You are making an excellent point about companies focused on tactical use of the social media, and I also agree that it is caused by their inability to measure strategic impact of it on their product and brand value.

I have seen a lot of money being invested on technology to monitor what is being “said” without any clear vision of how these data bits are going to converted into actionable information, and subsequent knowledge.

We have developed a methodology to consistently measure product reputation across the consumer electronics market. We decided to use customer reviews as a raw data to measure a gap between customer expectations and their experience with a specific product reflecting on functionality, reliability and support of this product. These metrics can effectively be used by product management and marketing organizations to increase their products profitability, but all they want to discuss is why is it important to capture data on any given hot platform-du-jour.