Which social media monitoring tool should I buy?

The listening platform market I discovered is still pretty immature and as John Barton Head of Social Media at Steak says ...from to the best of my knowledge, they are all 'much of a muchness' to coin a phrase.  The market contains hoards of monitoring and analytics tools with dozens of competitive offerings all claiming much the same thing.  I found 198 listed here alone from the completely free to top end price. And its not going to get any easier, expect more to pop up as social media start-ups are flavour of 2011 so they will keep on coming. Anyone who has technology that can crawl the web is starting one. This obscures, confuses, and seems to commoditise the landscape. At the other end software, consulting and publishing giants have seen the importance of getting involved with IBM's, Microsoft, McKinseys, DowJones getting in. This gives instant credibility to the SMM sector which is a good thing but also adds further confusion to the procurement process.

The main tread I posted on LinkenIn is here but I shared it with 25 other groups all digital marketing focused. I got many comments and responses emailed direct. One of the first to comment was Stephen Brooks the ex UK MD of Nielsen Online, who lead the launch in the UK of Buzz Metrics in 2008 and MyBuzzmetrics in 2009. Stephens echoed many when he said ‘‘..One of the most important considerations .. has to be what question(s) is the client trying to answer. Too often they rush headlong into social media and then try and use it to answer questions that are unanswerable. Therefore there needs to be a very clear brief and a high degree of understanding between client and agency/supplier"

With this in mind you need to take a BIG step or two back and answer some basic questions before you just rush in and buy the first shiny SM monitoring brand you spot. These questions should form the brief to any potential SMM partner service.  

Q1. What do you actually need to know? What are the questions you need answering. Do you simply want to see if your brand, campaign or competitors just show up in social chatter. For that purpose, Google Alerts or many of the free/low cost tools (see listed below) may be sufficient. But you may want more, like knowing something about the people who are mentioning your brand, such as where they live and whether what they say is positive or negative (their "sentiment"). For information like that, you'll need a more sophisticated (and more expensive) tool.  

Q2. Why do you need to know this. You'll have to get 100% clear about your business objectives before you select. Do you want to identify service opportunities, protect your online reputation, find out your brand influencers and leverage them, save money on other marketing, R&D or just see how your firm compares to the competition? Depending on the questions you're trying to answer, one tool will be better than another.

Q3. What are you going to do with the information once I get it: There is no point patrolling the beach like the Hoff in an effort to spot drowning people if you haven't learnt how to swim. Have you thought about a time when you have all the answers on who, where and why your customers are feeling the way they are, how you are going to react? Have management bought into SMM and its importance as the canary down the mine or the bellweather for marketing and sales. Will the believe SMM tools, basically a piece of web search software, will actually be of any use in exposing the whole brand picture? More importantly are they open to making changes (minior or otherwise) to the business if the answers gleaned from listening demand it?

Q4. How much time and money can you invest it this: Literally the $64,000 question. Like everything else related to social media, monitoring requires that someone spends time using and getting familiar with the tool you select. Your "off-line" processes are going to be more important to you when it comes to gaining meaning so it cant really be outsourced. How much time is your firm willing to allow for that purpose, and what level of expertise is the person or people using the tooll to have? When I posted the question on LinkedIn the majority of people who responded warned me not to trust automatic sentiment in particular. This is a very important point as sentiment is the core reason for using SMM tools in my opinion. Again not to over burden the metaphor but its your canary down the mine picking up any dangeropus fumes from consumers. You want to know why people like and especially dislike you, dont you? Even the vendors themselves admitted that this is a developing technology, Olivia Landoit the UK Marketing and Community Manager for Radian6 said that 'sentiment was never 100% accurate and that is industry standard for all monitoring tools, however we do work hard to continue improving'.

So establishing sentiment works best only when there is a manual influence in the categorising as an automated process finds it hard to pick up  sarcasm, slang, poor grammar, missepellings, foreign languages, poor syntax, puns, jokes etc. If you want business-specific, precise analyses there has to be human work involved and this takes time so calculate this into time and indirect HR overhead.

If you can answer the four questions you are fore armed and can then broadly address the scope of any SMM Social Media Request for Proposal. For the purpose of selection I have simply listed questions that have been mentioned in the LinkedIn discussions. I have divided the choice into simple Listening service partner (any tool that helps you listen to the chatter) and Social dashboards (a tool that offers the ability to listen, analysise, engage and generally manage SM campaigns).

Key selection criteria pointed out by respondents, In no particular order.

Test, Test, Test and test again, then test once again.
Start expermenting with the free services immediately. I recommend Social mention as an immediate free teaser to get you into the basics. Once you've narrowed down the scope of what you want to do and the range of tools that might work for your firm, send the RFP and ask for a free no strings demonstration to make sure the program does everything you want.

You have a knowledge of your brand and industry and your companys position in that industry, that is ahead of any social media monitoring tool. You know the companies that are top of their game and those that are not. See if this is evident in any tool you test and do this before you actually purchase a tool, or make any long term commitment. When weighing options, don't be pennywise and pound foolish. If SM monitoring is going to be increasingly important to your firm, go for the best program for your needs, not the least expensive. Otherwise, you'll end up spending more in the long term on upgrades, training or self training or program changes. Remember that this is a long term investment because as ‘learning a dash in the first place isn't the easiest task in the world, most tend not digress too much from their dash of choice unless they have a truly awful experience.

So, you want a full Social dashboard so you can listen, analysise and respond— What you need is an all-in-one, web-based monitoring tool. To recap, their primary aim is to help companies pick up on brand and competitive chatter, enable effective engagement within these social hot spots and generally manage social media campaigns.A few examples of said companies in alfabetical order.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I have not tried these tools(yet) so would love to hear any practical experience from any of you out ther.

1. Alterian - Provide packaged service solutions around their SM2 technology platform to drive marketing actions, regardless of channel. Price on request but has some big names as clients. Cited as a key leader by Forester among listening platforms
2. Brandwatch - Pretty flexable i am told, from a simple monitoring project to full-blown Analyst Reports or API integration. Claims it has the best realtime coverage of Social Media. Claims to have an intelligent automated systems which address the sources of irrelevant data, so saves you time.
3. BuzzNumbers -  Local Australian startup, Sydney based but looking to establish offices in Melbourne and Los Angeles this year. Say they provide a full service approach to engage, monitor and understand Social Media. Worth a try if you are in OZ.
4. Buzzmetrics  - Nielsen's online audience and consumer-generated media measurement and analysis solutions. Cited as a leader by Forester among listening platforms but not the cheapest. 
5. Collective Intellect - A suite of social media tools and services built on proprietary, semantic search and latent semantic analytics technology, which automates the capture of consumer "consideration and preference" metrics and insights from consumer generated content. You do however need to be a big brand for this one.
6. Converseon;  In the latest Forester evaluation, Converseon's suite of social listening tools was cited as a leader among listening platforms. 
7. Cymfony; Cymfony (part of Kantar Media) is due to launch officially in the UK next month, and have been very well established in the US for the last 10 years. Cited as a leader by Forester among listening platforms
8. Dow Jones Insight -  - gives you a 360° view of events and conversations wherever they’re happening – in print, online or on video, from New York to Iran to China. Cited as a leader by Forester among listening platforms
9. EmPower Research; Listed in the Forrester Research report on the Listening Platform Landscape for Q4 2010 according to a PR relaease. Not mentioned if it came out as a leader.
10. evolve24, The Mirror -  The Mirror provides an enterprise SaaS media-driven Business Intelligence solution focused on stakeholders, reputation and risk. Cited as a leader by Forester among listening platform. 
11. NetBase  - Deliver tools and scorecards that give market researchers and brand managers a reliable way to understand online brand equity, analyse and compare consumer passion, and generate deep insights that answer their “why” questions. Big clients including Coca Cola, Honda and Kraft Foods. 
12. NM Incite - Nielsen recently launched a joint venture with McKinsey to add industry leading consulting to its strong technology offering. Two great companies getting together as a single package but get your wallet out as this wont be cheap.
13. Radian6 - The veteran of the pack, est 2006 and just bought by salesforce for $350M. Like the others helps businesses listen, discover, measure and engage in conversations across the social web. Was dismissed by some early on as a PR tool, also talked about as almost 'too powerful' but is is a heavyweight buzz monitoring tool for brand managers. Cited as the top buy last year by Forester among listening platforms. A must for a test really, but can become pricy.
14. Revinate  - If you are in the hotel industry, check it out according to a comment.
15. Sentimentmetrics - Comment stated that it was 'In the same camp as Radian6 but different model based on number of keywords. Easy to use, effectivetive and designed by a good company willing to listen.
16. Synthesio - Paris based, International company who allows data to be displayed in a dashboard with no delay. Sentiment monitoring is done by analysts that are native in the language we are monitoring (up to 30 languages). Major clients including Microsoft, Toyoto, Phizer, Accor amoung others.
17. Sysomos - provides bussiness intelligence for social media. Has major brands listed
18. Visible Technologies, truCast Suite - Claims to be assisting Global 2000 companies and leading PR and creative agencies with their social media implementations for the past 5 years. Cited as a leader by Forester among listening platforms
19. UberVU - I am told it has most of the features of Radian6, but for a lot less money and with better performance. According to their website they have been praised by the press as having 'Innovative social media monitoring service'.
20. Viral Heat - If you have a limited budget, Viral Heat have a $29.99 option for 7 search profiles. The length of the searches you can write are limited so you queries cannot be overly complex. Yet for a small company or a pilot social media project in a large company this may be the way to start.
21. Vocus - Vocus provides advanced and easy-to-use software for public relations management.

Pick two or three and test, test test.

If you have experience with these please drop me a line or comment below. If you are a SMM tool vendo and want to be added to this list please drop me a line with the reasons why.

Simple listening service partner. This is ideal for customers that just want to listen without the overhead of configuring and fine-tuning the monitoring solution themselves. suggested examples that were mentioned include;

1. Addictomatic - A cool little tool that lets you set up a webpage to track a topic, grabbing mentions from WordPress, Flickr and FriendFeed etc
2. BoardTracker  – BoardTracker claims to be scanning hundreds of thousands of forum discussions. Impressive if a bit technical in it’s reporting.
3. Google Alerts - YOu are not digitari if you havent one of these set up on your own name for the last 3 years. It can give you daily or real-time email alerts when your specific keyword is mentioned. This works well with unique search terms, its a little blunt if your company name is generic. Can also clog up you inbox but it is free.
4. HootSuite - One of the original players, and hearing a lot of positive vibes from the states on this one. Does a similar job to Tweetdeck but allows users to monitor all of their social profiles not just twitter. The basic package is Free the Pro package is $5.99/month so wont break the bank.
5. HowSociable – Nice design but better for looking at the social media scores of big brands rather than smaller ones.
6. Jungle Torch - A large number of customers find local business services and products through search engines this product claims to help you realises the importance social media plays in good SEO.
7. Kontagent -  Basic service free, lists some known big brand customers
8. Netvibes - This product started as an RSS feed reader, but now allows you to create a custom dashboard based on your interests.  Free service also. 
9. Social Mention – Like Google but for the social web (their own slogan says it all). Good for general research as well as social buzz monitoring. My favorite as it also has sentiment, but is a bit slow.
10. Trackur - has a limited free tool but also an $18.00 sub version. The thing I quite like about this is the ability to rank the people mentioning you or your brand in terms of influence; this allows you to prioritise who to respond to if you are struggling with an ORM problem.
11. Tweetdeck – A great tool for Twitter in particular and gained traction when Twitter’s website was pretty much unusable, but despite improvements to Twitter.com it is still very useful so much so that Twitter bought it in May for For $40 to $50Million
12. TweetReach – Want to know how far a Twitter hashtag your company is using has gone? It tells you how many people have received tweets with your hashtag. It’s free, or there is an enhanced paid version if you need that. a.     
13. Twitterfall  – More often used for live Tweet displays at events – it’s a great tool for following live debate around key words and hashtags.
14. TwitterSearch  – You can subscribe to searches as an RSS feed and as it’s actually an official Twitter product it is pretty good.

Again if you have experience with these please or know of better ones please drop me a line or comment below. If you are a SMM tool vendo and want to be added to this list please drop me a line with the reasons why.