Thanks @jamkim for sharing this link pointing to A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions. Social media monitoring has ballooned into a crowded space and it’s helpful to see a quick glance of the many options out there.

As can be seen by the list of 147 items (as of this writing), the market is full of options when it comes to monitoring social media. Available tools range from free options using data and web services available on the open web to hosted solutions running custom software with varying price ranges along with varying business models.

When you look at this list, a typical first reaction might be, “There are so many options!! How do we know which tool to use?” But before you go too far, I’d say this is one of the classic situations where the first question you should be asking is “why?”

Why?

Why do you want to monitor what’s being said about your brand online? What will you do when you find out what people are saying?

You don’t need to have fully-fleshed answers and it doesn’t have to be overly complex (because honestly, by the time you figure that out, the world will have already moved on), but give it some thought before diving right in.

If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to invest in your people first and technology second. All the data you’ll glean from the online world will be pretty useless if you don’t have people who can interpret the data into meaningful information and then carry out some form of actionable task with that new-found knowledge.

Myself I get by with setting up a few custom searches in Google, Twitter, and a few other news sources, I take the RSS feeds from these searches, and then I aggregate the feeds into a single web-based interface.

Why? I’m doing it to add some perspective and context to what you can find out by using freely-available tools.

What am I doing with what I hear? Well, not much, at least not yet – but that’s ok because the reason I’m doing it in the first place is to build that perspective and context!

See? Simple! 🙂