Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media published a great post today about the four “cornerstones” of holistic monitoring, highlighting how social intelligence can be applied across job functions: (1) Competitive Analysis, (2) Product Development, (3) Reputation Management and (4) Outreach.

It’s always encouraging to see specifics when it comes to the application of data, but one important application not addressed is around what this intelligence can mean from an advertising perspective. Monitoring is the gateway to your most passionate customers, who are typically either blogging or commenting about your brand, products and/or competitors. But consumer generated media is not a new phenomenon: blog readership has exploded by 300 percent in the last four years, and blogs have matured as a medium. That means that, just as often as you reach out to a blogger in hopes they write about your product or service, you can also likely add them to a buy plan for your advertising campaign. Given there are now 101 million users consuming blogs (according to comScore) the ability to monitor and analyze which peer sites are leading relevant conversations can inform advertisers where the most engaged audiences live. That means everything from ad placement, creative and copy can be more targeted and effective – advertisers can even begin to align a media buying strategy with “earned” media (or PR outreach) efforts to truly capitalize on brand lift. As Joe Marchese notes in this week’s MediaPost column, all media is becoming social – which means paid media planning and strategy will need to evolve.