September 1, 2009
By Lauren McKay,

The 2009 Rising Stars - Visible Technologies

At the rate information's zipping across the social Web, companies are finding it nearly impossible to filter out the noise and glean the truly important conversations. Thanks to social media monitoring companies such as Visible Technologies, keeping up with the chatter isn't so bad.

Visible Technologies, a provider of brand management services founded in 2003, has recently been taking social media analysis and monitoring to the next level-not just showing the ongoing conversations, but telling companies which ones to pay attention to. Blake Cahill, Visible's senior vice president of marketing, says the hyperspeed of social media channels forces the company to keep innovating just to stay ahead of the curve.

Visible's strength isn't the ability to gather masses of information, Cahill says, but to identify the needle within that haystack. Visible is one of a number of vendors specializing in managing social media for businesses-including the powerful Radian6, which might easily have taken this slot. Yet, Visible is, if you'll pardon the expression, the one getting seen by analysts. "Based on the research I'm doing and what I'm hearing I think [Visible] will continue to make good traction," says Jeff Zabin, an Aberdeen Group analyst. Visible also seems to have some visibility of its own, sensing the hot-ticket item of the moment. In February, that ticket was Dan Vetras, who Visible named as its chief executive officer. As the former president and CEO of Talisma, Vetras brings Visible a wealth of customer interaction experience.

"They've built a great amount of brand equity partly due to continuously innovating," Zabin says. "Part of that stems from [Visible's] impressive ability to collect data not only within the universe of social media, but also in being pretty good at integrating with traditional media as well." Zabin adds that Visible has managed to succeed in an area that has tripped up many analytics vendors-sentiment analysis. "They have some nice workflow modules for a brand, which makes it easy to disseminate insights throughout the organization," Zabin points out.

The company claims to house 270 million conversations in its data storage. That's some powerful stuff-and the company knows it. Although not explicitly promising any link-ups with big CRM vendors, Cahill says Visible is doing what it does best-paying attention. Us, too.