It's time for B4B's What Blogs Are Saying About Your Business session on how to monitor what the great washed/unwashed amongst the estimated 33.2m worldwide blogs are writing/podcasting about you.

Anders Schoenberg, CEO of WaveMetrix, says "we want to measure, as accurately as possible, what people are saying". "We believe customers deserve to be heard, it's your responsibility to listen to them and make better products [as a result]." That's a playbook example of what this new paradigm is all about.

14.15 - Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers steps up and says blogs will be influential but aren't quite yet; what's still important is monitoring forums and other online social arenas, he says. As far as blogs go, Mark says companies should certainly join the conversation when bloggers are talking about their company, especially when bad publicity is looming as it did in the notorious Dell Hell episode. Or, come to think of it, Sony's rootkit.

14.26 - Brad Engmann should've used Tripadvisor. The Blogtronix director says his hotel room is too small, next time he'll search blogs for hotel reviews before booking. It's an illustration of how what people say is valuable. People tend to trust people (except when they're crazy people), and companies like Yahoo! have noticed that the value of interpersonal recommendations is driving what's coming next online.

Brad says new-style "campaigns" for the Firefox browser, former US Presidential hopeful Howard Dean and Microsoft's Channel 9 video service are excellent examples of how blogs can help businesses.

But blogs can pose threats, too. Brad cites the example of Kryptonite, in which the bike lock manufacturer responded too late to bloggers' discovery the company's locks were defective, was a srategic mistake. Brad says "it's important to control the conversation and, by having a blog of your own, other people don't control the information flow, you do".

14.37 - There are soooo many West Coast-ers here today. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has a simple, practical tip for businesses keen to monitor blogs but not pay a blog monitoring or research company - type your company name into Technorati as a search term (in a postmodern twist, I just did this for one of the previous panellists and found both positive and negative discussion about the company). Also, figure out who the influential bloggers are in your space and create a dialogue with them. Heather said that, back in August, one in every 200 web page views was to a weblog; that's now likely to be one in every 100, she said.

14.42 - How to counter individual rogue elements trying to destroy your brand? Mark Rogers says, the way this ecosystem works, authoritative bloggers are linked to more often than others so are more influential; bad apples are identified as such and not gifted eyeballs. Essentially, unless your product sucks, relax.

And that's a wrap.

-- Rob