On Digital9 Social Media Tracking, Monitoring and Analysis Tools (and Tips on What’s Important)
Irfan Kamal June 29th, 2008
Social media and buzz monitoring tools are growing up. Here are a range of tools that can be used to monitor / track, analyze and engage in conversations about products and brands online.
These tools vary substantially in sophistication and focus; different tools will be appropriate for different size organizations and different marketing objectives.
Some of the considerations in selecting among these tools include:
- algorithms for measurement of influence, popularity, reach and authority: there are thousands of blogs and social networks out there; focus is important, and focus is affected by how influential a particular post will be relative to your product or brand’s target segment
- semantic extraction (tone / context): the context of a post is important in determining how it should be handled, for evaluating brand positioning, and for setting future marketing spend
- scope of demographic data: influence is much more relevant if viewed in the context of target segments; demographic data helps you determine relevance
- tools for filtering and presentation of results: the sheer volume of tracking data can quickly become overwhelming; it’s important to have a variety of ways to filter, sort and visualize trends and items requiring attention
- notification options: sometimes it’s important to know of specific types of posts quickly so you can address issues; tools can provide a wide variety of notification options
- recency and scope of data: different tools cover different sites and types of postings (e.g. Youtube, microblogging, social networks, blogs) and provide different levels of recency (see below, for example: human engagement can improve accuracy but delay tracking)
- level of human engagement: tools can provide human review of results to improve accuracy
- features for engaging in and managing conversations: it can quickly become confusing to track responses and responses to responses; it’s helpful to have a way to track conversations and responses
- ease/speed of use and implementation: some of these tools are much easier to set up and understand
- pricing (from <$100/month to over $1,000/month)
Here’s the list of social media and buzz tools:
Andiamo (Andiamo Systems), www.andiamosystems.com
Blogpulse (Nielsen Buzzmetrics), www.blogpulse.com
Buzzlogic, www.buzzlogic.com
Collective Intellect, www.collectiveintellect.com
Orchestra (Cymphony / TNS Media Intelligence), www.cymfony.com
Radian6, www.radian6.com
Sentiment Metrics, www.sentimentmetrics.com
SM2 (Techrigy), www.techrigy.com
TruCast (Visible Technologies), www.visibletechnologies.com
Updated 7/10/2008
- Metrics , Social Media
- Comments(9)
Hi Irfan,
Thanks for mentioning Sentiment Metrics and your email inviting us to comment on this post..
From your list, things I would like to comment on:
-Sentiment analysis- Positive , Negative and Neutral. We have a lot of different reports but you can always drill down to Sentiment as this is a core component of our system. It can always be manually overridden if ever you don’t agree!
-Demographics- We break down into regional, age and gender.
-Influence – One of our core reports identifying the most influencial sources mentioning your brand/phrase or topic.
-Authority- We rank all mentions by authority, but the user can choose to rank by published date, source or source type.
- Human Intervention- Our data collection and filtering is done through machine learning computer algorithms. We do not do human review which allows us to keep costs down and data displayed close to realtime.
-PDF exporter- We allow users of our system to select graphs and data items and create very nicely presented PDF reports ideal for showing to clients or team mates.
We are currently working on workflow so you can use our system to participate in social media, and keep a full audit log of how you and your team participated.
There is lots more to our system and procices start from £259 about $500 per month. We do a lot of work with PR and Marketing agencies and provide a white label solution for a fixed cost.
We welcome enquiries and our clients find us highly responsive and easy to work with.
Thanks again for the mention
Leon
CEO
SentimentMetrics.com
Thanks for including Visible Technologies in your post. I am amazed at Sentiment Metrics ability to provide the services described at the price points mentioned. Very interesting.
Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies
Irfan,
Thanks for listing us. There are tremendous differences in the way most companies attack this space so it’s always good to encourage interested parties to beat on the solutions and be sure to find the one that matches their particular needs. Thanks again.
Mike
Hello Irfan,
Very pleased to be included in your list. You’ve touched on some great items that people should keep in mind when looking for a solution to monitor the social web. The items on your list we work with our customers most on are;
• Tools for filtering and the sheer volume. Radian6 offers a number of ways to filter your data be it by media type, language, geography or by specific sources. However the most popular with our clients is the tracking of conversational dynamics. These give you the ability to sort through the large volumes of results to identify the items that have had high level of commenting, unique commenters, views and engagement. This enables users to identify the post or video with the most activity in the past day, week, month etc… allowing users to identify the content that has a community forming around it as it is happening in real-time.
• Scope of data and speed of discovery may be the most important items on your list.
It is important that people realize that social media is so much more than just blogs and includes user forums, message boards, video sites, social networks and microblogging all of which Radian6 monitors in real-time.
Real-time is crucial to ensure you are able to identify the conversations as they are happening and not after the fact. This means with in minutes/hours versus days. Many blog posts will have a life span of less than 3 days with the majority of activity in the first 12-24 hours. We assist our clients in getting to these conversations as they are happening to give them the opportunity to participate versus just react.
• Ease and Speed of use – with a self service model and user defined dashboards Radian6 gives you the ability to be up and running with a new monitoring initiative as quick as you can type in your search and hit save. We are immediately tracking in real-time.
Radian6 currently has the pleasure of working with a variety of agencies spanning all sizes including some of the largest in the world along with a wide range of corporations including Fortune 500’s both of which have global deployments in a variety of languages.
We offer free trials and agency specific pricing starting at $100/month we welcome all inquiries at http://tinyurl.com/63hed7
Thank you for including us in your list.
Best Regards,
Richard
Sales Director – Radian6.com
Solid re-cap Ifran, and thanks for including us. You hit the nail on the head by saying different tools make sense for different marketing objectives. A PR professional, brand manager and media buyer have vastly different job requirements, and aren’t looking to buy the same platform or user experience. Similarly, different types of industries have varying levels of social media penetration and requirements. Buyers should think about the unique demands of both their function and organization to help prioritize the thorough list you provide. The good news is, as the industry evolves, there are clearly solutions emerging to meet every need and price point.
To give a little context, at BuzzLogic, our take has always been that monitoring is a means to an end. Separating signal from noise, and being able to take action is key. For our customers, that action usually takes one of two forms – using BuzzLogic data to fuel relationship building initiatives, or to deliver social media advertising campaigns on sites leading and participating in the most influential conversations. We’re actually seeing customer scenarios where these two functions (relationship building and ad campaigns) are starting to align and even work in concert – a convergence that’s interesting to watch. If you, or anyone else is interested in learning more about what we do and how we do it, feel free to drop me a line at todd at buzzlogic dot com.
Todd Parsons
Co-Founder
Martin from Techrigy weighing in here. Hi Guys.
We offer a feature set very similar to Sentiment with a lot of analysis tools. Our pricing starts at $250/month and scales up based on search results. All Accounts include unlimited Profiles and effective this week, unlimited Keyword Phrases.
The biggest differentiator is that we offer a free Freemium account that is fully functional and has no expiration date. Phrases are limited to five and results to 1000 but users can clear a search and start over. This is enough to track a niche brand for testing purposes.
A big part of the Freemium approach is our intent to develop a user-community where users can share blog whitelists, intelligent rules for sorting that they’ve created and more things to come, effectively utilizing the Freemium community to improve SM2.
This post and your comments tell me that we’re in a very vibrant space.
I need to call out something in the Radian comment. It’s my understanding from discussions with customers who are evaluating multiple solutions that the $100 is per user and does not include a minimum $500 /month results fee. That structure also includes only one Profile so an agency or manager with multiple brands is looking at $600/month per brand minimum.
If I am wrong please correct me but if we’re going to discuss pricing we need to include total costs in the interest of fair disclosure.
martin at techrigy dot com
Hi Irfan,
Thanks for the mention of Andiamo Systems. Since our official launch late 2007 we’ve attracted dozens of businesses and agencies to our tool. We do employ a level of human review on top of our proprietary heuristics and scoring models in select cases. Typically we choose to do this when we feel that due to irony, satire or industry-specific language requires additional review and data in order for our Self Learning Scoring System to adjust Sentiment scores accordingly. The accuracy levels merit the cases where this occurs!
In addition to providing sentiment scoring, we also rate each post, comment or article on the reach, authority, relevance and speaker influence the writer possesses.
We offer a 2-week free trial and affordable monthly pricing. Interested parties can reach us at sales@andiamosystems.com
Cheers
John Hingley
CEO
Good overview and thanks for including Cymfony in the list (note our spelling: and ‘f” not a “ph” — someday I have to change our name!)
I note that the list shows a trend toward more and more pure technology solutions at a very low cost. We’re definitely seeing that as an appealing option in the market, given the newness of the space, the fact that few marketers have a dedicated budget line, and the overall economic conditions.
Technology is key to what we do — there’s no way to get your arms around all this massive amount of content without it and it helps give a first cut at sorting it into buckets that make some degree of sense out of it. But to get the kind of insights and metrics out of it that marketers really want, there is no substitute for the human mind.
I’m also glad to see you include demographic data. The value of social media insights goes up exponentially when you correlate it with other marketing data sources. We’re rapidly beefing up our offering in this area using data from our new sister company Compete http://www.compete.com, and developing integrated market research studies with our colleagues in other TNS divisions.
Keep up the good work!
Jim Nail
CMO
TNS Cymfony