MASHABLE — Today, IBM is introducing a new social media monitoring tool, one that it says will measure consumer sentiment from data gathered on Twitter, blogs and other web services and networks. The software, called the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons, and it’s already being used by some pretty big businesses...

PR COMMUNICATIONS — Fortune 500 social media deployment The question of how you deploy social media within a large multi-brand company, really comes down to budget, which department is going to pay for the resources to set up a social media program? Different companies have taken alternative approaches to corporate social media adoption. Reviewing the landscape and history of social media I believe there are four ways social media deployment has happned within larger enterprises...

MARKETINGPROFS — Lesson 1: "Executive engagement is critical." That’s what Sandy Carter told me when I had asked her about the appropriate level of executive engagement in social media. "It’s a question of credibility," she explained, adding that it was "almost unethical" for executives to advocate use of social media and not be engaged themselves. For her part, Sandy started a blog in 2005 because she saw the potential and wanted to lead by example...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — "Be yourself." It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real -- or you won’t be followed. Yet, how do you pull off "authentic" while maintaining the company brand message? It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week’s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries? At IBM, it’s about losing control...

ONLINE COMMUNITY REPORT — This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Rawn Shah, Practice lead with the Social Software Adoption team in IBM. He has worked in various roles as a software developer, production manager, a journalist and community program manager in his career. His current focus is on understanding and measuring business value of social computing within the enterprise...