The coming challenge for social media is keeping it simple? Some social media types and companies would love to just focus on Twitter and Facebook. Ah, those will be the good old days of social media. The way I figure those days were the first 2 weeks of June of 2009. Now it’s going to be about topics, interests, comments, and rather than platforms and applications. You can see the early sprouts of this trend with the development of lists on Twitter, Listorious, and TweetDeck’s interest directory

Monitoring brand mentions and sentiment is child’s play compared to a full fledged corporate social play. There are dozens of social platforms similar to Facebook, plenty of microblogging platforms, and now enter geotagging mobile platforms like, Foursquare and Gowalla and many others. How will companies respond to brand mentions across thousands of communities, blogs, and mobile platforms? In addition, how will midsize, non-household name brands, efficiently build relationships.

We mentioned products that attempt to aggregate and monitor, then integrate that capability with a workflow which imposes structure on random relationships. Cotweet, People Browsr among others allow for monitoring and then creating an action item. To me, this is the key for the future of social media within a corporate environment, it must be worked into a quantifiable, disciplined process.

The latest of platform to follow this trend is Clove. It has fast and robust features to segment conversations, search terms and multiple profiles. Their development team is working on introducing a variety of modules as the market needs present themselves.

I interviewed one of the founders of Clove, Tim Erickson. You can register for the beta version of Clove. Its as close a competitor to Tweet Deck which is familiar to many social enthusiasts. I found Tweet Deck is a bit of a memory hog, Clove is efficient, fast and light.

Do you believe you need to monitor multiple companies and topics? How about participating under multiple profiles?

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