Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

This 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 con­ver­sa­tion when other peo­ple have already writ­ten great com­par­isons of the social media tools avail­able. Plus there are some smart peo­ple writ­ing about how you should use these tools. What I haven’t seen is what I’m going to write today — which comes directly out of a hall­way con­ver­sa­tion the other day.

“Why don’t you just look it up on Social Radar? That’s what it’s for, right?”

Well, not exactly. Which begs the ques­tion: do you need to define what you’re expect­ing to accom­plish before you go off and buy one of these tools? Because if your goals are pretty sim­ple, you may end up spend­ing more than you should. Or if you’re not ready for some of the more com­plex mon­i­tor­ing tasks, maybe you could start with the easy stuff first.

Cat­e­gories of tools

I think the eas­i­est way to look at the array of tools avail­able is to use three cat­e­gories. There are sev­eral tools out there to search the Web. There are other sim­ple tools avail­able to mon­i­tor the Web and pro­vide you alerts. And there are tools out there that track activ­ity. The last cat­e­gory can be fur­ther bro­ken down, which I’ll get to a lit­tle later.

Search

Google, Niel­son and Tech­no­rati all pro­vide excel­lent resources to search blogs in more or less pro­vid­ing real-time infor­ma­tion about your brand. Bing has a social search team work­ing on new tools and now has a Twit­ter search in beta. And Yahoo will even let you tai­lor a search engine. So there’s no need pur­chase an expen­sive tool if you’re just out to look up a lit­tle infor­ma­tion about what’s hap­pen­ing on the social web. If you want to search Fac­book, today you’ll have to do it on their site if you need any­thing more than the most basic results (Face­book is mov­ing in a more open direc­tion, so stay tuned). And when it comes to Twit­ter search, there’s a lot of options for search­ing Twit­ter since they have their API open. Some ded­i­cated free social-search tools include:

Ice Rocket

Social Men­tion

One­R­iot

For search, one ben­e­fit of the more expen­sive tools is the fil­ter­ing of the results. Many providers claim to have the least noise — all appear to be bet­ter than the free ones. Another ben­e­fit is speed – it takes servers to deliver the goods fast and, well, that costs money.

Tools for alerts

For sim­ple mon­i­tor­ing and alerts, Google, Yahoo, Back­Type all pro­vide the abil­ity to mon­i­tor the Web and pro­vide almost real-time alerts when some­thing is posted on the inter­net about you or your brand. If a site is pop­u­lar and has good SEO, Google will give you a pretty close to real-time alert if some­thing you need to know about is posted — for exam­ple, I get an almost instan­ta­neous alert every time I click pub­lish. Frankly, even if  you’re using another tool, you should be using these ser­vices. You’ll find that some search engines see some­things and oth­ers see other things. It’s just the nature of the Web and the dif­fer­ent algo­rithms search engines use. Now if you want alerts that look for aber­ra­tions or spikes in vol­ume or sen­ti­ment you’ll need to spend money.

Track­ing tools

For track­ing tools, I break this down into two classes: the free/freemium or inex­pen­sive ones and then the pre­mium tools. Obvi­ously the pre­mium are bet­ter for cer­tain pur­poses (and do a lot more than track) but not nec­es­sary for every­one. If you need to get a gen­eral idea of the con­ver­sa­tion about a brand and watch what’s hap­pen­ing over time there are some afford­able, if not free options includ­ing from Trackur and Tren­drr.

A step up from these tools are free and cheaper tools would be the pre­mium ver­sion of the pre­vi­ously men­tioned ones or Scout Labs. These tools usu­ally pro­vide on demand search results with sen­ti­ment, alerts and some basic chart­ing of activ­ity. I took advan­tage of the 30 day trial of Scout Labs and found it extremely use­ful for a pitch we were in at the time. At this price point you will find some great fea­tures available.

Pre­mium tools

So if you can do all this stuff rel­a­tively inex­pen­sively, or even free, why would you want one of these other expen­sive tools?

Because you require the abil­ity to slice and dice a fire hose of raw data. And you want to be able to sort, dial in, tweak and drill down into the result with­out hav­ing to deal with noise. You want to reli­ably gauge sen­ti­ment and eval­u­ate trends. And you want the eas­i­est UI avail­able, maybe you even need train­ing and some­one to call on the phone to ask ques­tions. You may even want an on demand ana­lyst to help you build reports and make judge­ments. Not every­one really needs this kind of capa­bil­ity and ser­vice or even has the time and per­se­ver­ance to gain any­thing valu­able from it.

But if you do have the time to ded­i­cate to it, and you have the apti­tude for fig­ur­ing out the right ques­tions to ask the tools, you will dis­cover some great infor­ma­tion that may not have been obvi­ous using a cheaper option. And they can just make it eas­ier to do some more com­pli­cated tasks like gaug­ing sen­ti­ment and men­tions dur­ing a cam­paign for a deeper analy­sis of how a mar­ket­ing or PR cam­paign is func­tion­ing, com­par­ing the sen­ti­ment of your prod­ucts to your com­peti­tors over time to look for mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties or prod­uct prob­lems, or using them as an on-demand cus­tomer research tool.

Radian6, Techrigy SM2, Vis­i­ble, Syso­mos Map and Heart­beat, Biz 360, Col­lec­tive Intel­lect, Neil­son, and Social Radar are some of the more pop­u­lar tools avail­able and well worth consideration.

One out­come of the eaval­u­a­tion process for us was that we found the tools were use­ful in ways we hadn’t yet real­ized. This was espe­cially true for our brand strate­gists who found ways to test hypoth­e­sis and prove and her case to team mem­bers and clients. But that’s another story.