The news is out - TNS has acquired Cymfony.  The new operating unit will be called TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony.

I'm not surprised - in my opinion, this was inevitable.  In the Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave,
published in September 2006, one of the clear conclusions was that
Cymfony would be a great fit with a large research firm like TNS. 

Did they sell too early?  From what I can see, mainstream attention
is just starting to turn towards brand monitoring services.  In my
conversations with vendors, everyone loves the fact that Nielsen
brought attention to the space - now TNS ratchets it up a notch - and
my Forrester wave helped validate the market as well.  But nobody wants
to sell too early - like selling the rights to the Nike logo for $35 - and thus the market has been dating around, but not making long-term commitments.

Now,
expect additional activity in the brand monitoring market.  Other conclusions from the Wave:

I stumbled across a new Forrester blog recently and thought you might be interested in hearing about where other Forrester analysts are blogging:

• New media and marketing: Charlene Li
• Social computing:  Groundswell - Charlene and Josh Bernoff
• Devices and media: Ted Schadler, Charlie Golvin, and Paul Jackson
• Retail
• Security and Risk Management

The marketing team also had a conversation about why we blog.  Our feed subscription and site traffic have grown at a pretty decent pace and I thought it was a good point for a status check.  Some of our reasons:

There's a meme that has been circulating in blogs for the past couple of weeks called "five things you didn't know about me."  After posting an entry on my personal blog, I tagged five people with only moderate expectations that they would participate - and three already have (same day!):  Eric Kintz at HP and Charlene Li at Forrester, and Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership.

Hi - Brian Haven and I will be at the Consumer Forum EMEA, 20 - 21 November in London.  The theme of the event is "Integrating Social Media" which reflects a content focus on making things real.

If you can't make it over for the event, you can participate via our Integrating Social Media blog.  Our intent is to start the discussion before the event, enrich it during the Forum experience, and continue the debate afterwards.

If you are in town, drop me a line and let's meet up!

David Armano, creative director at Digitas, is currently giving a round of internal presentations at the agency called "blog's eye view: looking at the social network from a blogger's perspective."  I attended his Boston presentation this morning and came away impressed.  You can find his entire presentation here.

Blogging is still foreign to many companies, but agencies have particular pressure to get ahead of the curve and help clients capture value from the medium.  Digitas has embraced Armano's work and he has great lessons to share from his personal experience over the past eight months - illustrated too!  For example, the graphic at upper left is his image of "influence ripples" which describes how media sources impact one another.