There are a number of ways to monitor the web to see what and how your company and others are doing. Many of these require more configuration than the average business user is willing to engage in.  Workstreamer is designed to address the need of users such as sales and customer service reps, supply chain managers, and others who what to easily track what is occurring and what is being said on the Web about specific companies.

I recently spoke with Hank Weghorst, Co-Founder and CEO and Suaad Sait, Co-Founder, about their offering. It is described as a “real-time business listening platform” that allows you to stop searching and start listening. They automate the listening function for tracking business information, not just social mentions of your brand.  So it brings in data from blogs, tweets, social networks like LinkedIn, contact directories like Jigsaw, finance sites, CRM services like Salesforce, and more. The results are presented in a stream of findings that can be expanded to drill down on specific companies. You can see a sample screen below.

Looking at the screen above from left to right you first see the user and the companies they are following.  Then you see the feed of detail as around each company. The waving line shows the varying amount of buzz. The numbers indicate the change in mentions from the day before. Then the company details are offered with icons linking to such sources as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Jigsaw (the business card site). The next column provides what they call the tone cloud. It is a tag cloud like visualization that shows the key themes emerging for each company and allows you to drill down to the specific mentions.

In the far right column you can see the other team members. Workstreamer allows the formation of groups to share information. They start with others in the same domain but then others can be added.  This team feature comes in handy as you can comment on results and these comments are shared with team members. For example, a sales manager can point out the significance of news items to the rest of the team or ask someone to follow up on a change within a client.  You can see a comment in the screen below

One of the things I especially liked was the capability of expanding the results through specific visualizations. For example, the numbers of job openings over time is presented in a line graph.  Details on executives from Jigsaw are displayed in a table. Each visualization is specific to the type of data covered. Below you can see an example of job postings for a tracked company displayed in chart within the stream of other news items.

It is very easy to start tracking a company. Workstreamer has already added over million companies into their database and they continue to add more. So if you type in a name, they offer you instances to choose from. If the name is not in their database yet you can still start tracking it. I gave them the name of a very small local company and they came up with it instantly.  The goal is a one-click start and this appears very possible.

Workstreamer does a lot of filtering for business relevance so you are not overwhelmed by useless information. You can also select to narrow results to specific content types such as news sites or social media.  In addition, you can connect Workstreamer to your LinkedIn and Salesforce.com accounts. They provide nightly email summaries of the top news in the firms you are tracking.

The current version of Workstreamer is free. They plan to remain free through 2010 to build awareness. The free version will always be available and always retain its features. In 2011 they plan to offer a fee-based premium version with additional features. For what I have seen the free version is quite robust and useful.  I am very impressed with both the ease of use and the usefulness of the data visualizations. I plan to give it a try myself.