Here's how Google could be a killer social media monitoring platform

Originally published in Social Media Today

This week Google rolled out search capabilities across the Twitter archive, which in the grand scheme of things seemed to get a bit of a ho-hum reaction. Essentially, Google will now provide a nice, graphical display of Twitter conversation over time for your given search query. From there, you can drill into the peaks and valleys to see what people were Tweeting about at a given time, which is really quite powerful. The image below shows how this looks on a simple search for "social media".

I spend a lot of time either using, evaluating or reviewing the numerous social media monitoring platforms out there. It's an exhausting endeavor as it seems like every day another platform comes along with slightly different features and functionality, different cost structures, etc. etc.

So when Google rolled out the ability to search and analyze the Twitter archive it got me thinking--if it wanted to, Google could slap together a slick web-based front end (not something awful like iGoogle) and change the social media (and even mainstream media) monitoring game. Think about it, its got nearly all the pieces in place already, here are just a few:

Google News: Coverage from mainstream news outlets and top tier blogs? Check. By far the de facto online news aggregator

Google Blog Search: Long-tail blog search? Check. Not the greatest of blog search engines, but far from worst, and when combined with Google News, covers 85-95% of what you're looking for anyway.

Real-Time Search: Ability to monitor and capture the conversation from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and more? Check. To top it off, this feature is also available in 40 languages, so international capabilities? Check.

Twitter Archive: Ability to review and analyze historical Twitter buzz? Check. Adds a nice graphical component showing peaks and valleys as well.

Google Trends: Ability to see and graphically display hot search trends and online conversations? Check.

YouTube: Ability to track and monitor results from the top video sharing site in the world? Check. Added bonus: if you own a channel then you've got some decent insights into how your videos are performing as well.

Google Reader: Ability to customize and display your search results however you like? Check.

Google Buzz/Gmail: Ability to share items you find noteworthy and even 'assign' them to someone else on your team for follow-up. Check.

Analytics: Ability to seamlessly combine web analytics with online conversation analysis? Check. This would be a major step up from where the current platforms are.

Another benefit? Pretty much all these tools are FREE and Google is sitting on a massive archive of data from all these services (and more), which it could also provide free access to. This is a far cry from the current social media monitoring situation where vendors charge you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get access to historical data beyond just a couple weeks or a month (citing server costs to host/store the historical data).

Finally, given how hot sentiment analysis is in this market, the Google team could whip up a quick algorithm (who knows how to do that better?) to analyze sentiment across its tools and we could check that off the list.

So there you have it--seems to me Google could absolutely blow away any of the existing monitoring services tomorrow if it wanted to (and that's the big gotcha here, it likely has no desire to).

What do you think?