In your web site logs you can see where people come from. E-mail or chat based link distribution shows up with no referring site. The other day I wrote a critique of the new web site Spock (which I'm surprised isn't a trademark).
Many other blogs picked up that post and some nice conversation happened. I was watching the activity from this and noticed a hole I'm fairly sure is the Spock company all looking at the article at the same time and discussing it.
This is an excellent use of web resources. Not knowing the means of internal link sharing, I can't say for sure if this is really focused social media. What would have really got me excited would be to see these all coming from an internal Spock research tag. Seeing an organized collection of research links for Spock would have been really cool.
At this time, the article have received 3 del.icio.us links. As seen to the left.
I love seeing focused blog viewing when it happens. Some companies, like 103bees, are really really good at this. The Windows Live Writer group has also been very excellent at reading and responding to blog posts about their product.
Why should Spock or any other company care if I know the tool they use to do internal research? Because it is a further element (and a fairly harmless one) of transparency. It's an easy way to show the world that you are participating in the market and not merely a supplier.
Might you end up linking to pages like mine that say nasty things? Yep. But you also get the opportunity to balance those viewpoints _and_ conveniently distribute information internally.
Either way, it is always welcome to see companies take notice of posts (good or bad) and know that the information there is incorporated into their planning.
Most recent example: I've been noticing that Foo Associates is apparently helping a product I'm a big fan of market itself. Why? Steady trickles of traffic to each mention of this thing from their Dabble DB.
Whether or not people and their user agents are smart enough to cover their referer [sic] tracks -- you're right. It'd be great to see more of these collections develop on some reasonably neutral ground like delicious.
Posted by: Brian | 18 December 2007 at 15:29