For marketers, social networks offer a goldmine of data about topics and brands. But there’s actually too much data to easily parse for most companies to get at the most valuable data. That’s why IDG has built Social Scout, a new service powered by Networked Insights.

The idea is to be able to filter through some of the noise associated with social media. This in turn helps b2b marketers learn what people are saying about brands rather than just that they’re talking about them. “It’s significant that they’ve [IDG] chosen an analytical listening tool over a monitoring tool,” says Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights.

Neely goes on to note that a company the size of IDG could have chosen any firm to help them in this work, but clearly they felt Networked Insights offered something unique. The company also counts other big brands such as P&G, Kraft, Fox, McDonalds, Walgreens, and Cisco among its customers.

And it’s not just about filtering the social data, it’s also that Networked Insights tech provides realtime data, so there’s no need to wait for curated reports to come in. The technology behind this apparently uses both text modeling and pattern recognition to filter messages this quickly.