But as Ertter implies, tools like Radian6 and Techrigy make it much easier to collate and organise the information. IMHO, the bigger the budget for social media programmes the more relevant a monitoring tool is to justify the ROI of the programme. However when I work with small businesses I never even consider such tools.

Monitoring Tool:
- Saves complex queries with wild cards and generational terms (such as plurals and singular forms, gender and verb conjugations, adjective forms, and verb conjugations)
- Enables layered queries for rolling up searches into categories
- Target specific time frames
- Identify trends (yes, I find charts to be rather insightful)
- The ability to tag and categorize mentions
- Assign response priorities and resources
- Calculated metrics like influence
- Customizable metrics like sentiment
- Drill down and slice & dice for analysis based on source, categories, specific query, and date

Social Media Search Engine:
- Find sources, domains, and mentions
- Some have sentiment but you can’t adjust it

Either way there is no magic button that pops out a report with everything I need to know. It requires an analyst to pull out the insight and make recommendations. The monitoring tools just make my job a lot easier.

IMHO, you somewhat need both. You obviously need the close-up walk-around-the-tables type of contact with your guests/clients/users, but you can get some interestings insights by sending someone to do remote surveillance for a couple of reasons.

First, when you are walking around, you can not join each conversation and you don’t know what’s happening at the other end of the room, maybe someone is complaining about the service and you might only know at the end of the meal when it’s too late. I would want someone to report it to me as it happens so I can act on it asap.

Second, you re-align a conversation as soon as you enter it. Which is usually good for you and your brand, but you might also lose some truthful and raw comments from people too shy to express it face-to-face (so to speak). But knowing about these comments and their strength can be valuable.

I agree with you that some of the insights you will get from a monitoring solution will be used to either analyze your campaigns (“we did x and the volume / sentiment needle moved x per cent in this direction”) or too get insights for traditional advertising or “good old-fashioned one-to many communication”, but that’s ok because you still need both : measurement and traditional advertising.

What’s dangerous to me is many people seems to think that by buying a off-the-shelf solution, they will get a clear picture of what they need to do and how to do it.

Great post again !