Although this particular blog may be biased (for the first time ever, I hasten to add), perhaps the biggest story of this week has been the acquisition of Glide Technologies by Nasdaq OMX. You can read the full press release here, but essentially what this represents is the ‘first and only fully-integrated workflow solution for investor relations and public relations professionals’. It’s certainly an exciting time here.

In other news this week, PR Week reported on the changing role of PR based on the findings of the PR Census 2011, in conjunction with the PRSA. Topping the list for growth in importance over the last two years was online comms, along with reputation management, SEO and comms strategy development, all of which are also predicted to grow in importance over the next two years. Areas highlighted as having decreased in importance for PR were event planning and organisation, sales promotion and publishing and editing.

Evaluation-wise, the Green Book Blog has published an interview with analytics strategist Seth Grimes on sentiment analysis. Grimes is interested in using integrated analytics, such as linking content-sourced data with data from transactional and operational systems, to produce valuable Business Intelligence insight. The blog makes for an interesting read for anyone looking to take media monitoring to the next step.

One company looking into this is HP, who this week launched a study showing that data from social media can be merged with company data (ticket sales, customer demographics etc) to predict customer behavior with up to 90% accuracy. It highlights how critical it is for marketing to be integrated with IT to truly provide business value, allowing correlations to be drawn between conversations online and real-time transactions, for example.

Until next week.