Questions to ask for evaluating monitoring tools:

• Data sources? Amount of data?  (millions of conversations/blogs per day!)
• What to monitor? Brands, products, competitions, sentiment, influencers, or customers?
• What scale? only a few products or thousands of products?
  
• Real time monitoring? Viewing results any time online?
  
• Whether produce Marketing/Sales action?
• How to measure success?

Automation for social media monitoring

For monitoring a few products or brands, it is easy to use the free tools listed above to identify web conversations like tweets or blogs. Most free tools send you alerts, while Web2express allows you to view monitoring results online. To get fancy graphs and trending reports, you may need to use the commercial tools.

Large scale social media monitoring

If you have lots of items to monitor, for example, 10000 or more products, you will find it inefficient to use any of the tools above. You would want to consider custom service that provides automated setup of large number of items for monitoring and additional analysis for potentially huge amount of data. Because you are dealing with so many products at the same time, it's important that the custom monitoring tool can sort through the data for you and produce reports highlighting where actions are needed most. This may be technical challenging. Web2express is focused on helping marketers to solve the problem of large-scale social media monitoring.

Using social media monitoring to drive marketing

Successful marketing is fueled by understanding target audience and continuous flow of fresh leads.  Social medial monitoring helps to collect these critical market information and customer insight. Particularly, you can use real time monitoring tools to effectively monitor all of your products, brands, and competitions at the same time and all the time. If you can tightly connect the monitoring process to marketing and sales function in your organization, then the monitoring will become a real driver or engine for your marketing.

Integrating real time monitoring into enterprise collaboration platform

Enterprise collaboration platform is becoming the center piece of integrating many specialized software and make them work seamlessly. Traditionally, CRM, business intelligence, and marketing software are all part of the collaboration environment. Now, social media and real time monitoring are also being added to the mix. By integrating real time monitoring into the collaboration platform, marketing or PR signals automatically picked up by monitoring service can alert marketing or PR team for action in real time. 

CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, recently announced on its Dreamforce09 conference that their second decade of effort in cloud computing is to build the "collaboration cloud", a secure enterprise collaboration environmen and social development platform. This enterprice application models collaborations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Watch Dreamforce09 keynote video.