Rick Joyce is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Perseus Books Group, which includes responsibility for several owned publishers (including Running Press and Basic Books) and over 350 publishers distributed through one of the company's three separate distribution arms and Constellation, their digital distribution operation. For the past couple of years, Perseus has been experimenting with a range of "social listening" platforms: software that captures disparate web conversations across web sites, Twitter and Facebook streams, and blog comments. But Perseus has used these tools in a different way. Rather than trying to track what has happened in the past, they are using the tools to target the places they should be actively marketing a book in the future. They are building profiles of topics, understanding how and where audiences engage even down to the nomenclature that they use. They find the right sites and the "power words" that can produce interest in a book in places where they can already see the prospective audience is gathering.