Changes in the Social Media Monitoring Field
A recent move by social media monitoring firm DataSift has Business2Community contemplating “The Stratification of Social Media Listening.” DataSift is now working with Tumblr to distribute that site’s content to subscribers, and writer Mike Moran takes the occasion to discuss ways social media monitoring has changed since he began working in the field five years ago. At that time, he says, it was all about crisis management, and SalesForce’s Radian6 was a central player. Moran writes:
“Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6 is still the biggest deal ever in this business. But the Radian6 purchase was the last gasp of the fully integrated software stacks in social listening. Top to bottom, you bought it all from one vendor. Radian6 crawled the blogs, screen-scraped the message boards, contracted with Twitter for the firehose. Radian6 analyzed the data. Radian6 presented the dashboard of streaming messages and the dashboard that aggregated the metrics.”
Lately though, Moran tells us, media monitoring has been moving away from the centralized to the stratified. Companies now have the option of straying from their Radian6 (or similar) structure to embrace other tools, like Tableau for their analytics dashboard, or Clarabridge or Lexalytics for text analytics. He expounds:
“Which brings us to today’s DataSift-Tumblr announcement. Why should you care? Because this stratification of social media listening is truly allowing the best solutions to be brought together out of component parts. Cloud computing allows us to quickly and cheaply cobble together these pieces into what our clients really need.”
Moran goes on to note that this departure from the integrated stack opens a myriad of possible advantages. Off-the-shelf solutions are no longer enough to stay competitive, he insists; to excel in social media monitoring now calls for a customized approach. That sounds like a lot of work to me. Organizations should not overlook the cost of added hours when considering their options.
Cynthia Murrell, October 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
