Social media makes a lot of noise. In order to sift through all this noise smart marketers need to use monitoring tools to prioritize the most relevant information. I recently conducted a review of four monitoring tools for Page One PR: eCairn, Overtone, ViralHeat and Sysomos. The most important information I can share isn’t which tool was best but rather that no one tool will meet all your specific social media needs. Each tool I reviewed performed different functions with unique strengths. If you’re doing serious social media monitoring, pick the mix of tools that best meet your needs. There’s no way – yet – to automate monitoring. You still have to do manual work to fill the gaps. A smart marketer will select multiple tools that, when used together, will provide the right level of data to develop an effective social media strategy.
eCairn
eCairn specializes in the blogosphere. Their Conversation application is a tool that maps out blog communities. Users manually create a list of blogs they wish to track. A proprietary algorithm ranks these blogs by “influence,” largely by measuring how frequently the blogs cross reference other influential blogs. The tool’s functions are less about search, and more about text mining. For our agency, identifying key blogs and conversations is important, but if the tool also worked for Twitter and other social media sources it would be much more valuable.
Overtone
Open Mic by Overtone works on a platform that operates on keywords, and does a great job of analyzing data from search terms. I especially liked their emerging trend alert function which identifies potential spikes in a keyword that could lead to future trends or issues. However, Open Mic seems designed to focus on single brand topics for companies to manage online forums or customer service surveys more than for use as a general purpose monitoring tool. It’s not well suited for agencies.
ViralHeat
We signed up for a free ViralHeat trial after Mashable described them as a sophisticated, yet affordable social media tracking tool. ViralHeat pulls data from Twitter, websites, blogs, and YouTube from search profiles we create in the tool. It can tell you specific information such as the number of total unique authors who tweeted about your search term. They also pull together a convenient summary of daily metrics activity. However, a downside of the tool was that the search capability wasn’t as user-friendly and flexible as other monitoring services. Our account was limited to 10 profile searches, and it was difficult to figure out how to compare multiple keywords in the same search. Starting at $10 per month, ViralHeat is priced aggressively. But for Page One, ViralHeat would best serve as a secondary tool that would complement a primary monitoring service with better search functions and less rigidity.
Sysomos
Sysomos offers two main products, the Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. MAP is an in-depth tool useful for historical analysis over time. The tool is able to identify key influencers in social media communities and uses text analytics to determine tone and sentiment. One attractive feature is that MAP’s database reaches back to 2006, and the data can be effectively categorized by geographic location. It can also monitor across multiple companies.
Their second product is Heartbeat, and is targeted for real-time, day-to-day monitoring, usually for a single brand/company. This tool tracks social media mentions instantaneously, determines sentiment and key influencers, and lets users view their current competitive landscape. Heartbeat also allows multiple users to log-in to the website at one time, which facilitates the sharing of information with your colleagues. Like most other tools, the social media data only goes back 30 days, which is hopefully something that could be tweaked in the future.
Because of its flexibility, search functions, easy-to-use dashboard, and the real-time component, MAP and Heartbeat from Sysomos appear to be good choices right now for our agency (we also plan to more extensively test drive eCairn for its blog capabilities). But we understand that social media monitoring is still an evolving service, and our monitoring needs as an agency will change over time. One thing to remember about choosing a social media tracking tool is that what’s right for our agency may not be right for you.
If you have any insights or questions, please feel free to leave a response in the comments.
Happy tracking!
Tags: monitoring tools, social media, social media monitoring, tracking
Great review of these services. What is the pricing of other tools? Specifically Sysomos that you chose. You did not mention that in your post.
Susan,
Thanks for including Sysomos’ services within your review. If you’d like more information about MAP or Heartbeat, please let me know.
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
Mark, can you give people a general idea how much Sysomos costs? This would be a critical bit of information in any evaluation. I know the pricing we would pay from Nick Koudas, but I’m hoping that you can give the public a general idea of pricing that you tell everyone.
Seems like a very old screenshot of Viralheat. This stuff is great but your lack of analytics depth in your thinking is not good
Craig,
The prices for our products, MAP and Heartbeat, varies from client to client based on their needs, including the number of licenses they require. We would be more than happy to talk about your requirements, which will give you an accurate take on how much it would cost.
Mark
Mark, what’s a typical setup for 2 licenses, MAP only, no Heartbeat? Are we talking $3,000 per month here on the average?
Can I get someone to give you a call? You can send an e-mail to sales@sysomos.com to set something up.
cheers, Mark
Josh, thanks for the comment!
ViralHeat starts at $10/month and eCairn starts at $99/month. For Sysomos and Overtone, their pricing depends on the services you require. You can contact Mark, who has commented above, for Sysomos pricing, or info@overtone for Overtone’s pricing options.
John, thanks for the comments about analytics. I know that susan has a lot more information. We are actively using Radian6 and use a range of tools to monitor social media for many companies in Silicon Valley. What type of analytics are you looking for? We didn’t want to do a direct comparison because the use of the tools is open to wide interpretation. Also, the blog post was intended to be short. Each tool has its own strength.
Hi John,
That ViralHeat screenshot was taken last week, from their website.
- Susan
Mark, I have pricing from your CEO for our own company. I was just hoping you could give some general guidelines for Sysomos MAP pricing to the general public based on generic examples. There must be typical pricing scenarios that you can share, right?
Susan,
Thanks for the mention.
Our focus is on quality, relevance and control in order to provide meaningful analytics and actionable data.
Allow me to precise a few things:
1) Our tool is designed to provide the best view of Community and Industry Influencers who are driving the conversations in niche market (think “computer security” and “~1000 influencers in the US”)
We believe blogs are their base of operation (not saying they’re not very active on other SN), thus a particular focus on blogs.
We plan to expand the blog model to other SN (twitter etc..).
2) Identifying relevant blogs (proxy for those industry influencers) isn’t manual but semi-automated. The platform suggests candidates on an on-going basis. Because we focus on quality/relevance, someone needs to decide if they want to keep or discard them.
3) We have features for twitter and other SN. i.e: you can record a twitter search, like say “mybrand #fail”, and the platform will automatically.
Laurent@eCairn
Craig,
As I mentioned, pricing really varies depending on what you need. As a result, we don’t talk about pricing publicly but we are more than happy to discuss someone’s needs to provide them with the best and most suitable service.
cheers, Mark
Laurent, thanks for the clarification about manual vs. semi-automated. It definitely makes sense for eCairn to suggest industry influencers to their users so that they can track blogs of quality.
This has been a learning process for me as well!
- Susan
You might also check out Biz360. We just launched our latest generation social media platform called Community Insights. We specialize in broad global content with automated sentiment and the ability to have a complete self-service experience or work with our experienced knowledge engineers to refine your topics or provide expert analysis. http://ci.biz360.com
Thanks
Do anybody work with ALTERIAN SM2 ^
Personally I found this application really strong in terms of crawling, qualifycation of data and automated reports.
http://techrigy.com/sm2help/doku.php