I would respectfully submit that the comparison of volume is one dimensional and not necessarily the most important factor to look at. Relevance of the data collected is the most important.
One of the biggest problem with most self-serve tools is that the data contains a large percentage of irrelevant information. The old adage GIGO, Garbage in Garbage Out is very true in Social Media Monitoring. The noise to signal ratio for most brands is quite large ( minimum 1-1 and as high as 10-1 ) BAD data makes the pretty graphs irrelevant, or worse, misleading. Better data makes for better decisions and meaningful analytics.
Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/comparing-social-media-monitoring-platforms-on-content-about-social-media-week-nyc-10/#ixzz0eiVdWzID
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