The Monitoring Social Media 09 event this week was a 'standing-room-only' event. And I particularly enjoyed the presentations from Marshall Sponder, Giles Palmer, Brad Little and Katy Howell.

Here is a couple of points I made in my participation of the panel debating the future of social media monitoring.

Firstly, this sector will broaden its focus. I define social media as being a subset of the social Web, so the social Web = social media (blogs, facebook, twitter) + apps (tweetdeck, skype) + services (geo-location, social search) + the network (including the Internet of Things). Then things get really interesting!

Secondly, there are more than 70 vendors in this space, and commoditisation has effectively made data, indexing, simple analysis and pretty charts FREE. The conclusive step in this process will be Google's entry into social media monitoring, which I think might happen the first quarter of next year. Read more