If you’ll forgive me mashing up a couple of trite metaphors, we need to talk about social media monitoring – because right now we’re sharing a room with both an elephant and an 800lb gorilla.

I’ll start with the elephant: current social media monitoring services are not good enough. The three main problems with them are:

1) Pricing – pricing structures are complex and if you have sophisticated, constantly evolving monitoring requirements it can be difficult to manage costs.

2) Limited breadth – some monitoring services use their own crawler technology to scan the web, others buy their data in from a third party. Either way, you’re often only getting a limited, incomplete view of the web in your monitoring results.

3) Spam – spam filtering in many social media monitoring tools is very poor, so the results feature a lot of junk rather than genuine conversations about your brand. Consequently, all those lovely charts and graphs in your reports are based on inaccurate data.

To make matters worse, the automated sentiment analysis technology that social media monitoring sales people often like to tout as a key feature is wildly inaccurate; the technology just isn’t strong enough yet.

None of this should be taken to mean that social media monitoring tools are completely useless. Despite these failings, in organisations where there is little social media expertise monitoring tools can help the comms team to build a picture of online conversations and better inform their decision making.

But the market is confused and fragmented. There are dozens of monitoring tools, lots of different pricing models and extremely variable quality of results. Clients may feel comforted by buying into a big-name monitoring solution, but spend some time trying out the lesser known solutions at the lower end of the market and you may be left wondering how the massive price difference is justified.

Enter the Gorilla

If you want somebody to give you the most comprehensive view of brand conversations on the web, do a good job of filtering out spam and provide powerful analytics tools, you would be hard pressed to find anybody better positioned to do so than Google.

It would be a trivial matter for the company to build a class leading brand monitoring tool and, in all likelihood, it would make any such tool available free of charge, probably integrated with other tools such as Ad Planner or Insights.

Regardless of whether Google enters this space or not, the industry is crying out for standardisation of social media monitoring tools and metrics. Standardisation leads to commoditisation, which in turn drives down prices.

At the moment social media monitoring is largely an issue of trying to pick the right tool from an ocean of confusing options, when really it should be about having the skills to correctly interpret and act upon results that you can have confidence in.

Lance Concannon is the UK Social Media Lead at Text 100, a global public relations consultancy. You can follow him on Twitter here: http://www.twitter.com/concannon. Images via exfordy’s Flickr stream and that of