One interesting way of looking out for interesting projects or ideas on the net is to simply take a peek at your log files every once in a while. Today, while poking through the very large list of "unknown" user agents that AWStats spat at me, I ran across something from http://relevantnoise.com/.

relevantNoise is in the old-fashioned field of reputation management. Specifically, they’re dedicated to mining blogs for business intelligence. They’ll monitor what’s being said about your company (and about your competitors) throughout the blogosphere; allowing you to quickly see what you’ve done lately which made your customers love you – or hate you.

Reputation management is a very important part of marketing. When anybody with a grudge or a passion can very quickly create a website and publish their thoughts to the world, one satisfied customer can do wonders for your PR – and one badly handled customer can be extremely damaging.

In some ways, reputation management goes hand in hand with viral marketing. But rather than creating a buzz; you’re monitoring and managing the buzz created by others. When you’ve got bad publicity, you can jump on it immediately, deal with the problem, and possibly turn it into a success story.

From what I can tell, relevantNoise is a business intelligence company with a very good idea of the importance of blogs. You can read their own blog and get a pretty good sense for the character of the team and their ideas. It’s not a cold blooded corporate blog; the most recent post is focused on the positive buzz around Studio 60.

Reputation management is something that an individual can pretty easily do for themselves – subscribe to a few relevant blogs, run some Google Alerts on your name, etc. But at a higher level, having professional help is pretty crucial.

They could use a little site optimization help, though – unique page titles would probably be helpful towards building their site’s web presence.