brave new world

The social media management solutions landscape is vast and fractured. Altimeter Group identifies over 150 social media monitoring solutions and over 30 specifically defined Social Media Management Systems. The vastness of the options makes it hard for brand-side marketers to determine what platforms and tools they should be using.

Exacerbating the problem is that even among the 30 tools Altimeter identifies as Social Media Management Solutions, none of them do the same thing. And there’s no clear definition of what social media management solutions should do. Some of the 30, like WildfireApp, provide a very narrow sliver of functionality (network-specific engagement tools). I wonder if these should even be classified as SMMS at all. But I’ll leave the classification up to other analysts...