Social media is big business. The big players are getting bigger and everyone wants a piece of the action. But does big business get it? And will it use social media for good or evil?

Why is it that social-media listening, widely acknowledged to hold great value for marketers, is still not completely embraced by market researchers? Jack Neff writes compellingly on the subject recently in Advertising Age.

The nimble behemoth lumbers forward. It is only a matter of time before Google owns the brand-monitoring space. Radian6, Scout Labs, Techrigy, are probably looking over their shoulders as they compete for business among the PR firms scrambling to keep tabs on the social web. Google introduced Alerts in 2004 and became the first true technology [...]

Brand monitoring and social-media analytics are almost invariably lumped together, even by savvy marketing  folk. But there really should be no confusion between monitoring tools that simply catalog anytime and anywhere a term is mentioned and analytics solutions that give you a holistic view and true understanding of your customers. This isn’t to suggest that monitoring isn’t [...]

I credit Malcolm Bastien for inspiring the headline who says in a recent blog post: “Just like the enemy of web analytics is measurement of page views and visitors, the enemy of social media listening is listening only for brand mentions.” Such a great point. Counting brand mentions is only the tip of the iceberg [...]

So, you want to monitor a brand, or many brands. You want to know everything that is being said about your brand online, no matter who is saying it or where. You want to know everything and you want to be sure that you know everything. You want confidence and omniscience. Until recently, the best [...]