I had the opportunity to meet with the coComment folks yesterday. Many of you know coComment so I won't go into the solution except to say they enable the tracking and sharing of conversations in comments and enable individuals to aggregate around communities of interest. As usual, we got around to talking about how they're going to make money. The coComment folks tell me that they plan to start analyzing comments for market intelligence and selling this analytical service to enterprises. I gotta tell you that that monetization model sends shivers up my spine. Trying to extract market intelligence from Buzz is extremely difficult. It not only takes a significant amount of technical expertise in natural language processing and analytics but without context for this analysis, the intelligence is typically of poor quality. And that context can only come from a human looking at the comments in the gestalt of the conversations and drawing inferences from those conversations. Therefore, coComment will also need the equivalent of business analysts to provide this inferential layer of context. I've had the opportunity to work with both BuzzMetrics and Umbria - two companies dedicated to deriving market intelligence from Buzz. And in both cases, each company failed to serve the needs of B2B businesses. They agreed that they failed to be able to deliver the type of contextual analysis that enables enterprises to make real decisions based on the intelligence provided.
Content drives context but to date, only humans can ascribe the appropriate context to that content.
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