Collective Intellect, whose software helps corporations monitor the online buzz, has closed a $6.6 million funding round, the Boulder, Colorado, company said Wednesday.

The funding is the company's second venture round and brings its capital raised, including an angel round, to $11.2 million. Grotech Capital Group led the round with participation from prior investors Appian Ventures, Croghan Investments and new investor Crawley Hatfield Capital.

Three-year-old Collective Intellect competes in the nascent market for monitoring social media companies like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Competitors include companies like BuzzMetrics, acquired in May 2007 by the Nielsen Company, and BuzzLogic, backed by Adams Capital Management and Ackerley Partners.

Lawson DeVries, a vice president at Grotech, said the immediacy of Collective Intellect's technology gives it an edge.

"It allows brands in real time know how their advertising campaigns are going," he said in a telephone interview.

The initial premise of the company, founded in April 2005, was to provide financial intelligence to institutional investors, Tim Wolters, chief technology officer and co-founder, said in a telephone interview.

"The original idea was around the financial services space: Finding the smartest people on message boards and blogs and selling to the financial services market," he said. "Traders are some of the most demanding companies you could imagine in terms of getting information in real time and having data crystal clean."

The company succeeded in selling data to some Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds, but soon changed course to pursue what its executives believe will be a larger market in corporate marketing, advertising and public relations.

"The primary plan is to help companies understand social media to amplify traditional marketing campaigns or move some spend into social media," Mr. Wolters said.

In one instance, Collective Intelligence informed an unidentified food manufacturer that soldiers in Iraq were using its sweetener to mask the taste of drinking water, prompting the client to create a campaign to publicize the practice.

The latest funding will be earmarked to increase sales and marketing and is expected to help increase the 38-person headcount at Collective Intellect by about 25 percent this year.

Mr. Wolters said companies are hungry to track all forms of social media, including e-mail traffic to their own customer support units and company-created online communities.