Great question, I get the same from many people. None of these tools come anywhere near being complete and as effective as real human analysis, and each have their pros and cons (which is why we posted this entry). Each person interprets data differently, so my suggestion would be to try a demo version of each of each of the tools and determine which one suits you the best. They all are targeted at doing the same thing and providing similar results.

It’s very true that a lot of these tools are very expensive, but luckily, there are a lot of free tools out there that will help get you similar results. The disadvantage of going with the free tools is that ALL the analysis will have to be done manually (which is not necessarily a bad thing, I do this anyway, even with the paid tools), and they may not date back as far as the paid services. Some free resources that I would recommend for looking at social media metrics are: Technorati (for blogs), Social Mention and Trendrr (for a nice aggregated look across multiple outlets), Monitter, Tweet Volume, and Twitalyzer (for Twitter), and Google Alerts. All of the above tools will help in getting you the data to be able to analyze sentiment and gain insight in to your consumers. I hope this helps and answers your question. Please feel free to contact me at almitra@mojaveinteractive.com if you’d like to speak further about social media analytics.

Best Regards,
Almitra @almitra

Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6