Meltwater buys Ice Rocket
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Item

The puns must be flying around their respective offices today: Software as a Service group Meltwater has acquired social media search engine Ice Rocket. Just the names alone make this a match made in heaven. However, at least for Meltwater, the acquisition also makes sound sense from a content point of view.

Meltwater has made the news frequently, and has been the subject of many a LiveWire posting, with its battle against licence fees imposed by the Newspaper Licensing Authority (NLA). In the latest round, Meltwater and other aggregators lost their appeal at the High Court, which means that the original ruling, allowing for both aggregators and customers to be charged for accessing news links, still stands.

Aware of the dangers of fighting losing battles, Meltwater has been moving away from what paidContent has pointed out is its core business offering of news aggregation towards more social media monitoring. After all, many social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn now also provide links to business news and are increasingly used for competitive analysis. What’s more, their links are free.

The acquisitions of BuzzGain in 2010 and JitterJam earlier this year fit into Meltwater’s game plan of wanting to offer its clients a comprehensive social media monitoring service. According to CEO Jorn Lyseggen the aim is to generate $100 million in social media business within three years.

Although Ice Rocket is less well known than Technorati for blog searching, I have always preferred its search engine. I have frequently found items via Ice Rocket that did not come up on Technorati or a Google blog search, for example.

It will be interesting to see how Ice Rocket is integrated into the Meltwater Group. Follow these links for a two-part review by Robin Neidorf of another Meltwater Group product aimed at PR professionals.

« Blog