Socialmediaworx

We live in an information-saturated world. No surprise there. But I’m always intrigued when any kind of aggregation tool hits the market with the potential to help me better collect and analyze heavy streams of information.

Be it my Netvibes start page, imperative reads like Techmeme and Digg, or even using Basecamp at work to easily compile and manage projects, I’m increasingly grateful for tools that help me collect, sort and analyze information.

And while I’ve enjoyed using Google Analytics’s continuing improvements in measuring my websites’ growth, there is one sphere of analytics that I am hopeful will take off in the next year.

Social media metrics. It’s a mammoth undertaking given the sheer scope of blogging, social networking, videos and online communities, but any tool that can help make sense of the wealth of conversation taking place is worth it’s weight in gold.

Enter Scout Labs. Sure, there are other dashboards on the market like BuzzLogic or Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, but I’m excited to see what Scout brings to the table. Techcrunch has the write-up (including screenshots).

The really cool part of the product is the fact that it looks at historical data, too (as I said, back to January 2007). So a brand manager can create a new scout and within moments see how the number of daily, weekly or monthly mentions increases or decreases, and how they fluctuate from negative or positive over time. I could easily see how periods where we were heavily criticized for something led to an increase in negative posts, and vice versa.

I’m looking forward to trying out the service when it’s released from beta, but in the meantime, does anyone have a preferred dashboard for providing some level of social media measurement?

UPDATE

While this original post only briefly touched on a few tools for social media dashboards, The Buzz Bin has a killer collection of ideas, tools and strategies for measuring social media.