Do social media trackers adopt cookie cutter approach to meet corporate demand?

You want to search for social media? Well I wanted to so I typed keywords such as “social media”, “social media monitoring agencies,” “social media trackers,” “social media analysis and measurement” et al on google, the ultimate search engine. I tried almost all permutations and combinations. And what did I get. A handful of companies(35-40) selling sleek algorithm laced tools claiming to dish out each and every bit of information available on the internet liked to the keywords that you type.

The tools search not only the blogs, but chats, forums, discussion boards, mini blogs and the likes. Each company’s tool claim to crawl millions of blogs, chats and forums. Some of these companies are--Radian6, nielsenbuzzmetrics, buzzlogic, techrigy, technorati, trackur, brandseye, icerocket, ….the list is endless. If I continue to write the name of each and every company offering social media tracking tools, I will have to fill up many more pages. Hence I am limiting myself to just a few.

Some claim to offer human intervention in assessing the tonality of a post while others offer sophisticated algorithm that accurately defines the tonality of a comment. Some offer semantic searches while others offer to interact with client’s customers directly.

Some tools are free, others offer free trials whereas some are paid ones. Now the question that’s plaguing me is how to choose a tool. Should I use the free ones or the ones that comes with a price tag.

There are blogs….and more blogs..and so are the opinions floating around the world wide web. Although some bloggers have established credibility on account of the knowledge base they have acquired (Jeremiah Owyang, KD Paine, Nathan Gilliatt,Philip Sheldrake) among others, the general climate in the blogosphere is that of uncertainty about how to carry forward social media monitoring. As social media analytics is at a nascent stage, social media trackers are exploring the Web 2.0 to find answers for some elementary questions such as—

How do you measure social media accurately?

How can a tracking tool analyze conversations?

How does a tool read the tonality of a statement?

Tell now no one seems to have a satisfactory answer that can serve as a benchmark for the industry.

This brings me back to the question---so how do I choose a tool that will serve my needs? Well as technology is not very subjective in nature and it follows a certain protocol, any search tool will most likely throw the same results (how you apply the tool to find answers or deduce meaningful result is more important). As most tools crawl the same sites for aggregating data (there are some that track larger number of websites), the result will be only slightly skewed.

But do numbers really matter? Is your client interest is knowing each and every small and obscure data that talks about his brand on the internet or is he interested in knowing opinion of people who really matter to him. This brings us to the question of authority and accountability of savvy internet users who generate content.

I think the most important thing here is to aggregate content that comes from authoritative and accountable sources rather then collection of abstract obscure content that does not offer any credible content. After all for top brands, credibility of the media is sacrosanct. Do I hear somebody out there shouting Rating or Ranking….maybe a Moodys for the internet generated content!

………………………to be continued later

Social Media Networks--a treasure trove of News. Is it the end of Journalism?

Coming from a journalistic background with a stint in public relations and communications, an inclination to learn about the social media networking and its positive attributes seemed almost inevitable in my case. My curiosity to understand the social media space got the better of me. A month of goggling, surfing the net for any topic associated with the social media, scanning discussions involving highly rated social media bloggers, participants at discussion boards, forums and community networks got me thinking--- is social media here to stay?

Yes, without doubt, my inner self asserted! Social media seems to be turning an average individual into a prolific journalist. So is the future of journalists globally nearing an end.

Thanks to the discovery of social media space. Now everyone wants to be someone and what better way to reach the stage of becoming ‘someone’ by the exceptional tool called ‘The BLOG.’

A quick scan of few blogs on the internet showed emergence of a few thought leaders, a few reporters talking passionately about the things they like. It should definitely send a red alert to journalists the world over. They will have to reinvent themselves or face extinction.

In order to keep up with the rapidly expanding social media networks and the amount of news flowing around, even traditional media such as newspapers and magazines will have to innovate and reinvent themselves or they will be dead before one utters ‘Jack Robinson’.

This trend is visible for all to see. Take the case of the ongoing financial sector crisis in the US. A few days ago I was reading a top line international newspaper-- the epitome of classic journalism at play (name deleted for obvious reasons). And this is what I found. The newspaper was quoting discussions in the chat room about what people had to say about the crisis. Now-a-days even international columnists with impeccable reputation are taking their news pegs from blogs and chats.

If such trend continues, “traditional journalism” is sure to die a slow death. Although it won’t happen immediately but the fact that I am already referring to the so called journalism as “traditional journalism” is definitely a case in point. So what do we call social media journalism----the new age journalism! Any comments.