It's not a good sign for Facebook if companies find the free part useful and the paid part not useful.

Thanks, Bill. I hope the site's helpful.

The obvious one is customer service, which we've seen as the hype shifted to Social CRM in 2010. Product management and R&D can use the information in its market research/market intelligence form. Switch the focus from your own company to competitors and monitoring becomes open-source competitive intelligence. HR can use it for compliance monitoring, but the more interesting application is in recruiting (as in finding future employees). Finance might want to monitor/measure social media to understand trends that institutional investors might be looking at. Probably the most surprising use I've seen is using online sources for reputation analysis in supply chain due diligence (to avoid entering relationships with bad actors). If we look at this as a huge set of data that is available for analysis, I think we're just getting started. Thanks for the exercise. I'm supposed to be working on a presentation on applying "and not or" thinking to analytics and intelligence, so tracking down the examples is particularly helpful just now. :-)

The article doesn't so much miss the point as make a different one than you expected. The legal department has very different responsibilities from PR, so they have different product/service needs. Social media monitoring provides a set of capabilities that can be adapted to different functional roles within a company, and the examples here are for e-discovery and information security.

Part two of the secret is that (some of?) the brands make a lower-quality product to hit the outlet price point. Caveat emptor.

Not sure it's possible to discuss this without getting into the politics of it, but it strikes me as an interesting contrast to the Nestle/Greenpeace tossup on Nestle's Facebook page. Nestle seemed to be in a no-win position; they were going to catch hell whether they deleted comments or not. Are the rules different for business, or are politicians simply more accepting of the inevitability of criticism from their opposition?

The overuse of the word "platform" is adding to the confusion. If we use platform to refer to the sofware, it's easier to sort out. So, revisiting Jennifer's point: A client can select services from Company A that build on the software platform of Company B. Offering both tools and services is a strategy of some, but certainly not all, companies in this space. http://net-savvy.com/executive/social-media-analysis/listening-tools-vs-services.html The insight company can be a research specialist, an agency, or an in-house team. Look at all the Radian6 and Visible Technologies announcements with agencies, and the software company strategy becomes clear. Many more companies can do the insight piece than can build a competitive social media analysis platform. Oh, and I can think of three different categories of professional services in this space, but I'll save that for the blog post I need to write.

Just waiting for you to post 'em. :-) Knowing a little about some of the people behind Ford's efforts, I won't be at all surprised to hear them sound informed.

Now there's a conversation I'd like to have. Nice catch! One nit to pick, though. I wouldn't be surprised by his use of "platform," which is not used exclusively in technology. Coming from Boeing, Alan would be completely familiar with thinking of products as platforms. Just Google "737 platform" to get a sense of how Boeing aircraft are described. The auto industry has a similar history, especially when you think of different vehicles (say, the VW Jetta and Audi A4) that are built on the same platform. Still, it is nice to see his willingness to talk to people who might not have been on the must-reach media list a few years ago.

Don't they say something about getting the name right? ;-)

It depends on what you want to accomplish. Online removes manufacturing and inventory issues, but a lot of people will expect it to be free and ignore it if it's not. Selling it to a publisher has the most prestige (plus the ego boost of seeing your name on the shelf at Barnes & Noble). Self-publishing has better margins but leaves you with all the work. An editor friend recommended that I consider publishing through Lulu (sort of an on-demand variation on the old subsidy press business). That's worth a look.