers. Now I love this stuff. It’s a visual metaphor of social media monitoring and easier to sell internally. "Look Brad, you can see how the brand is performing and respond immediately and there are loads of screens." Now with all sales, the size of investment is what counts, i.e. will this generate a return commensurate with our spend? Well lets see?...

CONVINCE & CONVERT — If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. Too often, standard charts and graphs included in software are just that, standard. They provide numbers, not insights...

TECHCRUNCH — As more businesses look to social media for marketing efforts and to drive sales, there is a need for a comprehensive, yet easy to use platform to manage interactions on social networks. Chicago-based startup Sprout Social is launching its social relationship management platform to the public today. The startup’s platform allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools...