What is wrong with this question?

I am evaluating Meltwater, HubSpot and CoTweet.  Which one should I choose?

The question makes the incorrect assumption that the three options are comparable. Meltwater Buzz, HubSpot and CoTweet are not competitors but complimentary tools.

I hear similar questions from community managers, marketers and product managers.  It’s clear that this nascent space is lacking the taxonomy necessary to group and define tools’ core functionality. Buzzwords like “dashboard” and “platform” are used to describe any tool with data and a graph or two. As a result, social business professionals with a mandate to evaluate and select a “tool” often end up comparing a wrench to a hammer.

There are hundreds of social media tools out there vying for your attention, but few do a great job of defining what they actually do and do not do. Some are similar to one another and compete with each other, while others have zero overlap and can supplement each other. Of course determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives, but without knowing which tools do what it is impossible to know which tools will meet those objectives.

Let’s group the tools by function, or “what they do”. Of course, we can expect that this will change constantly, some tools do not fit neatly into one category, and other tools that emerge as soon as I publish this post will be overlooked altogether. Rather than overwhelming you with exceptions and complicated matrices, I chose to classify tools according to their core area of expertise. The intent here is to give some intelligent structure to an unstructured space.

Social Medial Monitoring (SMM) tools, often called listening platforms, are where most social media strategies begin – monitoring and tracking mentions of your brand, products, competitors and industry issues. SMM tools offer countless ways to analyze, measure, display and report findings…The features vary by vendor as does cost, so one typically selects one SMM solution or provider and supplements it with tools in other categories.

• Alterian SM2
• Attensity 360
• Attentio
• BrandWatch
• Buzz Capture
• Buzz Logic
• Collective Intellect
• Converseon
• Crimson Hexagon
• Cymfony
• dna 13
• Ecairn
• Lithium SMM (Scout)
• Meltwater Buzz
• NM Incite
• Radian 6
• Spiral 16
• Spredfast
• Synthesio
• SAS
• Sysomos
• Ubervu
• Viralheat
• WebTrends
• Trackur
• Dialogix
• Overtone
• Trendrr
• Visible Technologies
• Jive Software
• Revinate
• Asomo
• Silverbakk

In general, SMM tools rarely compete with tools in other categories, but there are some SMM tools that over lap with the 2nd category of tools, Social Media Engagement (SME) tools. For example, Radian 6 is an SMM tool that offers an Engagement console, but Radian 6’s core expertise is SMM.

Social Media Engagement (SME) tools are communication platforms where users take action and can respond, engage, interact or communicate directly on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc…Users provide the login credentials and offer OAuth permissions and can Tweet, comment on a blog post or respond to a question in a forum without leaving the SME platform. These are real-time, highly customized dashboards and often offer multiple accounts, a shared workspace for many users and the ability to respond in multiple places with one click. SMM tools differ from SMM tools because they are primarily where activity occurs rather where one analyzes activity.

• CoTweet
• Tweetdeck
• Hootsuite
• MarketMeSuite
• Tap 11
• Sprout Social
• Seesmic
• Twimbow
• Brizzly
• Twitterific
• Nambu
• Simplify 360
• Dialogix
• MarketMeSuite

Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) tools aggregate dozens of types of information from multiple social networks to give users the most complete view possible of each customer.

• Nimble
• BantamLive
• Blue Camroo
• Sugar CRM
• Beez Box
• JitterJam
• Gist
• Toucan
• Postling
• The Social Whale
• SalesForce

Social Media Specialized (SMS) tools fall into a handful of buckets.  These tools are not stand alone tools or comprehensive platforms, but specialized tools focused on on analyzing and optimizing one aspect of your social media efforts.  The intent is to use these tools to supplement, not replace, other tools. Some of these tools are available on SMM or SME platforms, for example, you can view Klout scores within Seesmic Desktop. These tools can be broken down into the following categories:

• Influence – Klout, PeerIndex, TwinFluence, Twitority, Zuberance
• Conversion tracking – Argyle Social
• Twitter analytics – Bit.ly, Tweetreach, Twitalyzer
• SEO – HubSpot, SEOMoz, Raven Tools
• Xefer
• Ad.ly
• Soovox

Social Media Content Management (SMCM) tools facilitate the creation, distribution, optimization and management of social media content.  Each tool facilitates at least one specific activity.  For example, Timely posts your tweets at a future time to achieve the most reach.

• Garious
• Dlvr.It
• Sprinklr
• Timely
• TwitHawk
• SocialFlow
• Twaitter
• Tweet Spinner
• Social Ping
• Media Funnel
• Pluggio
• Objective Marketer
• Sendible
• Social Oomph

So now that you can identify what tools belong to which category and what exactly they do, you can identify how they match up with your social media goals and then select the one that suits your needs.