It’s been a whirlwind of a week here in the UK. After the resignation of Alterian’s CEO, David Eldridge, I arrived to share my ideas about moving our ‘Social’ line of business forward in the upcoming fiscal year.

The opportunity ahead remains tremendous. With Radian6 being acquired by Salesforce.com a couple of weeks ago and then Kana buying social media company, Overtone, the social media monitoring and listening tools space is red hot, yet still fragmented with an increasing power vacuum. Some may question the viability of these tools as a stand alone play. My thought is that there is such a play but not the way these companies are positioned currently.

Social media monitoring has to be about worthwhile insights moving forward. Social consulting companies now are becoming more popular as brands realize insights come from smart people observing the social data. Eventually, even these types of insights will become more commoditized and will need to be less of a manual effort. That means the social media tools themselves will have to become smarter, which is how they will be able to survive and then thrive as a stand-alone play.

There is a way a better way to collect, organize and interpret social data than what is being done today. So, success will not necessarily be doing what is currently being done better, but doing things differently overall. The market remains exciting and I look forward to its continuing maturity.