11 Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Tracking And Analysis

07
Jul

By Puja Madan | 16 Comments »

Listen, Respond and Engage.

If this be the mantra for brands, then the listening part (literally) wasn’t easy till a while ago. Then came along a smart bunch of people who decided to create tools to make monitoring brand conversations easier. From basic to highly sophisticated, a wide variety is available to choose from today. I’m listing down 11 with a brief summary from the sites and my first (for most) impression. This is by no means a comprehensive list – that’s why comments boxes were created I’ve concluded . While I use two of these tools myself, I’ve tried to keep this post objective and more of a resource for those interested.

Radian6
Despite the heavy, tech jargon and complex presentation, Radian6 is a popular name in the social media community. Its latest version integrates data from WebTrends and Salesforce.com making the package a compelling one.

Pricing: Undisclosed
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @radian6
ScoutLabs
Scoutlabs boasts of clients such as HP and SonyBMG. ScoutLab’s pricing plan is transparent (most require you to get in touch) offers a wide spectrum of editions based on the size (of company) and scope (of requirement).

Pricing: Starts at $99/month
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @ScoutLabs
SM2
Designed for PR and marketing professionals, SM2 offers a free (not just trial) as well as several paid versions. Like ScoutLabs and Radian6, SM2 is one of the more sophisticated tools out there that provides sentiment analysis, clustering and customized reporting.

Pricing: Starts at $600/month
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @Techrigy
StartPR
Florida-based StartPR is the only site that prompts you to search for a keyword right there on the homepage. I think that’s a nice touch in terms of UI. The site claims to scour different sources but names specifically Twitter search, Google Blog Search, Technorati and Wordpress

Pricing: Starts at $19/month
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @startpr
Trackur
Trackur is pretty clear in its scope and value. You can tell from the homepage which provides a comparison with Google Alerts. Created by @andybeal Trackur came into being because existing tools ‘were either too complex or too expensive.’

Pricing: Starts at $18/month
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @trackur
MAP & Heartbeat
Released in June ‘09, MAP and Heartbeat are tools developed by Toronto-based Sysomos. The founders are confident that these tools ”are going to shake up the social media analytics market by providing customers with the real-time insight and intelligence that hasn’t been available before.”

Pricing: Undisclosed
Free Trial/Demo: Undisclosed
On Twitter: @Sysomos
BrandsEye
Another player offering similar value as Trackur with a simple comparison with it and Google Alerts. It targets not only companies but also bloggers and individuals who are interested in managing their online reputation.

Pricing: Starts at $1/month
Free Trial/Demo: Nope
On Twitter: @BrandsEye
PR Newswire
I found out today, thanks to @jasonfalls that PR Newswire is coming up with a new monitoring tool that “monitors and analyzes over 20 million blogs, 5 million forum posts, and 30,000 online news sources, social networks and microblogs”

Pricing: Undisclosed
Free Trial/Demo: Yes
On Twitter: @PRNewsire

Some other social media monitoring tools in the market are listed below:
Filtrbox
Buzzgain
ViralHeat

Wanna know which I think is the best tool? The one that sniffs this post out and responds first! Fair?

posted on July 7th, 2009 under Branding, Reputation Management, Resources.

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Comments

July 7th, 2009 | Sachin says:

Thanks for sharing this list. Interesting collection. Heartening to know that companies have invested so much in building social media monitoring tools.

Thanks.
July 7th, 2009 | Amit says:

We’ve tried StartPR which I would not recommend. But SM2 has worked out really well. Thanks for the list though – very useful.
July 7th, 2009 | Andy Beal says:

Hi Puja, many thanks for including Trackur in your list. I’m glad you found our scope and value to be clear–that’s what sets us apart. In fact, we challenge that you can have Trackur up and running in less than 60 seconds!
July 7th, 2009 | Jennifer Zeszut says:

Hi Puja. Glad you appreciate our open pricing and instant-access free trials. You are not alone I’d love to add that all of Scout Labs’ plans are for an unlimited number of users, so that it can truly be a customer dashboard in and across organizations. We are very proud of our text analysis capabilities (sentiment scoring, new meme detection, spam filters), with totally unique NLP-based features being announced soon. Stay tuned.
July 7th, 2009 | David Alston says:

Hey there Puja,

Thanks for including Radian6 on your list. Thanks for highlighting our latest Salesforce and webtrends integrations. Certainly capabilities that help further define the ROI associated with listening and engaging. I realize our user-interface is a differentiator for us with most folks enjoying the free-flow ability to configure it to whatever they want.

Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6

PS. I replaced the typical website URL on this comment with a link to folks on Twitter that have experience with us – in case folks want some third party feedback on us instead of just mine
July 8th, 2009 | Adam Green says:

How about taking a look at http://www.AlertRank.com for inclusion in this list? It’s a completely free Google Alerts add-on that provides management, reporting, and analytics features. Let me know if you want a demo.
July 8th, 2009 | Puja Madan says:

Sachin, Amit – Good to hear from you and happy you found the list useful.

Andy – you rock!! You got here first *thumbs up*

Jennifer, David – Thanks for writing in and elaborating on your respective products.

Adam – I just signed up with AlertRank, thanks. This list was meant to grow with community inputs. I’ll update it with my findings and comment updates soon.
July 8th, 2009 | Synthesio says:

Hi Puja,

Definitely a great list of monitors! Although we’re not quite ready to roll out our services to the anglophone community just yet, we would like to point out that there are also quite a few French monitoring companies out there
Other than that, just wanted to say that we like following some of these guys on Twitter, for sure

Regards,
Michelle
@Synthesio
July 11th, 2009 | Mukund Mohan says:

Hey Puja
Thanks for including us. Love to give you a demo and walk through if you have a moment. Please call me at +91 998 054 2748
July 13th, 2009 | Abhay Shete says:

Hi Puja,
Thanks for the reviews on the products. I have been working on search and NLP for the last 5 years.
How important is the accuracy of the sentiment analysis tools? I created a campaign for iphone using sm2 and the results were hardly impressive as far as accuracy is concerned.

e.g: “Win a FREE iPhone, just go to http://bit.ly/uYUqK , good luck! #iphone”

is treated as “very positive”. There were many such discrepancies. Clearly, the analysis is going to be skewed because of these errors in software.From a use case perspective, are the market analysts happy with just data collection at one place and they are willing to run another round of manual analysis on this information? Could you share your experiences about the accuracy of these tools and the rework that had to be done?

I am developing a sentiment analysis tool myself, I am hoping that a far more accurate sentiment analysis and spam filtering tool would add more value. Or am I wrong about this ?

Thanks for the article again and looking forward to your feedback.
July 13th, 2009 | Puja Madan says:

Michelle – thanks for writing in. Its so encouraging to see more and more companies tackling the ever-increasing monitoring task in different markets. I was especially impressed with SportTrack Web. And now, I’m following you on Twitter

Mukund – thanks for the offer. Will definitely take it on!

Abhay – Welcome aboard! Your question is pretty pertinent though I’m afraid I won’t be able to do complete justice to it since I haven’t used all these tools, just two. But here’s my take from that experience: relying on an algorithm to carry sentiment analysis is unreasonable. We’ve carried out this exercise manually for clients. While most tools offer automated sentiment scoring, it definitely helps to have manual intervention.

It would be great to have insights on how you’ve approached this problem with your new tool. And definitely look fwd to its launch.
October 16th, 2009 | Reema Sathe says:

Hi Pooja,

I came across this analysis of yours and found it interesting. Me, with couple of my colleagues are planning a venture in the brand analysis arena. I have one question though… What is a the average size of Indian market dealing with foreign social media clients and also Indian clients. Is it really worth the kind of buzz that social media has created in brand analysis field?
October 16th, 2009 | Reema says:

I came across this analysis of yours and found it interesting. Me, with couple of my colleagues are planning a venture in the brand analysis arena. I have one question though… What is a the average size of Indian market dealing with foreign social media clients and also Indian clients. Is it really worth the kind of buzz that social media has created in brand analysis field?

-Reema
April 24th, 2010 | Shameer Thaha says:

Great Article!

I wanted to bring to your attention a fantastic and reliable tool for social media monitoring – ThoughtBuzz.

ThoughtBuzz provides the best social media intelligence in just a click! It provides only relevant data and is an intelligent learning tool which gives you absolute control over the data without requiring you to spend lots of time and effort.

You can obtain more info at http://www.thoughtbuzz.net or drop me a mail at shameer.thaha[at]thoughtbuzz[dot]net.
May 29th, 2010 | Mark Evans says:

Thanks for mentioning MAP and Heartbeat. Both services have seen a large number of new features over the past few months. Heartbeat, for example, now features integration with Salesforce.com.

cheers, Mark

Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
July 21st, 2010 | Reeta says:

Hi,

That’s very useful information and very very thanks to sharing these tools