PhillyDeals: They're listening to your online postings

What are they saying?

Rudy Wolfs, chief information officer at ING Direct Bank, looks online and sees "a growing fire hose of information flying at us" from the American public. Brands and products uplifted and defiled by a chorus of millions, every day, on Twitter, Facebook, blog posts, comment boards.

Instant feedback between friends? Corporate America wants to see it, own it, exploit it. But first, it's got to be pulled from the vast unwieldy pile.

Dutch-owned, Wilmington-based ING Direct Bank controls $90 billion in U.S. home loans and investments. But try Googling for posts that name "ING." They're everywhere.

To sort and rank what people say about the bank and its rivals, Wolfs hired ListenLogic. The firm's 10 Fort Washington-based analysts and five-member Milpitas, Calif., computing staff boast that they can track every public post that links "ING" with "account" or "mortgage" and other brand and bankerly terms, and useful verbs and references and contexts, filtering out the crushing crowd of "false positives."

Then it ranks the actual ING posts and sends them to ING staff, grouped, and graphed, and color-coded - green for positive mentions, red for complaints, customized per request. "We also use it for security. If there's consumers talking about frauds or issues of security related to our competitors or ourselves, we want to know about it," Wolfs told me.

ListenLogic is a small (sales below $5 million a year) and recent (2007) entry to a market that includes early movers like BuzzMetrics (now Nielsen MediaMetrics), and Umbria Inc. (now part of JD Power & Associates).

"Yes, it's Big Brother. But it also makes for rock-solid customer service," says Mark Langsfeld, founder and chief executive officer of ListenLogic.

"I can tell your most-loved and -hated products," added Langsfeld, a former investment banker, real estate dot.com executive, and Wharton graduate. "We're looking for every public mention on Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Finance message boards, you name it.

"See what this means? No more guerrilla intelligence, talking to your competitors' managers. No more focus groups."

Context is key. "What does 'Sick' mean? It's very positive, in snowboarding. It's very negative at a restaurant. In health care, it's there all the time," said ListenLogic managing partner Vincent Schiavone, a Northeast Philadelphia native and Temple graduate who helped Langsfeld start ListenLogic after he sold his firm, spam-detector TurnTide, to Symantec Corp. for $28 million in 2004.

"Ever since online media became available 25 years ago, we've seen its value for concentrating the experience and knowledge of people dealing with illness," says Bruce Grant of Digitas Health, a Philadelphia online marketing agency (owned by France's Publicis) that serves drugmakers. Grant uses ListenLogic "for in-depth understanding of the needs and values and behaviors of people using social media."

GSI Commerce Inc., King of Prussia, uses the service to check "what people are saying about NFL bobblehead dolls" and other products sold online by GSI customers such as the National Football League, GNC Nutrition Centers, and Bath & Body Works L.L.C., said Gerry McGoldrick, vice president of interactive marketing at GSI's TrueAction division. "They're great at filtering out all the noise" and targeting problems in shipping or customer service.

"Somebody big's going to suck this company up. That's why I invested," Ariba Inc. founder and ex-SAP AG software sales executive Paul Melchiorre told me. The South Philly native joined Villanova professor Steve Andriole, state-funded Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, and other locals in raising $2 million to finance ListenLogic.

"This is a hot space," Melchiorre added. "I got pulled into social networking to keep my eye on my four kids. I Facebook-friend them, I want to know who they're with, what they're doing."

So do companies. "This way, you can figure out what people are saying about you before you're front-page news."

Is it unsettling that firms track your posts? If you want privacy, remember the advice Cardinal Richelieu is supposed to have given his client, the king of France:

Never write a letter. And never destroy one.