When people use tools for monitoring social media content, such as Brandwatch, Radian6 or our own Smesh technology, they expect that the different tools should all produce very similar or identical results for any given term being monitored and are a bit surprised when they don’t. They’re all looking at the same content, aren’t they? The stuff that’s out there on the web?

Perhaps surprisingly, though hopefully less surprising once you’ve read this, the answer is ‘no’: they’re not all looking at the same content and will frequently produce differing results.

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The Internet tends towards open standards where its infrastructure is concerned, not least because there are so many different interest groups operating on the net who stand to benefit (though of course there are massive tussles over lower-level technology that place restrictions on usage, such as DRM on video, music and games). There follows some musing on what is happening in this regard in the space of social media and where such activities are leading.

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