Social media monitoring software selection: Why we chose Social Radar.

Image representing Social Radar as depicted in...
Image via Crunch­Base

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:

Techrigy SM2

Radian 6

Sys­mos

Buzz­Met­rics

Vis­i­ble

Scout­Labs

eCairn

Web­trends Social Measurement

Col­lec­tive Intellect

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.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
December 1, 2009 – 3:55 pm | By Jimmy Gilmore | Posted in social media, social media monitoring tools | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (14)
  • http://atomicdust.com/ Danielle

    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!

    • http://jimmy-gilmore.com/ Jimmy Gilmore

      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

  • http://atomicdust.com Danielle

    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!

    • http://jimmy-gilmore.com/ Jimmy Gilmore

      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

  • http://ci.biz360.com/ Maria Ogneva

    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

    • http://jimmy-gilmore.com/ Jimmy Gilmore

      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

  • http://ci.biz360.com Maria Ogneva

    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

    • http://jimmy-gilmore.com/ Jimmy Gilmore

      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

  • http://maria.me the­maria

    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.

  • Pingback: Evaluating Social Media Monitoring Tools. Do I really need all that? | Jimmy Gilmore

  • http://www.huntingcows.com Ian Arm­strong

    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?

  • http://jimmy-gilmore.com Jimmy Gilmore

    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.

  • http://www.huntingcows.com Ian Arm­strong

    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?

  • http://jimmy-gilmore.com Jimmy Gilmore

    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.