Kelvin sent me this interesting blog post by Andrew Frank of Gartner. In it he decides to test social media monitoring companies to see if if they practice what they preach. In other words, do they listen in on their own brand to see who's talking about them. Andrew had listed all the social media monitoring brands at the end of his post.

Most of the brands came back to reply in the comments which is a good sign. But this simple exercise got me thinking not just if they do it, which is easy even with Google Alerts, but can they.

What if we repeated that exercise on a freshly created blog. No search engine has picked it up no one has linked to it. How long and what would it take for these services to find it? I think this would be a true test of these service's technical prowess.

Why do I have doubts? Because just before reading Gartner's blog post, Kelvin and I were mucking around with a new social media monitoring service. I shall not name names here, but one of the keywords we used was "poverty". What was amazing was that it had results that dated all the way back to 1964 (before the Internet was invented by the way) with a grand total of... wait for it... 466! Just for scale, Google returned 73,300,000.

But seriously, I don't expect these engines to re-create Google for the sake of selling a subscription service to marketing folks. I think a lot of them do their best based on search engine results which is a good measure. If it can't be found in a search engine, it might as well not exist. And if you didn't know, a search engine doesn't return results past 1,000 (10 results a page x 100 pages). Also, Steve Rubel believes that search engine page rank is the best measure of influence online.