Social media, SEO, marketing and writingThe Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Used by Today’s Top Creative Agencies & Brands
Most companies I know use a handful of different tools (free and paid) to measure, monitor, and influence their social media efforts. The reason being:
1. Companies looking to monitor the social web each have their own unique budgetary constraints
2. Most firms have varying levels of internal staff skill sets
3. No one social monitoring tool does it all
When I think of social monitoring and analysis tools, here is my wish list of top 7 features:
1. Analysis of the external social web + unique website characteristics
2. Multiple, real-time query & filtering abilities
3. Site, sentiment, and SEO analysis
4. Trending, charts/graphs, save & export functionality
5. Theming, grouping, or targeting around a topic/category
6. Competitive & influencer analysis
7. Ability to share, mix, or compare with external data feeds
That said, here is a short list of social tool providers:
http://www.converseon.com
http://www.ecairn.com
http://www.scoutlabs.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.techrigy.com
http://www.nielsen.com
http://www.trendrr.com
http://www.overtone.com
http://www.cymfony.com
http://www.heardable.com
I also recommend these tools that monitor site traffic, demographics, and SEO best practices:
http://www.websitegrader.com
http://www.compete.com
http://www.quantcast.com
http://www.conductor.com
Note: According to social media pro, Gunther Sonnenfeld, Ecairn was recently was recently rated by several top creative marketing agencies to be the most detailed and comprehensive social platform on the market.
“Ecairn’s phrase mining capabilities are superior and they have the best ‘market searching’ tools,” claims Gunther. “The simplest way to explain this is that platforms like Radian6 and Scout can keep track of brands, but they cannot easily deep mine conversations that may or may not be endemic to those brands. Ecairn’s engine thinks categorically, not just topically or according to brand sentiment.”
Do you know about a quality social web monitoring tool or service that I didn’t mention above? Drop me a line and let me know about them and I will add them to my list! Or, if you represent one of the companies above, pitch the benefits of your platform by responding to my post. I really would like everyone to have a chance to make their voice be heard.
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Hi Jon,
Networked Insights SocialSense fits the bill. We focus on analytics more than monitoring as we feel that it has more long term value. Monitoring definetely has it’s place but the trends pricing-wise suggest that it’s getting commoditized pretty fast. So what do we do?
1. Analysis of the social web + unique website characteristics (w/ comScore media metrix)
2. Multiple, real-time query & filtering abilities
3. Engagement, sentiment, and site analysis
4. Trending, charts/graphs, export functionality
5. Theming around a topic/category
6. Competitive & influencer analysis
7. Ability to compare with external data feeds
Yes, all that. In addition we focus our clients on the audience that matters most to them by creating Virtual Communities and we have text analytics engine that automatically discover topics of conversation across the social web. We just released a new version and you can get details here: http://bit.ly/928Cy and here: http://pitch.pe/18956. Alternatively you can contact me on twitter @alexfortney
thanks,
Alex Fortney
Networked Insights
@alexfortney
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Hi Jon — thanks for the mention, mon frere.
To add to Alex’s post, I’d say that eCairn’s value (nice screenshot by the way) also lies within an analytics capacity. For example, eCairn pulls in data from any set that is live or active; Alex mentioned Comscore here, but the reality is that Comscore only indexes sites that have either existed for one year, or those that are preferentially ranked within their network index. In essence, platforms like Networked Insights act as API-like extensions of these larger platform providers (Comscore, Alexa, etc.).
It is very important to understand these distinctions because an engine like eCairn’s can filter, segment and monitor without ‘ranking bias’.
Talk soon!
G
July 31st, 2009 at 5:39 am
Another one that you should check out is Sysomos. Http://Sysomos.com. Our firm has been using it for a long time and it really delivers deep analysis, can handle multiple languages, sentiment and renders nice visuals of comparative datasets. We use it to compare a brand’s online share of voice to its competitors among other things.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:09 pm
[...] The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Used by Today’s Top Creative Agencies & Brands - Jon Samsel [...]
August 1st, 2009 at 4:10 am
Jon,
As David was kind to mention above, Sysomos offer a rich set of features that helped it gain a growing amount of attention for our two social media services: Heartbeat, a cost-effective social monitoring and measurement service, and MAP, a feature-rich analytics services.
One of the key features of Heartbeat and MAP is the ease and flexibility to do database queries, and then quickly filter those queries by time, country and city to find and engage with key influencers.
If you would like a demo, please let us know.
Mark Evans
Director of Communication
Sysomos Inc.
August 1st, 2009 at 7:50 am
Hi Jon (and Gunther),
Thanks for including Scout Labs. I do understand the need for meme and issues identification — not just relevance matching! I hope you saw the new QUOTES feature at Scout Labs that launched this week. You give us a brand (or product, person, industry…you name it) and we give you what people are loving about it, what people are not happy about, what issues they are having, recommendations they have for the company, things they WISH the company would do differently,ways that people are caveating their speech “i love my iPhone BUT…” and many more. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Best,
Jenny
August 4th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Just to clarify Gunther’s comment. Our integration of comScore data has zero impact on how we find conversations so there is no “ranking bias”. We find relevant content with a combination of our text analysis software and keywords (we let the data tell you what’s important). In fact when you look at our dashboard you may find occasions where there is no comScore data due to the reasons Gunther noted.
So, no we’re not an extension of comScore or Alexa in any way and our application is designed so that we can minimize any sort of bias. We choose to offer comScore integrated data so that customers who use SocialSense for media buying and planning have familiar and trusted website measurement data at their disposal when evaluating the sources of the conversations we uncover.
We’ve actually been writing about our approach at our blog: http://bit.ly/gRb8T - please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions.
Thanks!
Alex Fortney
Networked Insights
@alexfortney
August 18th, 2009 at 10:06 am
[...] companies, and their brand and product reputation. Web-strategist Jon Samsel just published which social media monitoring tools are being used by the top agencies and brands at the [...]
August 19th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
[...] Jon Samsel » Blog Archive » The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Used by Today’s Top Creative … http://www.jonsamsel.com/marketing/the-best-social-media-monitoring-tools-used-by-todays-top-creative-agencies-brands – cached page The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Used by Today’s Top Creative Agencies & — From the page [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Greetings Jon (and All) –
Appreciate the inclusion of Overtone in your shortlist. While all the companies listed above all perform social media monitoring, it’s important to understand the methodologies/science behind their offerings. Automation, sourcing, and depth of analysis all impact the quality of insights delivered, and professionals interested in monitoring for PR efforts will require a very different solution than product marketers seeking deep customer insights on product uses and features.
For example, several of the vendors listed above are focused on “Buzz Tracking” of brands within a defined social media universe. These approaches look at keywords and concept libraries to flag relevant articles, evaluate sentiment, and begin to identify authors of prominence. Such solutions - frequently positioned as “Google Alerts on Steroids” - deliver on fundamental brand metrics and reports at a relatively low cost, and are mostly useful to social media and PR professionals. Some of the other vendors listed combine human anakysis with buzz tracking to produce report deliverables that present “brand pulse” metrics and help evaluate the effectiveness of social media campaigns, etc.
Social Media serves as a valuable source of customer experience insights, and tools like Overtone’s Open Mic help automate the listening of customer conversations via machine learning, deep text analytics, and context-specific sentiment analysis (e.g., “sick” being positive sentiment for video games VS. negative for restaurants.”). The result is a “microphone” that can be pointed to any source on the social web, or within data sources in the enterprise itself (e.g., hosted communities, direct feedback, VOC programs). Overtone then does the heavy lifting of sorting every unstructured verbatim record into thematic categories (e.g., not just keywords), and distilling them into actionable business insights for Product Managers, Service Professionals, and other operational disciplines. Each Overtone implementation includes unlimited users and on-demand reporting of LIVE streaming data classified in real time. Advanced report scheduling and distribution workflows allow users to have the most current insights upon which to make strategic business decisions.
So while indeed many of our customers use Open Mic for “Social Media Monitoring,” the vast majority leverage our listening platform to track deep voice of the customer insights across multiple direct and indirect feedback channels. This requires advanced machine learning that can be pointed to any text-based data source, classify content in real time, identify emerging topics, and distribute alerts throughout the enterprise. Social Media Monitoring in this respect gives way to a broader category of multi channel listening and content analytics.
Would be happy to discuss any of this further vis-à-vis specific science, use cases, and other thoughts.
Best Regards,
Alex Lustberg
Product Marketing @ Overtone
August 31st, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Thanks for your insight, Alex. Perhaps getting a full demo of your service would be a productive next step. I’m game if you are.