Seattle-area social media monitoring firm Visible Technologies lands a huge Series C round:

Bellevue-based Visible Technologies said Wednesday that it has scored a $22M, Series C funding round for the firm’s social media monitoring software. According to Visible Technologies, the round was led by new investor Investor Growth Capital, and also included prior investors Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP.

That’s a good result for a company that has always seemed to be able to stay near the top of a competitive space.  Congratulations to the Visible team!

Greg over at Xconomy commented on the Visible funding news about 17 hours ago.  Interesting to note that the top goal of the company for the use of the new funds is to drive global expansion.  I’m not a great tea-leaf-reader (I think), but what that tells me is that Visible has matured to the point where they are thinking long-term market leadership, and obviously global is a component of getting and staying on top.

Also, interestingly, from a link on the Xconomy piece I found this blog  post which has some pretty negative things to say about social media monitoring in general.  Food for thought, but I don’t agree with the writer.  Social media monitoring has its place in our newly interconnected world and if it brings up problems like “hounding” or “silencing” of critics, well, then that’s a different problem to solve.  Merely getting information in front of people – accurately and quickly – is not grounds for disqualification of the entire segment.