Last week Alan over at BlogWhine, Alan played a little virtual kick-ball with the brand monitoring industry, focusing on the reasons such services haven't been wildly successful. Alan's discussion about the weaknesses of "sentiment scoring" (for now, we've chosen not to employ that approach) detract from a couple real nuggets in his last bullets. As Alan suggests, the bottom line is that monitoring social media is only a means to an end. In the social media construct, monitoring can power many practical business applications from within a decision-support framework, and that's exactly the direction we've taken from the start. For example, take a look at Rob's mention about ad targeting here . On a related note, it's nice to see other leaders in our industry like Matt Hurst acknowledge our approach, ala the following:

"I had previously considered BuzzLogic to be a competitor to BuzzMetrics. However, I now have a better understanding of what they are up to and how influence, if harnessed and measured correctly, is currency that they can take to publishers/bloggers, enterprises and advertisers. In other words - while they are fundamentally in the measurement business, the application of that measurement is horizontal."

Thanks for helping clear the air Matt, and Alan, please keep those wheels turning.