As the use of blogs, online forums, brand and product communities and social networks like facebook, twitter, linkedin, baidu, tumblr, pintrest, foursquare to name a few, has grown over recent years, the volume of public data on the internet has exploded at lightning speed.  Both organisations and individuals recognise that there is value to be gained from listening to and analysing these online conversations and as a result a number of social media monitoring tools have been developed and are currently available on the market.  These include:

• Radian6
• SM2
• Peoplebrowsr/kred
• Sentiment Metrics
• Sysomos
• Crimson Hexagon
• Visible Technologies
• Cymfony
• Nielsen
• Meltwater buzz

Each social media monitoring tool offers a different value propostion, based on their dashboard, the data sets they have available to them and the insight and reporting resources available to them.

To provide past clients with an overview of key areas to consider when evaluating and selecting social media monitoring tools, I produced the whitepare and questionaire below: