Why delight? Announcements like this are another indication of the influence that social media is having on the communications environment. They also influence the thinking of senior managers, by ‘legitimizing’ the business reality of social media conversations, and thereby support public sector communicators efforts to engage with new media.

Chong describes the service thus:

To reflect the ever-accelerating news cycle, Chong Newztel has designed and built a digital platform from which we can monitor and aggregate content from weblogs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Hence the wry amusement. This purpose built digital platform sounds a lot like they have discovered RSS. They are offering the service at no extra charge (other than an increase in the number of pages you receive if you do feature in a contretemps in the blogosphere), which is terrific because you should already be doing this yourself.

Earlier this year I posted a simple tutorial on how to monitor blogs for mentions of your agency. It would take half an hour, at most, to set this up in either an online or a desktop reader.

By all means, use the agency services if you are already a subscriber, but relying on them would be foolish. The whole point of social media is to get in there, engage, and understand — not just sit back and think that you can outsource the monitoring function.

The BuzzMonitor

For larger agencies, or those with a higher public profile, you may want to consider something a little more powerful and sophisticated. Shortly after its public release, we installed a version of the BuzzMonitor at SSC. A couple of us have been playing around with it to see how useful it is in the New Zealand context.

Essentially, it is a way to not only track comment across a stunningly large number of blogs, but also to tag and aggregate those comments into a coherent conversations. If I had any criticism at all, it would be that, for a small organization like ours, the impressive feature list is hopelessly underutilized.

Perhaps with more time, I could add feeds featuring keywords for all of the public service departments so that we could track all comment about government agencies and then forward the relevant material on to each department… Like the UK Central Office of Information does, as Che Tibby noted last month.

In any event, all of this boils down to the fact that you need to be in this space, one way or another. Follow the tutorial and roll your own feeds, or use a service like Chong to get your feet wet; just make sure that you are tracking social media. Chong can see the value in this, can you?

At Chong Newztel, we have created a media list of this country’s most important and influential blog sites, and we expect this list to grow rapidly.

Disclaimer: I am not a Chong subscriber and I am pretty sure that this blog is not on that list…

Photo: Kaptain Krispy Kreme. Hat tip Karen Jones for the Chong release.