One of the challenges with social media is simply keeping up with the latest changes, additions and disappearances. It seems that just when you are feeling a level of comfort with one tool, along comes another with better functionality, new features or just better graphs. And one of the hottest, most contestable areas is the areas of social media monitoring.
Now, I use the social web in a quite deliberate way – what I call simple social media. I use social tools to:
- Create user generated content
- Filter the vast amount of knowledge available
- Distribute ideas, links and content
- Provide context for the behaviours that we see every day
But how does this work? Let me give you an example.
Ken Burbary has created a great wiki of social media monitoring solutions. He lists the name of the company and the platform, what the solution monitors and links to the site where you can find more information. I found this via a link on Twitter (the filter in action) and am now publishing this as a record of something useful here on my blog. This post aims to provide the context for Ken’s wiki and why people might find it useful. My blog also feeds through to a number of other sites such as MyVenturePad and Gooruze (amongst others) – so distribution occurs across the web. This publishing process will, in turn, act as a filter for others – providing relevant information is a small, contextual package.
And the best part? By and large all this is freely available. So now, rather than wondering where or how to find the big list of social media monitoring solutions, you can now just keep an eye on Ken’s wiki.
