The latest pairing to enter the social monitoring space is research giant Nielsen and Bazaarvoice, which uses a veritable stable of technology services to helps brands track user-generated ratings and reviews.

The two companies have partnered to provide a system that combines Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics dashboard (which tracks social media, blogs and websites for mentions of a brand), with Bazaarvoice’s consumer-driven insight, giving marketers a better understanding of  online behaviour. In practical terms, if people arriving at a website love a retailer or manufacturer’s product, but everyone else hates it, the discrepancy is easy to pick up.

The weight of Nielsen’s super-credible research, combined with the e-commerce stock that the Bazaarvoice team bring to the table (one of the co-founders comes from Coremetrics, others from Dell.com and Google) – makes them a formidable contender for larger businesses. Forrester anaylst Zach Hofer-Shall blogged about the partnership last week, saying that this move makes total sense as it’s time to stop looking at social media data as an isolated series of channels. “Start planning out how to integrate social data with broader customer data, marketing data, and web data. If you have ratings and reviews on your site, think about what you can achieve by integrating this data with other public social discussion. Social media monitoring is about more than the traditional social channels.”

The service will allow brands (than can afford the fee, which is as of yet a little unclear) to understand how consumer reviews of their newly launched product indicate a successful launch campaign, or that early warning signs of negative sentiment will impact sales of the product. They will also be able to compare these online reviews to those conversations occurring across other social media platforms in order to understand how the two relate to one another.