Techdirt started life as a blog focused on the intersection of business and technology. One of the early reactions from the market, was that enteprise customers really liked what they were doing (the analysis, the blog format), and they wanted to use it for competitive intelligence, general market intelligence, and ongoing information about new products and services.

Key observation: The bloggers are the new influencers. If the enterprise isn’t involved in the discussion on the blogosphere, then you are too late.

The newest thing that Techdirt is doing is … the Techdirt Insight Community … the idea is to match subject matter expert bloggers with rapid research needs for corporations. Let’s say a corporation needs some analysis done on a slice of enterprise software, about trends, features and competitors. They need feedback from experts. Techdirt can collect together a group of bloggers with subject-matter expertise, for answering the company’s question.

There are different ways that an organization can connect with the community: Eg,
1. Challenge Issue … write a set of questions, post it publicly, and bloggers can respond on line to that issue. The company reviews the responses, and then pays a pre-set amount of money to a certain number of top bloggers. Eg, $1000 each for the top 5 points of feedback. This format gives a competitive element, but there is a possibility that you might not win … but the blogger retains ownership of the content. The company can still use it if you don’t win, but the blogger can still use it too.
2. Commission Issue … this is where a company specifically engages a certain person for $1500, or some other figure. The system allows the blogger to go under NDA to the company.
3. … and then there are different flavors of the above two main ones.

Expertise of bloggers is judged before bloggers are invited into the programme. Because of the availability of blog published materials, it gives a way for Techdirt to pre-judge / qualify expertise.

This is research and analysis 2.0.

Learn more at www.techdirt.com.