Over the past few weeks, a common thread in many of the more enthusiastic conversations about social media has been the role that people play compared with the technology.

These discussions have been focused on issues such as sentiment, particularly whether automated sentiment technology is accurate, and whether people can do a better job of assessing whether a conversation is positive, negative or neutral.

In particular, Jason Falls’ blog post on “Why You Shouldn’t Trusted Automated Sentiment Scoring” attracted a lot of attention.

There’s also been talk about social media monitoring and discovery versus curation done manually by people.

The emergence of these discussions is not a surprise. In fact, it’s a positive development because it reflects how the social media industry is evolving and maturing.

As social media monitoring usage becomes more widespread, there’s bound to more talk about the “what”, “who” and “why”, as well as the inevitable “man vs. machine” debate.

I think some of this discussion is motivated by the fact technology is taking over a role played by people for many years.

Before the Web and social media emerged to search and aggregate information, many companies used clipping services that used people to manually go through newspapers and magazines, as well as radio and television broadcasts. It was an intensive and expensive process.

Now, technology has pushed people into the background. Social media monitoring and analytics technology can handle a lot of the grunt work by quickly collecting, aggregating, processing and presenting millions of conversations – something that people are not capable of doing.

But – and here’s the big “but” – technology can’t completely replace people, and technology shouldn’t completely replace people.

Despite the advantage of social media monitoring and analytics services, people will continue to play a key role in taking the information collected, and then providing insight, advice, context and recommendations about what the data means and what should be done with it strategically and tactically.

For example, technology can make it easy to identify key influencers and opinion leaders but people need to step into the fray to engage with these people and develop relationships.

People can also play an active role in helping perfect the technology. For example, all the talk about automated sentiment fails to take into account that perfection can be elusive because of things such as sarcasm and nuance.

Still, I’d take a system any day that processes millions of conversations to offer information and intelligence about what’s happening within the social media landscape, AND gives provides the ability to easily adjust sentiment when needed.

The bottom line is that social media is a partnership between people and technology. They serve different roles and, in many ways, couldn’t operate as well without each other.

The “man vs. machine” discussions are healthy but it’s really a “man AND machine” world that we’re living in.