What about Analytics in Social Media monitoring?

Listening posts monitor the "chatter" that is occurring on the Internet in blogs, message boards, tweets, etc

Date:

Fern Halpern Blog, May 12, 2010.

I couldn't help but think that a) it was nice that his company could get its feet wet in social media monitoring using a tool like this and b) that they might be getting a false sense of security because the reality is that these social media tracking tools provide a fairly rudimentary analysis about brand/product mentions, sentiment, and influencers. For those of you not familiar with listening posts here's a quick primer.

Listening Post Primer

Listening posts monitor the "chatter" that is occurring on the Internet in blogs, message boards, tweets, etc. They basically:

Aggregate content from across many, many Internet sources.
Track the number of mentions of a topic (brand or some other term) over time and source of mention.
Provide users with positive or negative sentiment associated with topic (often you can't change this, if it is incorrect).
Provide some sort of Influencer information.
Possibly provide a word cloud that lets you know what other words are associated with your topic.
Provide you with the ability to look at the content associated with your topic.

They typically charge by the topic. Since these listening posts mostly use a search paradigm (with ways to aggregate words into a search topic) they don't really allow you to "discover" any information or insight that you may not have been aware of unless you happen to stumble across it while reading posts or put a lot of time into manually mining this information. Some services allow the user to draw on historical data. There are more than 100 listening posts on the market.

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