Nielsen BuzzMetrics Nielsen bought the rest of BuzzMetrics in 2007 and used it as the core of NM Incite , its joint venture with McKinsey, in 2010. Suresh Vittal's January 2009 report, Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms also covered seven companies, two of which two were not in the 2006 report: Radian6 Acquired by Salesforce.com this week, but you knew that. Back-channel emails are a wonderful thing. couple of CEOs have pointed out how few of the vendors ever featured in Forrester's reports on social media analysis are still independent. Umbria Acquired by J.D. Companies MORE >>

Radian6 – I originally started with a firm that I own here at Avaya. They offer sentiment analysis, trend comparisons, geographic analysis, theme detection, authority measurement, demographic and, a classification engine similar to Radian6 or Sysomos and the same basic price point of about $500 a month. Sysomos – which is now owned by MarketWire is different than Radian6 or Alterian since it also indexes more traditional news (a nice touch). Syncapse – They are an “aggregator of aggregators” (they have Sysomos, Radian6, Crimson etc). So lets dig in! MORE >>

Over the last few weeks we’ve been carrying out detailed tests and analysis on 7 social media monitoring tools – Alterian , Brandwatch , Biz360 , Nielsen My Buzzmetrics , Radian6 ,  Scoutlabs and Sysomos – so that we can provide an in-depth review of the tools and a comprehensive report laying out the pros and cons for each tool. We’ve put the tools to the test by tracking well-known international coffee company Starbucks. We’ll cover: The basics of social media monitoring. Who’s using the tools and for what? An overview of each of the seven tools. MORE >>

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Image by clownbastard via Flickr. When brands are getting started in social media , they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to. MORE >>

Radian6 Radian6 offers a solution , where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Nielsen Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics , which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. MORE >>