Social media monitoring is a hotly-debated topic, and a space that’s crowded with companies providing analysis and endless graphs or reports.

It’s no secret that many communications professionals are skeptical. Sentiment-based analysis is hard to get right and often technology isn’t comprehensive enough to catch every mention of a brand. However, finding out what people are saying about a client online is a necessity when you’re trying to manage their reputation properly.

As part of our ongoing research into the industry, we sat down with Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch and the company’s COO, Bryan Tookey. “It’s less crowded than it appears in fact, as so many services are just a white-labelled version of core products. We even do it ourselves, but it’s more prevalent within the monitoring space than any other”, said Palmer.

That aside, differentiation must be hard? Brandwatch was born out of a project that was intended to build a web crawler for the UK Government in 2004, and is one of the only ‘big players’ to remain independent – with angel funding in place. “A lot of the time our product speaks for itself. There have been several independent reviews that place us at the top,” said Tookey. The trial most recently carried out by social media agency Fresh Networks named Brandwatch the fastest at searching for and processing new online data for instance.

Of course, choosing your monitoring provider is a multi-dimensional decision. It’s not as easy as saying price or ‘x’ is the one thing that makes one service better than anpther. “These indpendent trials usually highlight two main things as being important across the board; user interface and coverage. We focus on both aspects heavily,” continued Palmer.

He used Google as an example as it’s a good benchmark as almost all web users are familiar with using it. “The average query length for a Google search is 1.5 words. However, these searches are often inaccurate, and after scanning the first few results many people give up or try again if they can’t find what they’re looking for. It also doesn’t take into account punctation or capitals – which is key when you’re trying to find out what’s being said about a product or service.’

Palmer then told us that in order to produce a good result, a longer search term is needed. However, Google sets a limit on how many words you can enter into its engine, and that’s why monitoring companies are often so useful. “What’s needed is for monitoring agencies to step up and create an online database of search queries that will provide communications professionals with the best queries for finding out about a specific company”.

There’s also consumer benefit to such a product, which could used to highlight the best sources to find reviews for a mobile phone (invaluable for a price-comparison site) – but understandably, monetising that would a hard task.

We’ll be testing Brandwatch’s service over the coming weeks and will be reviewing it in full. Interestingly, from Brandwatch’s perspective, they see media agencies as being far engaged with monitoring than the PR community. This could be due to the company’s natural experience in selling more successfully to that group, or it could be something connected to the product. Either way, we’ll let you know.