During that event and our subsequent Monitoring Bootcamp we analysed many of the leading monitoring tools, including Radian6, Sysomos, Brandwatch, Synthesio and SM2. We also suggested best practice for brand and reputation management and hammered out a framework for calculating and benchmarking the ROI of listening – which of course depended on what you were listening to and why.

A year on and the social media monitoring industry has dramatically developed. As happens in technology booms – and make no mistake, the social analytics market is booming – there has been a spate of acquisitions. Since Alterian bought Techrigy in July 09, Meltwater Buzz (which was reselling a white label version of Techrigy’s SM2 solution) acquired Buzzgain, a promising start-up co-founded by social PR guru, Brian Solis.

July this year saw, in my view, an extremely savvy deal, when Marketwire bought out Sysomos, the impressive Canadian solution headed up by Nick Koudas. Sysomos is a very smart piece of kit, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see them snapped up. But it was in May this year when Lithium, the social CRM company acquired Scoutlabs – a highly user-friendly social media monitoring tool, though one at the lighter-touch end of the analytics scale (where the likes of Nielsen BuzzMetrics weigh down the other) – that I think the most interesting development for the monitoring industry occurred.

As I mentioned in my previous post about social CRM, the big question for CEO’s whose companies are already monitoring the social web is now: how can we use all this data? By opening up their previously closed CRM databases to new flows of data from the web, companies can start to filter this new information to the people who can action it. In any fiercely competitive industry information is king and those companies that successfully grease the flow of information to their key decision-makers WILL be the winners.

I recently described social CRM as the end-game for social media monitoring companies – but it looks like rapidly growing social CRM companies, like Lithium and Jive, are going to subsume many of the monitoring start-ups before they mature. That said, the monitoring companies aren’t taking that risk sitting down. I know of several monitoring companies that are working with large brands to create complex, distributed systems to ensure that accurate, relevant social media data reaches the right people within their organisation in virtual real-time. Storing and enabling users to manage that data is, in theory at least, just one step away.

This is the topic I expect to dominate the discussion at our Monitoring Social Media conferences and Bootcamps in Boston, San Francisco, New York, London and Paris over the next 3 months – at least among the industry insiders. That said, there are an awful lot of big brands and agencies that are still only now getting to grips with social media monitoring and measurement. The “tools” and “brand management” questions will keep coming back time and again. We will also, doubtless, suffer the habitual cry of “Google’s coming!” and need to re-iterate the models for measuring ROI until they become a manta. Look out. Here comes the early majority.

UPDATE: I’ve just been reminded by @themaria that Attensity acquired Biz360 earlier this year too. Another smart acquisition in my view.

BrandWatch are serious data-heads. Having started out building monitoring systems for the British Government, they struck out on their own, creating a high quality social media monitoring and tracking system of their own. While some services (notably Market Sentinel) employ human intervention to measure “sentiment” in the posts people make on Twitter, forums and blogs, BrandWatch concurs with Scoutlabs, among others, that automation is the way forward when dealing with large quantities of data (as Seb points out, you get real-time trends, regardless of thhe inevitable inaccuracies).

BrandWatch works by enabling companies to set up a range of “classifiers”. These might include “industry”, “country”, “sector” etc. within which data should be tracked. They can then set the “keywords” they want to track within these boundaries – and the system does the rest. Once the data has emerged, the user can slice, dice and present it in a wealth of useful, fun and, if I’m honest, mind-boggling ways.

A particularly nice feature is “Groups” that enables companies to track their keywords across a set list of websites. So Mothercare, for example, might discover that they get more comments about their prams on Netmums, while their baby clothes stoke up more interest in the Confetti.com forums. Similarly, users can check which keywords appear most often in comments and which are increasing in frequency over time – i.e. what the hot topics are. These kind of stats and flows can have a huge bearing on advertising spend.

BrandWatch also measures the Influence of the people making the comments. This is done using a straightforward calculation of the “most mentions for a particular keyword” plus “credibility” – which is gauged by site traffic, in-links, page-rank and the age of the site. Evidently there’s a hole here – Twitter followers for example – but Seb assured me that will be filled in due course.

For anyone not familiar with tracking social media, BrandWatch, like many other services, offers hours of fascination: the peaks of activity on a Monday; the troughs at the weekend; the emotive spikes generated by “new” products (about which people are much more opinionated that old ones); the wild differences in sentiment detected between a brand and it’s latest product or marketing campaign; the amusing acceptance that, no matter how clever they get, computers will never understand irony.

The new version, BenchMark. looks to be a Netvibes-inspired mixture of drag and drop usability with some juicy additional features thrown in. In addition to the inclusion of more video data (i.e. stats and ratings), it will include “proximity” targeting of keywords, i.e. the ability to limit the terms covered according to their proximity to other words. I look forward to trying this out when it’s launched in a few weeks’ time.