VENTUREBEAT — The problem with most web analytics is that they give you insight into numbers. You can see how many users are visiting your site, when they do so, and where they are coming from. But you don’t understand anything about them as people. That’s where Frosmo, a Helsinki company originally founded as a tournament gaming company, could prove useful. Frosmo launched its Frosmo World casual game tournament business on Facebook last year. While doing that, it became intimately familiar with Facebook analytics. As Facebook expanded its reach to web sites this spring with its ubiquitous Like buttons, Frosmo saw an opportunity to deliver much better analytics. Taking advantage of the fact that real people indicate whether they like a web site or not, Frosmo aggregates that information into useful analytics that companies can act upon...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Position2 recently launched a new product in the social media analytics and engagement space. Brand Monitor is a platform that enables companies to listen, discover and engage with social media conversations in real time. A cloud based platform, Brand Monitor helps companies track and monitor conversations across millions of blogs, micro-blogs like Twitter, social media, forums, news, video and photo sharing sites...

CONVINCE & CONVERT — If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. Too often, standard charts and graphs included in software are just that, standard. They provide numbers, not insights...

TECHCRUNCH — As more businesses look to social media for marketing efforts and to drive sales, there is a need for a comprehensive, yet easy to use platform to manage interactions on social networks. Chicago-based startup Sprout Social is launching its social relationship management platform to the public today. The startup’s platform allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools...

TECHCRUNCH — Online brokerage firm Zecco is one of the participants in Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program – currently in beta – and this morning announced that the ad platform has proven to be very effective for the company to date. The company says it sampled 50 Promoted Tweets over the past two months and measured their effectiveness, seeing a 50% increase in engagement on average as compared to regular messages posted on Zecco’s Twitter account...