Just sat through a webinar on social media monitoring put on by Cison. It is pretty interesting the system they have to monitor social media. (pretty much everything except Facebook, which apparently does not allow monitoring of there site by outside firms) There system offers

• Monitor all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, and Twitter with the ability to filter by country and media type
• Track the viral nature of each post with influencer metrics that are constantly updated
• Sort, email and download results by publish date, comment count, unique commenters, and influencer scores
• Monitor globally with multiple language support including; English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Simple Chinese, Korean and Japanese
  Quoted from the Cison site.

All this for around $595 a month. Not bad. But during the webinar, Cison mentioned they had partnered with Radian6, and if you go to Radian6’s web site they are selling the same product – I wonder if it is the same price.

With the rapid growth of social media on the web, it will only be a matter of time before there is more companies specializing in this type of monitoring. What I wonder is how long it will be before Google is offering a similar service for free?