@BasilPuglisi

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social media analytics

Social Media & Brand Monitoring Part 4: Techrigy, Seesmic

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SM2 – Techrigy

When Techrigy, a Pittsford, N.Y Company, reached 1 Billion conversations, in Feb. 2009, it was posted all over the internet. In July of that same year, the company was acquired by Alterian, a British integrated marketing software platform and a leading marketing service company. Their product was labeled SM2.

The company provides brand monitoring solutions for social media. It provides tools to monitor and measure social media sentiment analysis, trend comparisons, geographic analysis, theme detection, authority measurement, demographic and classifications.

SM2 helps brand managers see what people are saying about their brand, who is saying what, how the competition is doing and what is said about them. It is an essential tool in market research and shows, analytically, how a campaign or new product launch is performing.

SM2 follows what was said on blogs, message boards, forums, micro blogs (like Twitter, Plurk, Indeti.ca), Wikis (user generated information sites), video and photo sharing sites (You Tube, Flickr) social network sites (Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn), classified sites and review sites.

All this vast information, categorized by topics, is delivered to their customers, aggregated and diced into graphs and pie charts so you can dig out the information you need and adjust your search to make it more accurate.

In comparison to Radian6, SM2 showed almost the same search results. The sentiment result was much better in SM2, but the interface is not user friendly. The initial set up time for each search also takes too much time. 

SM2 serves advertising agencies and PR firms like Abraham & Harrison ( working with Kimberly-Clark Healthcare, Lowe Worldwide, Sharp Electronics), Bader Rutter (GE healthcare, Pfizer) and Yamego (MTV, Durex, BBC).

Their pricing is compatible to Radian6 – plans starting at $500 a month.

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Seesmic

Seesmic, founded in 2007 by French investor Loic Le Meur, still operates out of San Francisco. It offers tools to monitor the activity on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, and respond in a timely manner from one centralized place.

In 2009 the company went through a re-launch from being mainly a video uploading site to aggregating content from other social networks. They have a few programs:

Seesmic Desktop – which allows you to manage several Twitter accounts, build groups and “Build your community”.

Seesmic Web – A web based version that allows you to manage a few Twitter accounts, on any web platform. The information is being stored in a cloud, not on your computer.

Seesmic aim is to be the gateway to all your social services needs on any platform you are on, local apps and mobile phones. The nicely designed app, allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can add a Ping.fm account and automatically update all of them together with one post, or each of them separately.

In January 2010, Seesmic acquaired Ping.fm, a company that allows users to publish updates on many social media sites with a single click, and its ranged grew to over 50 social networks.

Users range from individuals looking to interact with their following, to big brand managers and social media experts. They do not offer analytics.

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SalesForce Chatter with: Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Devices

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Social Media & Brand Monitoring Part 3: Sysomos, TruCast

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Social Media has given every one of us an equal voice in what is being said on the internet about a brand, and with that changed the way our entire world works.

The more saturated the world wide web becomes, with information geared towards making money, not always in an honest way, more and more searches are conducted through social media sites that can give a firsthand, personal experience testimonials using the brand.

That, in turn, changes the way companies are advertising and handling consumer’s complaints. It changed launching campaigns, and reshaped the way advertisers are learning what works and what doesn’t.

There are online tools to help brand managers and small business owners track, analyze and react to what is being said about them on the World Wide Web. They help control the visibility, what is being said and where, and enables real time reaction.

Sysomos

“Business Intelligence and Social Media” – that is how Sysomos labels itself. What’s happening online, what it means for your products or brands, and how to engage in the conversation, are some of the areas their software enable their customers to do from one centralized place.

They provide Social media analytics that gives you the tools to make the right decisions. Their database has an archive of data collected from forums, micro-blogging, videos, blogs and other social sites.

The company, in existence since 2005, employs logarithms to scan information in the form of crawlers (similar to what Google does when new pages are uploaded) and categorizes, breaks down and aggregates that information from all over the world. That includes sites that are not in English, with the help of a translating tool.

Sysomos prides itself for having a 4 tire security against spam, which is meant to produce a spam-free and true report, for being able to produce results in real time and for enabling you to reach and react to the information in a timely manner, any time of day or night.  It also has an automated sentiment report to make it easier to navigate through the information.

The site will give you analytics; who is talking about your brand and where they are located. You can compare the information to those of your competitors. You can choose to identify the influencers who are talking about your brand and start a conversation. All this can be done with the same platform and you can share information and assign responsibilities to other team members.

A spinoff of the University of Toronto research project, this Canadian company’s flagship offering –  “MAP” (Media Analysis Platform) was launched in 2007, and was aimed to serve corporations, marketers, public relations agencies and advertisers. Another program called “Heartbeat” was launched in 2009, and is a cost effective version of the program. In 2010 the company announced the third major product, “Audience”, in beta testing for social media ROI (Return On Investment).

In 2010, Sysomos was acquired by Marketwire, a press release distribution company. The company holds webinars to explain the benefits of their system. Their pricings start at $500 a month and go up to $1,000.

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Facebook Page Central:

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Trucast

The newcomer to the social media monitoring is Trucast from Visible Technologies. It launched in August 2010, and offers the ability to track, analyze and participate in forums, social networks, blogs and online communities.

It is aimed at advertisers, brand managers, market researchers and corporate customer service, public relations and communication professionals. It is built to handle massive amounts of information (they say it handles up to 70% more than competing companies) and you can follow up to 40 different topics. The company will categorize it and transform it to actionable business insights which show the purchase behavior of clients, which areas of customer relations needs to be improved and how to build brand loyalty. They say they dig deep into social media data as well as other industries and third party data sources like newsgroups, bulletin boards and online news sites.

Their clients include Microsoft, Panasonic, Hormel and Dell. Their statistics has shown that using their software, Dell managed to reduce the negative sentiment about them by 50%.

They do not publish their prices.

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Social Media Analytics

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Social Media Analytics – Can They Be Measured and Tracked Accurately?

Since social media is one of the toughest things to justify in terms of ROI, current analytics simply are not well suited to measure this data accurately. There are many tools available that all propose to offer the most accurate results, better than any other tool available. This can create the notion that all you may need is the one wonderful tool. However, it is likely this sort of approach that has created inaccurate statistical results and other anomalies that prevents power users from building a proper foundation for analytics.

Some of the best ways to track you social media are:

  • Try Mashable Digg Analysts Tools.
  • Want to find out what people are talking about on Facebook? Soon to return should be Facebook Lexicon.
  • Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard can be a helpful tool and the first line of defense in brand management.
  • For those interested in mining social medias for hot and trending keywords should try buzz pocket mining tools.
  • Keotag is great for tracking tag usage.

However, remember that at best even these tools are limited to minimal measurement of brand mentions and tracking.

Additionally, it is important to remember not only the number of friends or followers on your lists when making statistical calculations, you must also take into account how strong those relationships are, which is once again an immeasurable aspect.

One of the strongest reasons for why analytics aren’t always suited to measuring social media effects properly is that the logs or even JavaScript tags are recorded from each visitor, which is where the fancy analytical information comes from. The problem is, what it needs to be able to read is all of your friends and followers minds. Back to square one again when you consider it that way, and you will continue to end up back there over and again until mind or mood reading technology becomes available.

I suppose that may be a slight exaggeration, but truly it is not as far off or as far out as it sounds. The point is, is that what you want to measure, record and analyze is the actual network of friends and followers. So although there are tons of helpful tools available, many of which provide incredible analytics for many aspects of your social media projections, the main thing you really need seems to continually go back to basics, and those basics still require a human behind the wheel. So what are some of the ways you can encourage social media networking on your own sites?

  • Send some business there way
  • Link to them
  • Answer questions they may ask
  • Send them helpful messages, not spam
  • Add them to your list or lists you support
  • Link to or shared their profile with your own users
  • Acknowledged accomplishments posted by them

I once posted about the blog statistics referring to 1000 visitors, in return I got questions like how many unique, how long did they stay, where did they come from, etc, etc  but none of these provided value for why I used the blog, after all if I have visits that I know are not mine, those visits consistently grow then the detail numbers are not as important as one would think. I found value in that if my blog had 100 page views today, that even if that was only 30 unique visitors, that those 30 unique visitors are stronger and more valuable than the 100 unique visitors with 110 page views that the next guy got. In this case my visitors where not brought to my blog on false pretences, my visitors found value in what was there. This is why they stayed and visited more than the page they landed on… this is success because I have caught their attention beyond the initial media that brought them here… now engaging them in comments, tweets and so on is another story.

So although once again, many of the social media tools have their purposes, the absolute best way to make sure your social media is effective for you and your business, is to build and measure relationships, their growth and their strengths. That is the best place you can focus on analyzing.

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