Latest Update: A Definitive List of Social Media Measurment and Monitoring Tools

Way back in April 2010 I compiled what I boldly claimed was a definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools. Since then, I've updated the list a couple of times and critically reevaluated my 'definitive' claim: Most likely, I've missed a lot of solutions and have certainly struggled to keep pace with the constant changes in the evolving social media measurement market.

My latest update saw numerous changes, reflecting increasing competitive pressures in a very cluttered marketplace. A half-dozen companies have disappeared completely, and several others have moved on to provide different solutions only tangentially related to social media metrics. There's also been a small number of acquisitions, most notably Salesforce.com buying the market-leader Radian6 in March this year. The net result is that the total number of solutions has fallen, although the quality of the survivors is very high.

If you're looking to buy a social media measurement solution there's a few important takeaways from all these changes:

• It's a Buyers Market
  Despite the predicted consolidation, there's still an abundance of companies supplying solutions. Companies are eager to get your business and you should be able to cut a deal for the right solution.
• Buyer Beware!
  Expect the consolidation to accelerate over the coming year. Be cautious about companies that aren't able to demonstrate good market traction, supply a full list of references, or just seem too desperate; they may well be gone in a year or two.
• Understand Your Requirements
  There's a broad spectrum of solutions out there, and every day new features are being added. Make sure you have a strong understanding of what you need to do and how a tool will help you do it. Take a look at the guides from many industry analysts (mine is here).
• Recognize that the Market is Still Maturing
  There is no perfect solution out there. Sourcing data, avoiding spam, providing adequate filtering, integration to marketing automation systems, providing easy-to-configure dashboards and reporting, alerting for your customer services folks... these are just a handful of important issues that are still being worked out.
• The Giants are Coming
  Finally, we 're still waiting for the obvious market giants... Google, Microsoft, maybe Facebook... to really enter this market. There's been ongoing rumors that Google was going to release a full-blown media monitoring solution; if they ever do, it could upturn the market and put an end to many of the companies I list. Stay tuned...

Radian6 Sells for 10X Revenues to Salesforce

There's over 100 tools available to measure or monitor social media traffic, but ask the average marketing pro for a product by name and they're most likely to mention “Radian6.” Whatever you think of their products – and there are detractors – the Canadian company has done an undeniably phenomenal job at marketing itself.

This week, we learned that Salesforce has acquired them for $326M in cash, plus $50M is stock. In interviews, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed Radian6 has annual revenues of about $35M, so he paid a handsome 10X multiple. Why so much, and why now?

Despite the cruddy economy, there's a nascent bubble emerging in social media-focused companies. Evaluations are skyrocketing even for start-ups unencumbered by income of any kind. Radian6 is on the peripherary of this market, but no doubt the evaluation reflected some of this hype.

Second, Radian6 has attracted a large pool of the kind of customers attracted to Salesforce's core CRM technology. At between $400 and $600 per month, Radian6 was priced such that SMBs could buy-in. The company also did a great job at selling through influential intermediaries – advertising and PR agencies.

Finally, the company ate its own dog food. The social media outfit worked the social media world tirelessly. Anyone remotely connected to their world, even lowly Uninfluentials like me, have been contacted by them.

Did Salesforce pay too much? Maybe. Certainly the hopes of many competitors will have been raised, and rightly so: expect more consolidation over coming months. Arguably there's also a new opportunity for these other companies to take up the position Radian6 held, and become the “leading independent” in the category. For sure, this is an early-stage market. Radian6 is a good company, but there's plenty of room to improve on their technology, and I speak from experience.

New Update: A definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools

It's been over ten months since I originally published my list of over 80 social media measurement and monitoring tools, and I continue to get a lot of updates. Many thanks to everyone for the corrections and additions.

This is my second round of edits and changes. This time, I've seen a handful of companies disappear (Intelligent Technologies, Kaleidico, Net Equity and Scanblog among them), as well as a few changes in business model or products offered. I've made updates to about half the listed, including Meltwater, Dow Jones, Appinions, Lithium, and Millard Brown.

You can find the complete and updated list here.

 I remain confused by the different capabilities and use-cases these products support -- am I alone?

Please let me know any omissions or errors.

It's not social media, it's social me.

Some days, my Twitter feed seems like nothing more than narcissism. And Facebook, MySpace, YouTube – even the names seem designed to inflate egos. As for blogs, the typical post can be conveniently summarized thus:

Me me me me. Me me me me. Me me, me me me me me me me me. Me me me – me me me me me. Me me me me. Me me me me. Me.

For all the talk, all the conversations, all the to and fro, is anyone really listening?

This all came to mind one night, working late. I happened to look at the Twitter feed of a self-professed Famous Social Media Guru, a man who actually claims “inventions” in the field and runs a successful business telling people that unless they engage with social media right this second their brand, their careers, and possibly the world will all come to a sticky end. His Twitter feed is a relentless stream of self-promotion, self-aggrandizement and unalloyed self-congratulation. He claims to follow over 2,500 people on Twitter, an impossible task and a transparent technique to amass as many of his own followers as possible. His heavily trafficked blog is an unaccompanied Variation On A Theme Of Me, with occasional intermissions in which he pays tribute to other Gurus in a virtuous cycle of ebullient backslapping. He's not alone; there's a whole boatload of these characters. It makes me grind my teeth and want to go to a distant Trappist Monastery with a vow of silence and not even a dial-up connection to the Internet.

And it isn't just egos that are getting over-inflated. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that investors are bidding up Internet and social media startups to levels reminiscent of the last Dot-Com boom. As straight-up, lets-make-money businesses, you have to wonder about the prospects of these social media outfits. We are, to paraphrase Gartner Research and Charles Dickens, at the peak of inflated, bubble-bursting, Great Expectations.

But wait. Might we be throwing out the proverbial baby here?

Can social media make business sense? For sure. In my day job, we use it very effectively to communicate with key stakeholders, and we've made major public announcement over our blog, with great success. It gives us transparent access to our customers, partners and fellow workers, and we get direct, fast, and unvarnished feedback in a way that was impossible with other media.

Can we link social media to real business outcomes that matter – say increased profits, happier customers, or lower overhead? Anecdotally yes, but we've still a long way to go. And lets face it, anecdotes don't count. This is why I remain convinced that measurement is the problem to crack. Measure the right things, and the right result will follow. In the meantime, see you at the monastery.

Update: A Definitive List of Social Media Measurement & Metrics Tools

Back in April this year I created a list of currently available tools that support social media measurement and metrics. I found 82 products on the market but confessed that I was pretty sure I'd missed things. I was right, and I got a flurry of comments and emails with corrections and additions.

The list has grown to 88 product. I've added MBlast, MediaHound, Meltwater News, PRMetrics, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon (taking the heavily contested award for the Most Esoteric Name), and UberVU. Sorry I missed you all, my oversight. I've also removed a couple of entries and made a bunch of other corrections.

You can find the complete and updated list here.

Sorry it's taken me this long to update the list. As always, keep your updates and corrections coming.

What is Buzz?

iPhones do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it...


Buzz, that is. But in the iPhone sense – the cool-hype sense - what is Buzz? How do you measure it, and when do you know you've got it? 

In marketing terms, we know that “Buzz” is composed of awareness, preference and – with due apologies to Cole Porter – even desire and love. People crave their iPhone, they are quite literally passionate about them – the brand-as-device has become a part of their identity and is valued beyond its intrinsic usefulness. This is a hallmark of Buzz: in some sense it goes beyond logic and reason – it is emotional – and this is why Buzz is so hard to define and to measure.

Most people agree that Buzz originated as a word-of-mouth phenomenon, a kind of groundswell, but beyond that definitions get fuzzy. In her much-cited 2000 HBR article The Buzz on Buzz, Renée Dye calls it “explosive self-generating demand” which doesn't strike me as particularly useful or specific (another takeaway from her article is how faddish Buzz is – her examples of buzziness include the long forgotten Pokemon, Beanie Babies and the movie The Blair Witch Hunt).

Not that others have got more specific since then. In her book Buzz, Mariam Salzman gives us this:

...buzz marketing is...organic; it is centered on conversational value; it is peer driven; it is strategic; and it spreads outward from trendsetter to trend spreaders to the mainstream.

Mark Hughes riffs in a similar vein:

Buzz marketing captures the attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand or company becomes entertaining, fascinating or newsworthy.

Both these books have a lot of good things to say, but like many other social media tomes they don't really give us a crisp definition of the fundamental commodity at hand. In social science speak, they certainly don't get us to a point where we can operationalize “Buzz” and thus measure it effectively.

This is a failure. How on earth can we have a conversation about Buzz, and all that it entails, if we can't agree on what it is? In many respects, this has echoes of past marketing conversations around another slippery concept, The Brand.

So, Buzz is elusive in nature and elusive to define. This hasn't stopped a boatload of companies claiming it and even naming products after it – Google Buzz, BuzzMetrics, ThoughtBuzz, BuzzTrace, BuzzGain, BuzzFeed and even BuzzLife. Buzz is Buzzy, I guess.

Let me know your ideas on what exactly buzz is...