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At Kilgannon, we’ve made the decision to use Social Radar as our new social media monitoring tool.
We did not take this decision lightly. We also scoured the blogs and websites. We also asked partner organizations which tools they were using and then decided on what criteria we’d use to evaluate the tools. Then spent several months looking at various tools – some we demoed and others we looked via webinar.
The tools we looked at included:
Honestly, we gave all of them serious consideration. And many of them also would have been excellent selections. What it came down to was the before mentioned criteria. These are the main criteria we focused on:
Features: What the tool can do that will benefit our customers.
Training and support: Interestingly, some require more of this than others – as all tools do not allow you to create your own queries.
Cost structure: Notice I said cost structure and not cost.
Much of the discussion among bloggers has been about the wizbang features that these tools have and not the business case for choosing one over the other.
And some of these these tools make more sense for in-house marketing departments than agencies, which we are.
When talking to software providers IN GENERAL (this means not just social media monitoring folks) I’ve found a reluctance to create a model that works for smaller companies, smaller agencies, and even mid-sized b2b companies. It seems they’re mostly interested in the big fish. That means, just like in media land, they’re catering to the non-niche, consumer audience. There is no reason that a b2b software provider should pay the same for the service as a consumer goods company – they simply do not require the same kinda of band width that Coke or Apple do.
I plan a follow up article with more detail about what I learned in the selection process that should be helpful to anyone looking for monitoring tools.
Update: Follow up here.
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I’m actually in the process of looking at social media monitoring tools as well. I’ve done demos/webinars for Radian 6, Cymfony, ScoutLabs, Techrigy SM2, and Sysomos, but I know there is still so much out there to look at before I make a decision (obviously, I hadn’t even looked at what you picked– Social Radar). Looking forward to reading your follow-up post with more detail as to how you made your final decision!
Danielle, It’s a pretty daunting process evaluating a complex software product — especially since it’s such a new category. I’ll get the follow up posted soon and try and explain the process we used to make our decision a little better. When it came down to making our selection we just had to focus on the criteria set up in advance. Kinda of like an agency review. More to come soon. Thanks for reading and commenting, of course. Jimmy
Jimmy,
Great post! I feel your pain; for many smaller businesses some of these cost structures are out of reach, and there are many features that are simply “overkill”. For your next writeup, please consider Biz36o’s Community Insights tool. We have flexible accounts for small businesses that allow to track multiple topics, as well as an easy-to-use UI, alert system, workflow tools, as well as pretty advanced topic setup capabilities, such as proximity search.We index blogs, forums, microblogs and online news (with more sources on the way), to serve up results in real-time.
Let me know if you want to take it for a ride. Would be happy to hear your feedback.
Maria Ogneva
Biz360
@themaria @biz360
Thanks for sharing information about Biz360. I missed your product when we were looking so I guess I owe you listen at least. There’s certainly room for more providers. Every tool I have looked at so far has it’s strengths and every business has it’s own individual needs. Jimmy
If you want to discuss further, please feel free to ping me on Twitter or mogneva (at) biz360 (dot) com — would be curious to see what you think.
[…] post is the over-due follow up to this one. It took awhile to write not just because I’ve been busy but because I wanted to add to the […]
I’m curious, Jimmy, are any of these products better situated to use in a social media consultancy environment — where monitoring and reporting is being done for multiple clients vs. a single company?
You hit on what I was subtly getting at. We have multiple clients. None of them are huge consumer brands that justify a per search basis cost. I feel that some of these services are priced for large corporations.
Social Radar charges us a flat fee.
As a consultant, you may go from client to client so you’re not consistently tracking a lot of searches. It’s one client this week, another the next. Radian6 probably makes the most sense that case.
I honestly think you’re going to have to look specifically at your needs and your budget then match them to the tools.
I’m curious, Jimmy, are any of these products better situated to use in a social media consultancy environment — where monitoring and reporting is being done for multiple clients vs. a single company?
You hit on what I was subtly getting at. We have multiple clients. None of them are huge consumer brands that justify a per search basis cost. I feel that some of these services are priced for large corporations.
Social Radar charges us a flat fee.
As a consultant, you may go from client to client so you’re not consistently tracking a lot of searches. It’s one client this week, another the next. Radian6 probably makes the most sense that case.
I honestly think you’re going to have to look specifically at your needs and your budget then match them to the tools.