Here’s a great story about the transport company DHL in relation to a Swedish artist (Erik Nordenenkar) claiming to have done the world’s largest drawing by putting a GPS tracker in a suitcase that DHL had to transport all over the world. In the end, the story about the DHL trip turned out to be fake. A giant YouTube viral stunt by the artist, but not necessary good publicity for DHL.

A blogger (Dan Calladine) has illustrated the story using Attentio’s Trendpedia blog search engine to show that DHL’s buzz is going “viral” all over the world right now. The blog posting is a nice example of how social media monitoring can be used by consumers as well as businesses to track buzz around certain events. Read Dan’s blog posting to get the rest of the story. This blog post illustrates the artist’s DHL viral stunt using Trendpedia. It includes the artist’s original YouTube video. Here is DHL’s buzz around the story as reported on Trendpedia. See the full drawing on Wired.

I’ve been doing some demos with the software recently, and I’ve come up with a general pitch that seems to appeal to our clients. I want to post it here, hoping for feedback on my powers of communication.

Attentio is a personalised (or rather, industrialised and/or corporate) media manager. Acting as a filing system of all online content, Attentio organises and stores information as it is created in the Internet. It’s one stop-shopping for all the information that you need, organised by source, subject, language, country, etc.

For example, Attentio’s tools note that MySpace is outstripping Facebook in overall popularity in forums and blogs, but Facebook users are more well-rounded than MySpace users. People that talk about Facebook also talk about books, movies, and Facebook’s notorious privacy policy. MySpace posters tend to be less finicky about their privacy policies and more excited about music and cds.

LinkedIn professionals, who prioritise privacy, are increasingly visible in the Spanish and French language blogosphere. LinkedIn’s Facebook tool is also picking up in popularity as the first Facebook generation graduates from socialising to networking. All this Attentio presents in lovely graphs that allow you to clickthrough to access the content that’s been filed for you.

There’s a joke that says the difference between business and economics is that business treats money as finite. The more money one person has, the less others are able to obtain. Economists know money is man-made, just like markets.

Man-made markets are why social networks are online media superstars these days. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like have bottled up beaucoups de potential markets. Individuals involved in the networks connect over common interests. These wants and desires are all bottled up online, waiting for some entrepreneurial genie to grant the multitude its mass of group wishes.

The information in these networks is posted for free. The trick, as in any business, is managing the information. Monitoring and measuring the trends and receiving up to date details about what the people in the networks are discussing and why. Market researchers can waste hours every day searching for every article that mentions their markets or potential markets. Or they can use Attentio software.

Where there is consumer will, there is a consumer market. And the success of any market lies in identifying the consumers, letting them know that they constitute a market, and organising their demands to meet your supply. Or is it the other way round?

Either way, this is stuff any economist or business person needs to know.

I’ve been reading online about the importance of social media monitoring in reducing the money wasted on advertising. Mediapost had some nice things to say about the recession and companies learning to shore up their budgets by being more cautious about their marketing.

In Europe, word-of-mouth and online marketing is not only a low cost with a great many benefits, it’s the safest, most respectful way to reach clients and consumers. The EU is very protective of European consumers. “Push” advertising, in-your-face, direct-to-consumer ads, are frowned upon. For some corporations, this kind of marketing can even result in legal action.

For example, pharmaceutical corporations are very limited in the information that they can provide to consumers, and they’re even more limited in their methods of distributing this information. France has required Yahoo! to limit the information that can be accessed by French consumers to be more in line with French rules and customes. The French Parliament is now considering making encouraging anorexia a crime, and in some Southern European countries, models are already required to present health certificates to their employers. One has to wonder how this trend in consumer-citizen protection legislation will eventually affect marketing.

Online marketing, however, is saving time, money, and respect for different legal and cultural traditions by creating content that “pulls” consumers rather than push them. This, the EU and European States determine, is okay. If a consumer accesses the information rather than has it foisted on them, then everyone is happy.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive at Oracle, pulled in a cool 92 million pounds in exercised stock earnings in addition to salary last year. Howard D. Schultz, CEO of Starbucks scored a salary plus stock options that topped 50 million pounds.

AC Milan’s Kaka is expected to gross (only?) 7.5 million pounds this year, and chances are the aforementioned chief executives will be spending more time at the top of their careers than the footballer. Physical ability tends to peak at some point, while CEO salaries…don’t.

It’s a competitive corporate market, and CEOs are the new celebrities. These demigods of commerce are usually made up of a face, a known name, and a paycheck that sparks shareholder controversy.

Studies suggest that the share value of a company can be correlated to the “value” of its chief executive officer. This is part of what nailed Nardelli, the highly criticised former CEO of Home Depot. Yet despite Nardelli’s short, less than shiny record at the head of that somewhat shaky ship, the man got a sweet send-off to the tune of 210 million US dollars, over 106 million pounds. Now that is heavy censorship.

CEOs are more and more the superstar, scapegoat, and celebrity of the modern corporation. They trade in trust and infamy, linking their own reputations to the firms they represent. A lot of the value of a CEO is tied up in his visibility. One has to wonder, who’s the buzziest of the big business men, and in relation to which topics? And just how is that affecting share price? Or company brands and products?

At Attentio, measurement is underway…