We sat down with new kid on the proverbial monitoring block – Visible Technologies – last Friday. The company had $22 million of funding plugged into the business in 2005, plus backing from Investor AB (the muscle behind Ericsson and AstraZeneca) and WPP, which means it has unique equity behind it that combines huge business successes with a comprehensive understanding of global comms.

The business is enterprise-focused, with clients including American Express, Microsoft and Delta Airlines already on board in the US. After operating for just 60 days (on Friday) here in the UK, it’s signed up 12 clients already – bringing the global total to 100 with an average spend of $100,000 per year.

One of the recurring conversations we’ve had with monitoring providers is what differentiates one company from another. We asked Brandwatch about this recently, and we asked Visible’s European MD Craig Gordon the same question. He said that for Visible it was the human aspect that sets them apart, rather than a technological one. “We add value via our professional services, rather than saying that our technology can do such and such better than anyone else. It’s customer service, the entire process of holding hands as we work together, and making sure they get what they need out of the data we source.”

Dan Vetras – Visible’s CEO - referenced Forrester’s research into this industry, which the analyst house describes as ’social intelligence’. “This is the best way yet to describe what we do. We review 160 million websites every day, and don’t just show you the specific mentions, but provide context by showing you the entire conversation. It’s not about a random comment on its own, it’s about what that means.” In fact, of the 150 companies providing monitoring services globally (most of which are white-labelled versions of the same product), Forrester invited nine to talk to them while putting together its Wave report for this sector.

The other USP is that Visible considers its data to be some of the cleanest out there, as everything is de-duped before being delivered to its clients. In fact, monitoring is only really a small part of Visible’s suite, as the company also helps clients to understand what to do with the data it provides.

Like many of the other monitoring firms, Visible’s dashboard allows users to create benchmark reports, and aligns a company’s key performance indicators to measure success from the outset. Plus, there’s integration with workflow data, which makes it possible to flag actions based on mentions online to various parts of the business or specific employees. For regulatory purposes, the records attached to this make financial and pharmaceutical companies prime targets for Visible, as shown by the customer list above.

Visible’s dashboards are also configerable for different service teams within each client, meaning that each part of the company only views what’s relevant to them through the browser. A SaaS model makes access to data super-flexible, so if one team uses more data than another, billing reflects this.

Most impressive of all however, is that all of Visible’s sentiment analysis is conducted by humans, which is all but unheard of within the industry (and shows us why the fees are quite high). Data is scraped by proprietary algorthims, but analysed ‘by hand’. A measure of tone can be provided by its automated sentiment engines, but it’s very clear that that’s not what the company considers to be ’sentiment’. The accuracy rate of this human-based scoring is 74-80%, which might sound low, but is actually fairly impressive comparatively.

The company’s small business version, called truPULSE, provides automated tone analysis (remember, that doesn’t mean sentiment). At $500 a month for 20,000 pieces of content, it’s very competitively priced and, unlike many monitoring companies, provides a volume alert if you go over your allocated allowance of data instead of simply racking up the bills.

The company is currently piloting an integration with Omniture’s SiteCatalyst product, incoporating some of the functionality of Visible’s technology to the existing analytics suite. This will provide companies with a holistic view of online social conversations in order to interact with consumers, build relationships, bolster visibility and grow revenue.

We’ve got a few monitoring trials on the go at the moment, but next week looks to be D-Day for some of them to go live. Stay tuned.