Free and paid platforms are available, which one is for you?
There is hardly any one-size-fits-all solution out there these days and same can be said about online monitoring and tracking services for social media.
In a nut shell, these services pull in public information that appears on social networks, blogs, news, forums, you name it. Most services take advantage of RSS syndication feeds, the higher end service sometime will offer custom scaping services (not cheap).
If you are brand new to social media and aren’t known by many people, try the services in the FREE section. On the contrary, a big established brand can take advantage from these paid services that let you categorize, assign, and manage conversations. Furthermore, some providers have built in sentiment analytics (yes, linguists are employed), conversation heatmaps, tagclouds/wordclouds, analytics, trending charts, that reveals the otherwise unknown movers and shakers of your brand in the social web. Identifying that brand cheer leader is critical to market your product on the social web.
Paid social media services
Expect more from Paid services in terms of
- real-time data
- quality & filtered information
- volume of mention
- variety of data sources such as video and audio
- language translation services
- sentiment engine
- analytical platform
- automated reporting
- contract to hire team of bloggers/microbloggers
- ability to annotate graphs
- adding your own data stream
- industry and competitive trends
- custom RSS or
- historical audit
- strategy and seeding of messages
- maintenance contract
Solutions are highly customizable so cost ranges a great deal with different service offerings and the big players like Nielsen and TNS require 1 year contract. If your corporation is thinking about a paid service, be sure to review the types of offerings above.
Forrester Research chart from Q1, 2009 below
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Reputable brand name and has strong international presence. Offers brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time reputation threats and compares you with competition. For China, they launch their buzzmetrics service in August, 2009.
Another strong brand but no presence in China. They rely on upstream content aggregators to feed their analysis platform with content unlike Nielsen that has existing relationship with dedicated social networks. Volume of results lags that of Nielsen, but cannot say for quality. Maestro platform is built on natural language processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies, and topics – a very strong engine dissects media sources. A smart platform but it’s ability to translate Chinese to English still yet proven.
A full service shop that has international presence. Uses Radian6 for the backend technology. Has a sleu of free online webinars, a really fantastic resource. Presentors are very professional and experts in their field.
Not a full service, but a great agency solution. If you have technical people in your company who can setup dashboards, this is the solution for you. It’s a great platform to do a lot of customization, a great deal of flexibility and claims to pull from 100 million sources. Remember to turn multi-lingual “ON” for Chinese character input.
Traditional market research company that’s also making its way to social media. Biz360 uses proprietary technology, analytics, and natural language processing to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of media and marketing information to yield marketing insights. Also has global capability and it’s in between Nielsen and TNS.
Provides insights, not just data into brands, markets, consumers and trends.
Global player focus on public relations and corporate communications. Small companies stay away.
Visible Technologies has international presence and it offers proprietary ways of discovering, collecting, processing, analyzing, and engaging social media content.
Not much to say about them. I called, emailed and contacted them via their own web form but no response. Definitely an odd case of bad customer service.
A small SF startup with some killer offerings. I spoke to their co-founder Vivek, extremely personable. They are building the social graph of the world, making sense of person to person connections and pulling in publically available information (i.e. facebook, linkedIN, myspace) about individuals (customers). Very powerful technology that’s great for candidate screening service, fraud & credit service, and marketing service. I cannot say too much here since they prefer to stay small and stealth. What I will disclose is that their engineers are the ones that turn down offers from Google and Facebook! Stellar.
Started by the social media pioneer Andy Beal (who I admire and respect greatly). Trackur offers affordable plans for individuals, companies, enterprises, and agencies. It does not have the bells or whistles like the annual contract services but neither do its prices. A good platform to test, has 2 week free trial.
Trendrr offers real-time social & digital media tracking. It seems to only return charts rather than stories and mentions.
Developed by Quirk e-marketing based in South Africa. Initially very responsive and promised many things, but just went silent, needless to say, unfulfilled promise to “get back to me with more information.” Not a good solution for China at all.
English company that specializes in PR, Marketing. Starts at 259 English pounds a month for single user account. A pretty steep price to pay.
I’d like to give credit to Dan Schawbel from Mashable for compiling the initial list
Free social media services
Conversations are happening on the web whether you like it or not. There’s basically three options,
- Continue to ignore what people are saying because you think you don’t have the time or resource.
- Choose to hear what people say (which is critically important if you are a service based organization) and not react and
- Choose to hear and selectively react
If you are opting in the FREE option, chances are, you are a smaller size business and don’t have the dedicated resources for marketing let alone social marketing. But consider this, if someone fills out and leaves you a comment card about your service, would you make the time to read it? What if someone emails you a complaint, would you respond to it? What if someone calls you? Would you continue to ignore them.
Social media levels the playing field for small businesses, people appreciate connecting to brands online, it is still a pleasant surprise to them – see this article in ReadWriteWeb.
Now the 13th most valuable web property on the world web web. Unfortunately blocked from China but serves the U.S businesses right letting people search for real-time brand mentions.
Offers email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories as they happen for your name, your topic, and even your company.
Yahoo Pipes is a more customizable and flexible service than Google that allows you to pull from custom websites and RSS. Tutorial is on the front page for the curious, do-it-yourself ones.
Technorati is the first search engine dedicated to blogs. If all you care about are blogs and no press releases or forum discussions, technorati is for you. Otherwise, it can be a little limiting.
This is a dedicated tool for blog comment monitoring. If your company has a blog and you expect to interact with people through that blog (many CEOs do that now), Backtype will help you track it.
Cocomment is the start of identifying web influencers. Not only does it help you manage your comments across the web, you can discover influencers who are commenting on the blogs you are reading.
This tool searches for comments on your content from the open social web like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Blogger.
A services that watches comments/follow-up on blog posts, digg submissions, flickr galleries and other open content on the web and instantly notifies you.
Monitor forum posts, topics, and actual forum names
Does what it says. Monitors for web page changes
An effective social brand search tool in neatly organized categories
Like Google Alerts but for social media. Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.
I’d like to give credit to Dan Schawbel from Mashable for compiling the initial list