The first post in this series examined the volume of “buzz” around Social Media Week NYC that is taking place next week here in New York.   What is the buzz made up of?

Remember – I’m using exactly the same query in all the platforms for the same period of time – the only way to do this.

Radian6

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2

Note: comparing Radian6 and Techrigy we already see a problem - Radian6 counts 390 blogs while Techrigy counts 66 blogs – Radian6 gets 964 Tweets while Techrigy gets 450, but both have very little coverage of Facebook, which is still mostly a walled garden.

Sysomos has 307 (closer to Radian6)  blog posts and 165 News mentions (similar to Techrigy) while Tweets are a sampled and Sysomos says as much.

Brandwatch numbers are much lower – but we don’t know if that’s good or bad yet.  News had 30 items while 72 blog posts and 24 tweets were found.

Biz 360 had 677 tweets and 168 Blog posts

My take away is that most people will never get the opportunity to meaningfully compare monitoring platforms in the way I am doing … because they can not get access to the platforms and don’t have the curiosity to test them the way I have. But now you can see just how different they are in their abilities, today, to track the same query across social media on the web.

On another level – it probably doesn’t matter that much each platform is so far apart in results it collects, because people will tend to believe the version of the truth that suits them the best.   Still, without the knowledge of how different they really are – an informed decision can rarely or ever get made.

My next post will be about Sentiment Analysis of these 5 platforms  – whew – that is a hot topic!