Last week I wrote an article about Trion World Gaming in which I made reference to their impressive venture capital backing. More importantly, I made an error. I said that Peacock Equity was an NBC venture when, in fact, it was a joint venture between NBC and GE Commercial Finance – Media, Communications & Entertainment.

So I was wrong and a good reader pointed it out, and the mistake was promptly corrected. That’s one of my favourite aspects of the blogosphere: many eyes can spot even small mistakes. So after the favour, I wanted to see if the commenter had a blog of their own I could check out their handiwork. The poster left their email address when they posted the comment so I googled them.

Turns out that the domain it came from was actually a communications firm with a decidedly corporate focus. After reading more closely, it turns out that GE Commercial Finance is one of their clients. So it seems like the kind poster didn’t stumble upon this site looking for Trion, Wikinomics, or another interesting posting from yours truly. So with my slightly bruised ego, I did some further looking about the business of “policing” the blogosphere for corporate mentions, and ensuring people get their facts straight.

So what do these firms do? Shift Communications is one such firm, and they point out that the blogosphere (and other Web 2.0 tools) is a prime forum for public opinion which can influence others. They go on to say blog monitoring is a great way to figure out what people truly think about a product or service. The idea is that the blogosphere is a sort of early-warning system to identify if there are any disconnects between what companies want to portray and how consumers experience their products and services.

So consider this an open letter. I’ve mentioned Shift Communications. Will they find this site? In the hopes that they do, I pose the nice people at Shift a question: How’s business? Have companies been compelled to action thanks to blog-buzz? Or is it only for online PR catastrophe avoidance? In other words, do they sweat the small stuff or was this a one-off?