A friend of mine brought YourBuzz.com to my attention yesterday, which confirms one of my predictions for 2012 that monitoring data is becoming a commodity and what American Express / Clickable.com gives away for free now, used to be the stuff that social analytics platforms were charging people hundreds of dollars a month for (and in many cases, still do).

Social Analytics platforms will face challenges on one side from aggregaters like Clickable giving away monitoring for free, while on the other end, Google, creating crushing the paid services with Google’s relentless need to, like Saturn, devour it’s own children, this time with the Social Data Hub and Social Pluggins.  Under such pressure, in 2012, the best platforms will become like diamonds, improving their value by adding advanced segmentation capabilities and deeper analysis than Clickable or Google is capable of, or willing to provide (even if it could do so), but the rest will have to reexamine what actual value they are providing – since the data is essentially, free.

I guess we can haggle about workflow features, breadth and accuracy of data, but when it all comes down to it, the newer American Express YourBuzz.com is actually looks better than many of the more expensive alternatives, especially for brick and mortar business, and reminds me somewhat of what CloudProfile tried to do a few years back, but that attempt never seemed to take off.   Here’s a video that shows what YourBuzz is capable of, and when combined with the Search Marketing Services offered by American Express, seems to answer may of the basic social and search marketing needs of many smaller to midsized businesses, and mostly, for free (mostly as an added value service for AMEX Cardholders – though others can apply and get a YouBuzz account).

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I have friends at Clickable.com, but haven’t been over to their offices for a while, so I didn’t know they had scored such a large win, with American Express, till I have examined YourBuzz.com today.

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Tell me that this chart, above, using my social stream, identifying influencers from within it, in real time, isn’t  exactly what bigger HR Recruiting and big Pharma has been asking for over the last few years – they’ve going to their clueless PR companies for advice, been sold expensive reports and platforms, while right under their noses, Clickable comes in with American Express, and pretty much gives it all away for next to $0.00.

You have to wonder and that’s incidentally, one of the reasons I wrote my book , because people I came across were unable to distinguish quality and pricing of these platforms – a book needed to be written to expose what the capabilities and value proposition of these platforms really are, so I wrote that book (though I’m not the only one that dealt with this subject).

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There’s also a lot of free and low cost deals to get started with advertising – esp the LinkedIn $100.00 credit seems ingenious.

We can argue that what American Express / Clickable is calling “Social CRM”, isn’t really that at all – yet …. it does seem to hold an “audit trail” of interactions – so maybe it really is a form of basic CRM that we are seeing here.

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Not bad, American Express / Clickable – not bad at all.