Today at Mashable, Jim Toobin (who is the president of Ignite Social Media) wrote a fantastic post about the future of our field: Why Social Media Monitoring Tools Are About to Get Smarter.
He mentions both cluster analysis and semantic analysis as avenues for future development and accurately describes some of the challenges that go along with these approaches. These techniques are at the heart of Nexalogy’s unique approach to Social Media Intelligence – and are a key element of the value we offer our clients to use social media to do much more than simple monitoring.
For me, this post is another indication that what we’re living through is not the birth of one industry but two: SM Monitoring and SM Intelligence. They’re different jobs with different goals, and the things required to do monitoring well (and that the key monitoring companies have done a good job deploying) are not necessarily the things required to produce valuable intelligence that can feed directly into brand strategy or corporate risk assessment scenarios.
