I've taken a real interest in companies that monitor and analyze social media lately. I met some of them at the WOMMA Summit, and one of the fun topics was trying to figure out what to call their new industry.
It seems a little strange to call it an industry already, but the New York Times called it a "promising new industry" in yesterday's story on Nielsen BuzzMetrics. I guess that makes it official. Part of what makes this little industry interesting is the different backgrounds of the companies and what that difference means for their approach to analyzing social media. It also leads to confusing terminology.
Here are some of the terms I've come across. They all mean roughly the same thing:
- Blog monitoring
- Brand monitoring (Forrester)
- Consumer-generated media measurement (Nielsen BuzzMetrics)
- Conversation mining (Converseon)
- Internet word of mouth and competitive intelligence research (CIC Data)
- Market influence analytics (Cymfony)
- Online market intelligence (Attentio)
- Online reputation monitoring (search marketers)
- Public image monitoring (Nstein)
- Social media analysis (Matt Hurst)
- Social media analytics
- Social media measurement (Constantin Basturea)
- Social media research
I have my opinions, but I'd like to hear yours. Is it possible to find a common term? What's your favorite?
Tags: blog monitoring social media buzz
How about Collaborative Intelligence? Well, at least it's what we call it.
It has the advantage of appearing in Wikipedia, but that's not the meaning I'm after here. I suppose I should have given a definition, huh? I don't have a finished definition, but the term should encompass most or all of these activities:
I think Social Media Research is probably the best big umbrella term.
It's important to realize that many of the services are quite distinct and meet different goals, and that it's not mere "marketing differentiation" that leads to such a variety of terms.
Thanks for the clarification, Hans. I'm not trying to bury useful distinctions—there's clearly a difference between monitoring blogs and analyzing social media for brand associations, for example. The point here isn't to replace any of the more specific terms, but to consider what broad label to apply to the industry overall.
Nathan, it´s hard to find a definition that reflects the four diferent steps you mentioned and don´t look like a branch of advanced physics.
This is a challenge we had to face when we defined our area of activity. After many unfruitful and eroding debates, we finally decided to delimit that definition to the 1st and 4th activities you accuratly have stablished.
The definition we came up with was "Monitoring and analysis of the mobilised opinion".
It still is a quite "round-about" definition and does not fulfill the second and third areas of our activity. (Software-aided analysis of the data gathered and presentation of the data in a analytical framework).
I, anyway, hope to have contributed in some way to this interesting discussion.