Coinciding with the release of Gartner's recent report, Social Media Delivers Marketing Intelligence, Gartner Research VP Andrew Frank threw out a challenge to the social media monitoring players featured: do you eat your own dog food? The answer appears to be a resounding yes. By the next day, the comment thread grew rapidly with confirmations that most, if not all, companies (including BuzzLogic) were not only listening, but participating in the conversation.

As for Gartner's report, it's an extremely informative read, one every company considering a social media research strategy should review. A great synopsis from Visible Technologies' Blake Cahill is available here. From a high level, the report looks at the impact of social media monitoring and analysis across a spectrum of marketing functions, separating out its role and value to both the corporate communications function and traditional online advertising - two important distinctions. Tons of great info, but a few points really resonated:

1) Brand advertisers represent the next phase of growth in online advertising - but trust within a CGM environment, coupled with a lack of established metrics, are challenges.
2) CTR on "social media" remains low - especially on social networks. What will be interesting to watch is the application of new targeting means based on concepts like influence and trust connections (within the walls of social networks and beyond). At BuzzLogic, we're see encouraging performance on social media sites with advertisers like Military.com. And, as was recently reported, Google is making moves to target influence on social nets. All of this is designed to bring those performance numbers up.
3) Volume of a discussion is not a suitable indicator for evaluating the potential success of a monitoring solution. This really hits the nail on the head. Yes, getting a sense of the size of the conversation is important, but accessing the high-quality, relevant discussions faster is critical to an effective engagement program. Otherwise you'll be spending all of your time wading through data and not taking action.
4) There is no one size fits all solution. What started as a category of 'brand monitoring' vendors as evolved into so much more. Before hiring an analysis firm, companies should know exactly what they want to achieve, as well understand their resources, assets and weak spots in terms of being able to support such programs.

Great stuff, thanks to Andrew and the rest of the Gartner team...