The Social Language

With Web 2.0, companies can have increasingly extensive dialogues with their customers. Customers can also talk about the company and its products among themselves, whether the company likes the discussions or not. A growing number of solutions is available for blog monitoring and analysis from companies like Nielsen Buzzmetrics and Umbria.

It will be interesting to see how these solutions will handle the language issue. As social networks will provide new types of business intelligence (see this PC World article for some examples and tips from Umbria) companies need to be able to monitor blogs and discussions in several languages, and then bring the information and insights to their employees and partners in several countries. This will need a lot of automated multilingual searches and translations, as the amount of blogs and conversations to follow is huge.

Or perhaps I am wrong; perhaps English will take over, and companies only need to monitor blogs and discussions in English. Hmm... I would, however, place my bets on solutions that can also monitor Spanish, Chinese, German, etc., discussions. Actually, if I was entering a new geographical market, I would certainly want to monitor the discussions in the language of that market.