Amber, I’d be curious to know how you plan on tracking unique visitors and sessions, session time, and site views on a monthly basis for sites you do not control. Alexa ? Quantcast ?

Mark – I’m somewhat skeptical about the value of these paid services as well. In the case of Radian6, I tend to agree with you that the difference is the higher level of analysis and data control built into the system, and not so much real time monitoring (especially since Radian6 only initially tracks back 30 days, much like a free web search). But Daniel makes a good point that people can use this tool in different ways, and scalability is an important issue for some. If you’re willing to pay for it, these tools can build a substantial database over time (and Google starts to miss results when you track back in time more than a month). Another plus for Radian6 – you can track work flow directly in the interface and return to your saved work later.

That said, from my experience, Radian6 can have its own monitoring deficiencies – missing results, duplicates, you name it. What you think will be easy and automated actually requires a lot of manual follow-up.

Daniel – at the large scale corporate level, I think you make a good case for the usefulness of paid tools that aggregate and process large data sets. I realize I’m coming at this question from a different perspective. Cymfony may be appropriate for companies with large budgets focused on responding to negative chatter in various social media. But the potential for noise entering the system when you get that big is troubling to me. I’ve heard horror stories about one of Cymfony’s competitors (Cymfony likes to tells this story itself) mixing up derivations of the word “Visa.” Be careful out there.

Also, I’d like to reiterate that regardless of the scale of the tool you use, drive your own metrics. One size does not fit all in the world of social media.

Amber – if you do indeed start including traffic metrics like unique visitors, I’ll be impressed. I was told this would happen earlier, but I’d still be excited to see some improvements. I’m convinced that the issue of scale can necessitate paid services, but at the same time, basic Radian6 “River of News” results can miss the mark. Search configuration is inflexible compared to Google and metrics like comment count aren’t always that useful in ranking data. I’ve found results I was looking for that show up in the “preview” don’t show up in the actual results widget, and for searches in the recent past, Google will pick up results that Radian6 fails to. And if this is happening for small-scale searches, I wonder what happens when you scale larger. Just today, a co-worker who had recently learned how to use Radian6 told me that the results she was getting were confusing and incomplete. I’m still a fan of a lot of Radian6 features, but I’ve had enough experience with the tool to say that it can be frustrating to use. That said, I don’t know if other paid services are any better in these areas.

Thanks for all your input!
David

And I’m typing David because i’m staring at an email from a David as I type to you. Criminy. Is in Monday or what?

Apologies for that error. You can call me Amanda if you want.

Thanks for the post, and for all of your feedback about the platform, as always. Much appreciated.

We’re big proponents of listening in general, and encourage everyone to start with whatever tools are available to them. But there are certainly things that just aren’t manageable from free tools like Google Alerts, as helpful as they can be.

For light campaigns, you may indeed be able to handle just 40 or so posts resulting from it with a handful of free alerts. But for brand campaigns that might total posts in the hundreds or even thousands, managing that manually is exceedingly difficult. Also, those campaigns can cross into multimedia sites like video, microblogging, photo sharing sites, even forums – all of which we monitor as well.

On the analysis side, there’s a significant collection of metrics for each post item that we currently offer – everything from comment count to twitter followers to inbound links – and a host of new features coming in our next release this month that might help enhance what you’re looking for. We’ll be including things like unique visitors and sessions, session time, and site views on a monthly basis.

There’s certainly no such thing as a magic bullet – human elements and business goals are critical – but we can certainly help by making sure that the best and most relevant information is available.

Happy to chat with you or your readers anytime about our capabilities, and thanks again for highlighting the platform (and indulging my long comment!).

Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community | Radian6
@AmberCadabra | amber.naslund@radian6.com

The difference can be in both scale and analysis. If you’re running a massive campaign for a major brand, Google Search or Trackr doens’t cut it.

If you’re part of a major CPG company, you probably need something like Cymphony which will actually do sentiment tracking (using human evaluators and AI) to analyze the data.

But on other hand, if you’re a community manager – simply just being part of the community, looking around forums etc – would be as big as a component as using any of these tools.

Over at e-Storm, we’ve used Radian6 to Bloglines (remember when they were big?) and they do have their place depending on the budget and the type/scope of the campaign.

I guess it comes down to whether or not these services are worth the extra cost of analysis.

Thanks for taking time to write up your opinion, enjoyed the post.