Social Media Listening #5 - Quest to integrate different types of data

There are now a vast number of tools available which relate either directly or indirectly to social media. These fall into a number of different categories, including reputation monitoring tools, social media management systems, tools to measure influence, web analytics and business intelligence software.

Social media is now a key part of the marketing mix and the insights from related tools must be combined with other types of data to create a holistic, 360-degree view of customers and their experience. Consequently, many reputation tools are evolving so they can either deliver broader insights or plug into other types of business technology. The industry is likely to see consolidation between different technology vendors as businesses reduce the number of point solutions.

Another key trend is that many analytics companies have begun to offer social analytics tools as part of their main web analytics package. In 2011, Adobe announced the launch of SocialAnalytics, a new product within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite that enables marketers to monitor, measure and monetise social media.

Although some reputation tools are evolving to become business intelligence tools, it is arguable that bigger players such as Adobe and IBM already have a head-start on business intelligence and online measurement. Therefore, social media monitoring vendors may have a long way to catch up, although their technology may have the advantage of being conceived and developed for a more specific requirement.

In the last two years, the industry has seen tremendous M&A activity, with specialists being bought out by larger media companies and multinational retailers, as well as consolidation between different monitoring specialists.

There are plenty of movers and shakers in the reputation monitoring industry and the key to success is to remove the silos between social media measurement, business intelligence and web analytics. The majority of companies are looking for sources of useful information, so whether the insight comes from a reputation monitoring tool or a business intelligence platform is largely irrelevant.