Jan 16

Radian6 is Best for Social Media Monitoring. No it’s Not.

Sales, Uncategorized, listening, monitoring, public relations, social media Add comments

Over the last several months I’ve spent a considerable amount of my time evaluating and testing various social media monitoring platforms for medium-sized and enterprise-class organizations. I’ve narrowed down my focus to three with an outstanding reputation in the industry. There are certainly others who have an excellent reputation as well but among paid platform providers these have stood out from the pack from the research I have done:

Radian6, ScoutLabs and Sysomos.

My conclusion: They are all winners in their own right. Numero uno truly is relative and depends on the context of your enterprise’s needs. But more on that in a sec.

So I’ve looked at lots of platforms but the three I am most impressed by and have looked at most closely thus far are Radian6 (which I’ve demo’d and tested), ScoutLabs (which I’ve also demo’d and tested) and Sysomos, which I’ve demo’d and plan to test early this coming week..

The question we at VMR and myself in particular have been asking continually is not so much which is the best platform, but which is the best platform (or combination of platforms) for us to service our clients and prospective clients and their specific needs.

When it comes to something as complex and sophisticated as social media monitoring / listening and engagement platforms, each of the three above have their strengths (more on that in a future post) but the bottom line is that the best option for your enterprise really depends on the context of your situation.

The answers to questions like the few (of many) that I have listed below, will hopefully help you engage in meaningful dialogue internally as well as externally with vendors and agency partners vis-à-vis your social media marketing, public relations, customer service, and sales efforts online:

1. Are you looking to compare your share of voice online versus that of your competitors and track that over time using easily comprehensible metrics that can be assigned a $ value?

2. Whose voice do you want to listen to? Key influeners? General consumer sentiment? Stakeholders? Traditional Media? Male? Female? In North America or worldwide?

3. Do you need a platform that can be used in focus group fashion to slice and dice general consumer sentiment, key influencer sentiment, and or journalist sentiment?

4. Do you need to know where the fish (your prospects and key influencers) are currently swimming (“conversing”) before you dive into or create an empty pond?

5. Would you like to track how well your PR campaigns have increased share of voice specifically among key influencers or among consumers at large?

6. What about your sales and customer services teams? Are they looking for the actionable
intelligence that a social media monitoring platform can provide? Will the monitoring platform you choose need to integrate well with a CRM like salesforce.com?

7. Which social media “venues” are you most interested in monitoring? Blogs? Traditional News Outlets? Forums? Linkedin? Facebook? Youtube? Blogtalkradio? Podcasts? (Check out the conversation prism below to get a better sense for what’s out there)

8. If influencing the influencers is important to you, do you need a platform that helps you identify key influencers by showing you inbound links, comment count, level of engagement?

9. Is yours a global brand where you need to monitor not only key influencer sentiment but also the so-called “Long Tail” of your marketing sales curve?

10. Is your CMO demanding specific and meaningful metrics that can demonstrate a clear ROI from your social media engagement efforts?

11. If you are monitoring global brands, will you need a platform that translates content and sentiment in multiple languages?

12. Do you have the resources, expertise and social media savvy currently to fully leverage the capabilities of whatever platform is best for you?

13. How much historical data will you need? Some platforms have absolutely enormous amounts of historical data. Is that going to be helpful to your PR and marketing teams? Or not worth paying extra for?

14. What about ease of use? Do you need a platform that multiple users in your organization will learn quickly and easily, thus increasing their level of online engagement?

There are many options and just as many needs-analysis questions out there for medium-sized and enterpise-class organizations when it comes to monitoring platforms and social media agencies.

While content may indeed be king (is it still?), when it comes to evaluating your options in the world of social media and understanding how to engage after listening carefully, context i is queen.

That’s how we are approaching our needs analysis at VMR for ourselves and for our prospective clients. I’d love to hear from the three leaders above, their competitors, their current clients and those that are taking a look at them. Now’s your chance to speak your mind and voice your choice.

Do you agree that there is no number 1?
What questions would you add to a needs analysis?
Which questions concerning social media and social media monitoring are most important for your organization to consider?
Which ones have you had the most difficulty answering?

Bring on the comments. I’ll be listening. :)

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  • Really helpful post Hugh. The catalog of questions is in a way the other side of the coin of the myriad objectives and opportunities a business or brand might have in monitoring social media. I would love a source that somehow provides a structured overview of those different objectives and opportunities. Any ideas where I might find that?
  • Stephen,
    Thanks for the compliment and for your excellent question. I recommend checking out a little-known but superbly written post (and embedded scribd work in progress whitepaper) from Ogilvy's executive creative director John Bell:
    http://johnbell.typepad.com/weblog/2009/12/a-wh...

    His comments there are right on the money and offer a superb high level roadmap of opportunities, especially suite for for national and international brands but useful for all companies thinking about social media.

    I hope that helps!
  • This is an excellent analysis of what one should consider when looking to invest in a Brand Monitoring tool. Here is a recent post from my Blog- Protect Your Brand & Reputation With Brand Monitoring Technology- http://is.gd/6BqTL and a link to our Social CRM Technology Directory that includes a listing of 15 Brand Monitoring solutions- http://www.crmmastery.com/article.asp?articleid...
  • Jim,
    Thanks so much for your comment and the links. So glad you mentioned the CRMmastery link. I tend to believe that platforms that have a good answer for question #6 above regarding mapping a social profile to a prospect/contact profile in their CRM platform, will gain a real competitive advantage over time. To give you an example of the problem as it stands now from my little corner of the world:
    Over the last few weeks, I've been contacted by individuals from various companies whose colleagues have been communicating with me online through social media channels and the individuals who reached out to me were completely unaware of the "side by side" social media conversation footprints left by the salesperson's colleague in say, customer service, and myself. That is very understandable these days in light of the steep learning curve that organizations face regarding social media. But that curve will eventually even out and with it will come a demand for the platforms that do a good job of ensuring that workers from across an organization (PR, customer service, sales, C-level, marketing, HR, etc...) have access to the same real-time social profile intelligence, custom fit, of course, to their specific departmental needs. But what do you think? Does what I'm saying make sense or is there something else I am missing perhaps? I'd really appreciate your insight on this. Thanks again!
  • synthesio
    "Which is the best platform (or combination of platforms) for us to service our clients and prospective clients and their specific needs" is definitely the question to be asking.

    As vendors of social media monitoring solutions, we are all aware of the possibilities and constraints of our offerings and are grateful to bloggers like yourselves that provide unbiased views for their readers.

    If you'd like, it would be my pleasure to present you with a presentation of Synthesio :)

    Best regards,
    Michelle
    @Synthesio
  • Thank you Michelle! It has been really gratifying to engage in this discussion. And I really hope we get some users of these monitoring systems to chime in as well. What were their key criteria when choosing the platform that they chose, for example.

    In addition, what I plan to do is put together a spreadsheet to compare in detail the features of various monitoring platforms, including yours. Obviously a spreadsheet can only tell you so much but it will at least give folks a general idea as to which feature sets are included in various monitoring platforms that are currently on the market. I will also include in that spreadsheet a list of many of the most popular social media "venues" (youtube, facebook, flickr, blogs, etc...) and ask vendors to indicate whether they monitor conversations in those spaces. This will obviously be a living document that changes over time as social media venues change. But this goes back to Marcel's excellent point about knowing the scope of data that is actually being monitored. And yes, I would be interested to see a presentation of Synthesio at some point as well. Look for a post hopefully tomorrow with more details concerning the comparison spreadsheet.
  • Great idea, Hugh. Ken Burbary has an interesting wiki, but it would be nice to see something that goes into more detail for marketers looking for a social media monitoring solution. Looking forward to hearing more about it. Also, whenever you'd like to take a look at Synthesio I'm at michelle (.) chmielewski@synthesio (.) fr

    Best,
    Michelle
    @Synthesio
  • Michelle, Sorry for not responding sooner. would you have a link to Ken Burbary's wiki by chance?
  • Thanks, Michelle. I am actually quite intrigued by Synthesio's SportTrack(TM) Web which, according to your website, "enables you to measure the impact and presence of a sporting competition on online media."
  • dominiq
    Hi, these three solutions have the same approach to monitoring: they start with the "what" (i,e keywords or bag of keywords search) and then take care of the who ( i.e qualifying the source of information).

    We do the reverse and can get to this kind of precision:
    http://www.slideshare.net/domlah/amazon-industr...

    It's not better, just different. For 2,3,4,8,10 it provides more actionable results.
    Best
  • dominiq -
    i am intrigued but can you elaborate here on how you start with the who (influeners) and not the what ? (I viewed the Slideshare including the Influencer Mind Map with connections but I am still a bit confused). It sounds like a neat idea though, especially for PR practitioners looking to engage key centers of influence.
  • dominiq
    Hello Hugh,

    Let's take an example.
    You're a cosmetic brand and you want to leverage social media in your marketing strategy.

    If you start with the "what": you'll use one of the Social Media Monitoring platform and get back all conversations that talk about let's say: different brands, parabene, aging, ... some will come from "Beauty bloggers", some will come from Fashion Bloggers, some will come from Financial blogs ...

    This will give you a pretty exhaustive idea of the river of news around skin care. There is a lot of value in doing that, but there is a lot of value in doing more :-)

    Now if you dive down into the Beauty community, you will discover that this is not ONE community but many:
    - A you've a community around brands and beauty products
    - B you've another one around green & bio skin care that are brand adverse
    - C you've a community of woman that are concerned about health related issued with skin care product
    - D you've "nail communities"
    ...

    If you start with the who, you will first build a strategy, map your target communities and then apply focused listening.
    Let's say you're an exclusive brand and you've a new product to launch.
    You may send sample to influencers from group A and monitor sentiment and share of voice in that group.
    You may listen to group D and have someone from your research team analyze any threat from that group.
    You may spot how the B group invent new ways of talking about skin care in prep for a future Bio "skin care" launch.

    So How do we put "who" first.

    We have instrumented a 2 step process where in the first part, we enable brand to map communities mixing topical, topological and style related analytics... and some learning
    It's not a one click stuff but within hours/days a marketer with some knowledge of its target community can pretty well collect most members of a community including all influencers ( a few hundreds to a few thousands).
    We offer capability to analyze the formed community and even identify clusters / sub communities and we also give each member an influence ranking that is "local" to that community.

    That's an asset that our client can use and reuse as part of their marketing programs.

    If you want a demo, just send me an email !

    Best
  • erikavonhoyer
    Hugh, thanks for putting together a great (and important) list of questions & considerations. I've found that a lot of people are eager to 'listen' but aren't quite sure where to begin and others are at a loss for finding an approach that's both efficient and effective -- your post will help with both!

    I'd like to offer some additional points to consider - specific to vendor selection. We've posted them to the ListenLogic website - here's the direct link: http://bit.ly/8z0EJ2

    Regarding your invite for competitors to join the conversation and our thoughts on the number 1 spot... I firmly believe that RESONATE is the industry's number one platform for accuracy. At a rate of 90%+ we deliver real-time analysis (sentiment, influence, etc.) of brand-specific content. We're happy to be put to the test on that!

    Thanks again for the informative post.

    Erika von Hoyer
    VP, Operations
    ListenLogic
  • Erika, Wow, 90% is the highest rate I've seen for sentiment. Does that mean Resonate is able to accurately judge the tonality of sarcasm as well? Also, I read through the very helpful post you referenced above and I have three questions about it in relation to Resonance:
    1. Does RESONANCE have an ability to refine and continuously learn sentiment?
    2. Is sentiment based on the brand and/or product, or generic sentence structure?
    3. How does RESONANCE apply analysis to punctuation? (Frankly, that's something I'd never even considered prior to reading that post.)

    Thanks so much for participating in the discussion!
  • erikavonhoyer
    Hi Hugh, thanks! ListenLogic’s listening platform has the ability to refine and continuously learn sentiment. The accuracy rate is achieved through continuous machine-learning coupled with RESONATE’s ability to detect and understand the unique language of a brand.  This is important as brands in pharma, cpg, financial, and retail all have their own language and meaning.  Yes, punctuation is considered.  We have an in-house analyst team that supervises the machine-learning process.  

    Shoot me an email if you want more info (erika at listenlogic). Thanks!
  • jenniferzeszut
    90% is really high for social media scoring, if you have computers doing it! If you are outsourcing it to India, that's a different story. But even so, our findings are that 3 college-educated humans only agree with EACH OTHER on the sentiment of a social media mention 83% of the time due to idioms and slang and bad grammar and misspellings and... (This is not the world of clean news articles or pretty press releases.) Eg: "My nikes are the Tom Jones of shoes!" Huh? Our sentiment research and accuracy data here: http://www.scoutlabs.com/2009/02/26/how-does-se....

    And re: data, Hugh. Yes. When it comes to data, this is the world of the long-tail. We are adding new data every second of every day and we will hit over 1B documents live in our index in the next week or 2! That's 1B+ docs that are searchable, counted, trended, graphed, clustered, scored for sentiment, filtered for spam and porn, quotes extracted, etc. All live. Fun stuff!
  • One of the things I did notice in one platform I was testing (not yours) is that I did a search for email marketing and a post came up that had nothing to do with email marketing. The reason it came up was because there was a google ad in the post for ____ email marketing services. So this really brought home the point to me that spam filtering really is very important and covers more than one might think. I totally agree with you on sentiment as well. One marketing executive who wrote to me recently (and requested anonymity) has used a social media monitoring platform and I think his comments are worth noting:

    "Quite frankly, sentiment analysis is not as important to me as work flow management (especially given that for many of the tools, the sentiment analysis is not that good - i.e. doesn't pick up sarcasm that well (or didn't the last time I tested it) and FB and Twitter in particularly are "pithy" platforms). We want the right people answering questions at all times. My belief is that if you do this well, the sentiment will take care of itself."

    On a personal note: I can, admittedly, be a little slow on the uptake so I'm probably below average on the "human sentiment analysis" scale :) but my personal sentiment analysis is probably somewhere around 71 - 72 1/2%. And that's only when I've had 2 cups of coffee and a full night's rest. :)
  • jenniferzeszut
    Hi Hugh,
    Couldn't agree with you more! Companies should know what they need, and providers should know what they are good at. As a provider, Scout Labs is VERY clear about what we are and what we are not. We ARE the platform for extended teams (marketing + product + C-suite + customer service + community + PR + agencies) who all want to be tuned in to and taking action on social media. Some one-off / sole researchers rely on us, but teams love us, and that is what we are designed for. Our unlimited search results, unlimited user model, intuitive UI (no training required), simple pricing (no surprise bills at month end) instantly populated dashboard, comprehensive data coverage, simple: "what customers love hate, want wish think feel...", and sentiment and spam algorithms that LEARN from all those users' interaction with our system -- all are unique in the market BECAUSE we know who we are and what our sweet spot is.

    Hugh, your post pushes companies to be more specific and focused when they start their search for the right platform for them. Thank you for raising the level of discourse! I have another "educate the market" post that is still quite popular called: "Advanced Questions that you SHOULD be asking your brand monitoring vendor" - in case that helps your readers.
    http://www.scoutlabs.com/2009/08/31/advanced-qu...
    Enjoy!
    Best,
    Jenny
    CEO
    Scout Labs
  • Jenny - I am incredibly impressed with Scoutlabs and how well you've designed your UI to maximize user adoption and engagement. And even though you have a clean and relatively easy-to-learn UI, I get the impression you do NOT have a less is more philosophy when it comes to the volume of data that you monitor. Just the contrary. Also, I hope you know your account manager Erin Korogodsky (three cheers!) has been extraordinarily patient, passionate about the value of the ScoutLabs product/service, and helpful. From talking at length with Erin I get the impression that you train your account managers to be there for the long haul (not just at point of sale) which is exactly the type of partnership that agencies like ours are looking for. Thanks so much for sharing the article link here too!
  • *blush* thanks Hugh! I love it here at Scout Labs and I believe in our product. I'm glad that has come through in our conversations. So glad to have connected with you!
  • Hugh - great and very thoughtful writeup. There are so many solutions out there, and the one you choose is really going to depend on circumstances that are unique to your (or client's) organization and objectives. Some organizations may be just looking to find out how the market feels, some may be using it as a customer service tool, some may be using it to connect with influential bloggers in the space. Where are your customers and influencers? Are they on Twitter? User boards? And just as importantly, to your point, what is the resource structure? Do you have the folks to actually monitor and engage, or are you going to be looking for a external agency to do that? How much support and customization of reports will you need from your data provider?

    Have you had a chance to try out Community Insights from Biz360? We offer a very flexible topic building mechanism, and we work with blogs, microblogs, forums, discussion boards and online news, with more on the way. We measure sentiment and coverage and impact across those channels, and allow you to drilldown to the article level so you can start engaging with key bloggers and influencers, as well as a system of alerts and workflow tools to make the engagement process actionable.

    Please contact me at mogneva (at) biz360 (dot) com if you want to take it for a spin!
  • Maria,
    Thanks so much. I appreciate your comments. Yes, I have seen a demo of Community Insights. I've not actually tested it though. I know you have knowledge engineers to assist in topic profile creation and I was quite impressed with your sentiment analytics. You also have an solid reputation. I initially learned of Biz360 through a digital PR contact of mine whose agency offers a proprietary in house solution to their clients. I'm curious though, regarding the knowledge engineers: Is it necessary for a user to consult one of your engineers to create a topic profile using biz360?
    Also, I believe you nominated Biz360 for a Shorty Award because of the large amount of data they monitor. Can you give us some idea as to how much? Please ping me sometime with that info. Thanks!
  • Hello there Hugh!

    Great questions! Would love to help you answer them; let me know if I succeed in doing so. We do have topic engineers to assist in topic creation, but you absolutely don't need to use them. We value the ability to be flexible in serving various customer niches in the professional and enterprise markets. Some of our enterprise clients hire us to do everything for them; for one of our clients we do as many as 900 topics, and in a situation like that, you definitely need the help of engineers. However, for smaller businesses and consultants, we offer a DIY version, which is very aggressively priced, and allows you to create topics. I use it myself quite a bit, and I love the simple UI that allows me to do complex queries in the back end. We have advanced search features like proximity search that allow for complexity without having to know advanced queries.

    Regarding large amount of data: well, I can't tell you exactly how much, but we index 4 major sources (and are adding more) - blogs, microblogs, online news and forums / discussion groups. So on average we look at upwards of 30,000 documents per minute, and we are constantly increasing indexing speed and scope of data.

    Let me know if you want to try it, or if you have any more questions!
  • This is a very useful list for evaluating what an organization should be seeking in a social media monitoring tool. There are several options available ranging from free to paid solutions, but you must find the right tool that meshes with your organization's culture and measurable objectives. We are looking forward to your review of smm tools. Please let me know how we can answer any questions about Radian6 for upcoming posts.

    Lauren Vargas
    Community Manager at Radian6
    @VargasL
    lauren.vargas@radian6.com
  • Thanks Lauren. I really appreciate that.
  • Nice Post.
    Another critical objective is to demonstrate that taking a qualitative approach to media monitoring will yield more accurate and actionable results that can be tied to specific business objectives or key performance indicators (KPI’s). Improving the signal to noise ratio as well as correlating this kind of analysis to a business outcome is becoming more imperative as the "noise" factor increases.
    Larry Levy
    CEO
    Jodange Inc.
  • Larry - That makes total sense. And then of course, from a PR perspective there's the issue of: "Just because we've detected a signal or lots of them, which do we need to respond to and which can we ignore?" Amber Naslund got me thinking about this recently with her post on "The Critical Mass of Listening" (http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/157783)

    What comes to mind, also, is Dave Carroll's Youtube video song-complaint which turned out to be an important signal that United Airlines' initially ignored (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/23/uni...).

    I'm curious now though: how does Jodange improve the signal to noise ratio? How is what you do different and more effective than what your competitors do?
  • Hugh,
    Forgot to mention that Jodange is testing a new service with clients called "News Cycle Burst & Decay Analysis" which exposes "triggering events" for opinions "bursting or "decaying" on a daily basis based on the norm. By focusing on qualitative analysis you're able to produce a more refined and accurate analysis by filtering out the noise.

    Larry
  • Hugh,

    We focus entirely on identifying subjective statement (opinions). The logic is that if you review subjective statements and not just keyword mentions then you stand to get a lot more out of this qualitative analysis. By-products include unique opinion-holder identification, more accurate sentiment analysis, co-reference resolution on topics and pretty accurate spam filtering. It also means that you can cut across social and traditional media using the same analysis engine for more consistent results.

    Regards,

    Larry
  • Hi Hugh,

    Those are all great questions to ask and, I certainly agree that it is important to evaluate things relative to the specific needs of your clients, as you point out. Needs do vary and I expect the diversity of needs will continue to broaden as the social web increasingly becomes an important part of every business process.

    Radian6 is the market leader in the space, but we certainly agree that we are not for everyone. Some solutions are targeted for certain markets & needs and may be better suited than others.

    One area or question that I would add to your list, that seems important to most customers, is to evaluate a tool's content coverage - both breadth and depth. In other words, can you trust the tool to find all the conversations or does it only find a subset of conversations?

    Many companies tell us how important it is not to miss a customer complaint, or inquiry and many agencies tell us how important it is that they find all the conversations about their clients (they don't want their client's finding a potential issue or post that they were not aware of).

    Some tools can give the appearance of having good coverage by splashing content on the screen with "recent" tweets, videos, etc., but they really don't index all the content comprehensively. I just pass this on as another consideration to keep in mind.

    Great job on the post and good luck in your evaluations.
    Cheers,
    Marcel
    CEO, Radian6
  • Terrific point, Marcel. And to that point VMR has been compiling a list of key social media "venues" that we are going to ask Radian6 and others to consider completing so we can share the list on this blog. The list is based off of Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas' "The Conversation Prism." (http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-c...)
    I may also invite a few of you to discuss your platforms on Blog Talk Radio (www.blogtalkradio.com/hugh) if you'd be open to it. If Amber Nasland could join us too, that would be great. You and she have convinced me that Radian6 really understands social media listening and engagement inside out.
    Thanks again, Marcel.
  • dominiq
    Great discussion and great points.

    I would argue that - from a marketing standpoint (and this might be different for customer support or social crm) - the real objective is to get all the content from all the people that matters - not from everybody.

    This means that one has a predefined idea of who matters, which is ... the very core mission of marketing.

    Many social media marketers are currently not doing their marketing job. This should include identifying target audiences (i.e communities) and building specific value propositions for these communities. Then monitoring how these value prop resonate and get spread in these communities. They tend to view social media as "one big thing" whereas it is actually build up by a myriad of communities.

    Whatever you look at this, the bottleneck is the listening capabilities of the marketer or the marketing team behind his desktop. One cannot properly organize deep listening and attention development (that requires listening frequently to the same peoople) for more than a few thousand people at a time.

    If you provide more "sources" you will enable people to spot conversations in a river of news but not to get a deep understanding of what's going on in a community nor build trust and relationship with key community stakeholders. And btw, automated listening by machines that cannot understand context is a very risky approach.

    While you spend your time chasing everybody, your competitor may be building support and trust with the people who matter.
    This is where Social Media Monitoring, as good as it can be may not be enough.

    As you said, it all depends of the context of enterprise's situation
  • Dominiq,
    If I understand you correctly, your saying that deep listening by a person, not just a machine, is vital to really build trust and relationships online. I could not agree more.
    There's only so much machines and sentiment analytics can do. That said, however, a marketer or PR practitioner's ability to do what you are suggesting, can of course be aided by having the proper tools at their disposal and limited to the extent that the tools they are using are limited in capability. The right monitoring system can make a big difference but it still takes two to tango.
    Thanks for bringing up the human element in this. It really is so critical to success with social media marketing, PR and customer service, in my view. Great point.
  • Amber is right at home on blogtalkradio. I'm sure she could coordinate something with you.

    When you look at these "venues", be careful with just asking people to complete lists, checking which venues apply. For example, everyone will check "twitter" (to use one example), but some "tools" simply display recent tweets in a UI calling search.twitter, making it appear that this "venue" is adequately covered, where other platforms index & store all the content, plus its associated metrics, etc. The point is that both will be "checked", but one platform will only have a small sampling of conversations where the other will have all the conversations. All I'm saying is that there is a different between "checking a box" and truly covering a source comprehensively.

    The tools also vary significantly in terms of coverage within any given "venue". So within the blog venue, for instance, there are very wide variations in coverage. Then you have additional considerations like language & regional support. There is a difference between adding support for a language and truly covering (finding) the conversations in that language. Anyway, just passing on a few more thoughts for you.

    I'll pass along your comment to Amber.
    Cheers,
    Marcel
  • Dave Chaffey published a nice rundown of 26 social media monitoring tools last month, including positioning and differentiation features. http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/online-pr/onlin...
  • Paul,
    Thanks so much for sharing that superb post by Dave Chaffey. I like that Dave brings up some upcoming features for 2010. To me, one of the big conundrums for listening relates to the private networking space: sites like Linkedin, Xing, Ning and others. Some would argue that the most important conversations taking place on those sites are occurring behind a password protected barrier that listening platforms are simply not able to cross. Granted, there are public RSS feeds from sites like linkedin that can and are being monitored, but that's a small fraction of the greater whole.
    On a related note, one other post I found useful was Jason Falls April '09 "Social Media Monitoring Grudge Match" post (http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2009/04/13/s...)
    Thanks again Paul. Good stuff.
  • Hugh,

    Looking forward to your thoughts on Sysomos after you get a chance to test it out this week. Your list is definitely comprehensive but I think you'll impressed with what we have to offer.

    Mark

    Mark Evans
    Director of Communications
    Sysomos Inc.
  • Thanks so much Mark. I've actually already been extraordinarily impressed with what I have seen regarding both Heartbeat and MAP, the latter of which falls into a slightly different, though related category. As mentioned above, I will write another post in which I actually compare various platforms but here's a preview: Your multilingual (50?) sentiment analytics absolutely blows everything else I've seen out of the water. My initial impression also is that you, Atomic PR's proprietary solution ComContext, and Biz360 probably have the most sophisticated sentiment analytics on the market. I'm sure in the coming days I'll learn more to clarify the accuracy and completeness of this initial impression. Thank you again. I really appreciate your comment here and the opportunity to learn more about Heartbeat and MAP. Congrats too on the nice mention Sysomos recently received in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/technology/15...) regarding tweets referencing Haiti and the Red Cross.
  • Hugh, I think content is still king because if we didn't have some sort of content published, we would not have anything to talk about or begin any type of business relationships. Content is what makes people see us as experts in our field and want to engage in a conversation.
  • Good point, Steve. Thanks for sharing your view here with us.
  • Bryan Basamanowicz
    wow, that's a lot to consider. I can see you are quickly becoming quite the expert.
  • Bryan - Definitely a lot to consider. Fortunately, though, some considerations are going to be far more important to explore in depth than others depending on what business your in. So the process of finding the right solution does not have to be overwhelming if you can prioritize which considerations in the needs analysis stage are most important for you. Make sense? Hey. thanks for the compliment, too! I appreciate it.
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