There are over 80 (at least) Social Media analysis tools on the market, perhaps closer to 150 worldwide. About 95% are focused on marketing and PR usage. So that’s agencies and companies monitoring  Social and Traditional Media for buzzwords, trends and reputation management. Such monitoring is becoming increasingly valued by businesses and governments - some call this Big Brother.

But even as participants we’re watching each other as well. Take Twitter Grader for example. People seeing where they “rank” in terms of popularity with Twitter. Plurk awards Karma Points based on your participation. Then there’s tools like MyBlogLog from Yahoo! Friendfeed gives you Stats and Posterous tells you quickly how many people have viewed your posts. You can put a widget on your blog for RSS feeds so others can see how many get your posts via RSS (whether they read them or not seems to be irrelevant.) I’m sure there are others I’ve left out.

So we’re all watching each other. We’re looking at each other to determine how popular a blogger or microblogger is. Blogger and social media researcher Dan Zaralla discussed this to some degree in a recent blog post calling it Social Proof - essentially proof of who you are and the “value” of your content. We call this Social Value with our clients.

So why all this analysing? Does it matter? The why is easy for businesses and government; to understand what’s being said to make better marketing, PR and HR decisions on their reputation and brand efforts. For consumers or individuals, as Dan points out, it’s Social Proof that others think you know what you’re talking about, that you’re relevant to the topics at hand. This is a form of social acceptance behaviour, validated through the number of tools that quantify participants. Essentially this two-way monitoring is akin to how we behave socially in school, at work or at parties and other social functions. I’m sure much more can be covered on this topic, but for business and participants in Social Media, it shows how the Social Web is evolving and developing peer recognition, and there are implications.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)