As a follow-up report to our social media marketing ebook, I’m considering writing a report that would evaluate and compare the current social media and brand monitoring tools for the enterprise (Radian6, BuzzLogic and so forth). I need to learn more about these tools anyway, so this would be a systematic approach to a bit of professional development.
My initial research indicates that there are two sets of information about these tools: free (which is often incomplete, hard to find and shoddy) and analyst reports from Forrester and the like (very thorough, but also quite expensive).
I’m thinking of devising a 40-to-50 page ‘cheap and cheerful’ report, pricing it at about $99 and marketing it to small to medium-sized marketing agencies, and larger companies that might not have a Forrester or Gartner subscription.
What do you think? Are you aware of any such reports? Do you figure there’s a sufficient market for such a document? Any and all comments welcome.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Many people, including social media folks, are likely unaware of the existence of many of these tools. They tend to do things “manually” — Google Alerts, technorati tag feeds, etc.
So, yes, +1, I think this would be very useful.
Monitoring social media is, I think, a really complicated process. Too many parameters, to many communities, all interconnected.
I just wrote my master thesis about attention and participation in the social web and put it on as a wiki.
Although, I did a very thorough research, I didn’t know about such tools.
Could you link to some examples, to take a look?
robojiannis: I linked to two such examples–Radian6 and BuzzLogic, above.
my bad. I thought they were companies using these tools.
I’m on to it, thanks.
No worries. I’ll check out your thesis.
You’ve seen what Visible Technologies is doing?
But, yeah, I think this would be useful.
Darren,
Glad to see you’re thinking of doing a report. I will through our hat in the ring as well — http://www.CollectiveIntellect.com. In our estimation, its more than just about monitoring, its about measuring how what you (or your competitors) are doing is moving the needle. We also help companies identify the influencers so they can build authentic communication with the right people.
P.S. I was alerted to your post using our own service, because I use it myself to monitor conversations about social and online marketing and metrics.
Darren,
Are you aware of the Guide to Social Media Analysis? It’s a buyers guide I put together last year (currently working on the second edition). It covers the tools companies and the services companies, with the goal of helping companies discover their options and get through the initial information gathering.
http://www.socialtarget.com/research/
I try to find every company that gets into social media monitoring and analysis. It’s a growing task–over 100 companies in the database now.
Nathan: Thanks for that. That does look pretty comprehensive.
Darren,
Good to know you are increasing knowledge on this. I work for a pr company in Nigeria and we planning going into this (media monitoring/ mm tools). its new here.
I will appreciate if you can furnish me with on any development.
I am happy to see so many companies now offer social media monitoring services. But I’ve quickly put together a list of no less than 37 of them. How do I chose one? I can pay for just one of them. Nathan, When is the second edition of “Guide to Social Media Analysis” going to be available?