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

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

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.

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