I wasn’t able to find anything on the web about this, so I’m not sure how real it was, but IBM was showing a demonstration of Social Media Data Mining.   The concept was simply to take social media, forum, message board, and other data aggregate it for analysis, sentiment, etc.

The aggregation of social media data for a retailer to monitor their brand will be ’standard equipment’ for large chains in 5 years.   Companies like Radian6, Scout Labs and Visible Technologies are leading the way.

Photo by http://www.freshpeel.com/