Social media monitoring keeps getting more and more interesting. Not only are the existing players continually improving their wares but start-ups and under the radar players are bringing interesting features and thoughts to the marketplace.

One such company is Kansas City-based Spiral16, a two-year-old, privately funded social media monitoring service I spent some time with recently to explore their tool. The central differentiating feature Spiral16 pitches is their ability and willingness to use the social media monitoring algorithms, search features and natural language processing components on outside sets of data.

Sentiment view in Spiral16's dashboard. (Click for larger view.)