Viralheat - our favourite low cost solution

In the run up to Monitoring Social Media 09 I’ve been checking out some of the free or low-cost social media monitoring solutions. I’ve been hearing that many of the top marketing agencies still use free monitoring tools: but which ones? And how do they compare to the high-end paid-for solutions like Visible Technologies, Brandwatch etc? There are lots and lots of these services, but here are thumbnail reviews of 5 of the most best:

SocialMention (Free)

Often described as the social version of Google Alerts, SocialMention offers a really user-friendly interface. In fact, it’s definitely the nicest looking solution and the easiest to use. It provides results from blogs, twitter (microblogs), video, comments, bookmarks, news, events etc.  and sets these out with cross-cutting facts down the side panel showing Sentiment, Top Keywords, Top users and Sources – which tell’s you a lot of useful information at a glance.

The big problem with SocialMention is that you can’t save your searches and come back to them. There is no login/account function – so it’s really just useful for one-off searches. You can download the data and there is a nifty widget that lets you add realtime results to a blog, but what you really want is a private Deshboard to manage your searches. Also – you can’t easily respond to comments – which other services enable.

BrandsEye ($1 month)

BrandsEye is more of an old-school reputation management tool than a social media monitoring service. For just $1 a month (you wonder why they bother for that much), you get a “Blogger” level account that lets you set up 5 searches that you can login and return to view at any time. Results are shown in a rather Web 1.0 list which doesn’t include Twitter or other social media formats (comments, video, audio, presentations etc) and doesn’t enable you to respond within the system. It’s an nice, easy to use, cheap web-monitoring tool – but it’s really no good for social media.

Trackur ($18/month with free trial)

This is one of those services that, thanks to it’s founder, Andy Beal, get’s a lot of online promotion and coverage. It looks great from the outside and is free to sign up for a 14-day trial. Once inside it’s pretty straightforward – there is only one option “add a keyword” to create a search. The results come in a list (like BrandsEye) with Tweets, comments, posts etc. all mixed in – and a little graph showing when activity occurred. You can click into items to rate their sentiment or read the full text. It’s all very basic and obvious – though completely without bells and whistles, at least in the basic account.

Ubervu (Free)

Ubervu is similar to SocialMention but with the critical account functionality that lets you save searches and log in to see them. It brings in a full range of social media data – Tweets, comments, posts, video etc. – and shows responses/retweets in a nice. user-friendly indented way. If you’re logged in (it’s free) you can add your Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress etc. account details and reply directly to comments. You can export the data, get a widget for your blog to show results publicly and set up email alerts. On the face of it – it’s a great solution – though we had a few issues with the interface (esp. in Chrome) and some of the default settings (daily mentions) means you often get a negative looking downwards angled graph when you log in.

Viralheat ($9.99/month)

Although nowhere near as user-friendly as SocialMention or easy on the eye as the Ubervu results listings – ViralHeat is a very powerful tool that is probably our favourite budget solution. Once you’ve registered for the basic account, the Dashboard lets you set up 10 profiles. Although its’ a little confusing to navigate around, when you finally open a Profile you get a rich reward: graphs showing activity on Twitter, blogs and Video sites; the number of “authors”; the total reach on Twitter (our twitter reach this week was 51,000)  and who the most influential authors are on Twitter and blogs. You can click down into all this data and export it.

You also get a full listing of activity, with the nationality of the author site, a link to the post, the traffic of the site or full stats of the twitter user (like you get on Tweetdeck) and – a bit weirdly in our view – the ability to email an item to someone else. There is also a basic gauge for sentiment, though as with all less-sophisticated services, this is generally “neutral”.  Overall, Viralheat is a surprisingly powerful service, though they need to add the ability to respond from within the system.

The question being – does the character (or “brand”) of a company dictate how successful it is likely to be in social media? Does a laid-back, fun-loving, youthful company stand a better chance of success on Facebook, Twitter and the like than an ancient, grey, corporate monolith?

Well, as Amelia Torode of VCCP (who was on the same panel as Ted) pointed out, some large corporates have such torturous processes and regulations that it takes at least  48 hours for a Tweet to be approved by the lawyers – if indeed it is approved! This would make for rather stilted conversations, to say the least. In my experience the unwillingness for companies to free up staff and allow them to engage with customers via social media is subsiding – but there are undoubtedly still a large number of bosses who don’t “get” social media and shudder at the thought of their IT Support guy talking to customers.

But the question goes deeper than mere attitudes. Should the ethos of a company preclude it from engaging in social media? Or, put another way, are some companies so dowdy and uncool that encountering them on Facebook would feel like getting a friend request from your dad?

The fact that BT, Dell and other huge corporates have successfully integrated Twitter into their customer services offerings proves that, if the need exists, people will engage with corporates via social media. Now, it’s tempting to say that this isn’t marketing – it’s “customer services” – but I think the days of those silos have gone. In social media customer services IS marketing precisely because it’s SOCIAL. In these terms the BT brand – which definitely isn’t young, hip and cool – is doing just fine using social media.

So perhaps the question is: does being a funky, relaxed kind of brand help a company to engage via social media? Well, I think it might help in terms of the tone of voice. There’s nothing quite like the fear of getting the sack for killing off any cheeky comments and jokes you might want to share with customers. If the organisation is more easy going, the real character of it’s staff can come through online – and that’s absolute gold in terms of online engagement. Witness the huge success of Amelia’s Compare the MeerKat Twitter account, in which Aleksandr the Russian Meerkat and his IT guy, Sergei, entertain 30,000 followers with their Meerkat price comparison chatter.  Price comparison ain’t that interesting, until you add a couple of speaking, Russian, Meerkats. There’s a lesson for big business in there somewhere.

Tickets are still available for our conference: Monitoring Social Media 09 , London, 17th November

As always Neville Hobson was good value. He showed us an advert for a marketing role at Best Buy which stated “250 Twitter followers” as a desirable quality for the preferred candidate – giving evidence of the pervading influence of the medium. He also explained how the term “Social Business” is now emerging as a new media term, as opposed to something ethical or environmental.

So why are marketers turning to social media? Well, it’s more accountable (it can be monitored and measured). It involves direct contact with customers – so you learn about them, and they get to know you. Social media also works well in popular new mediums, such as video. It’s also fuelling customer expectations for personal recommendations and reviews – so if you’re not engaging on those terms you’re almost certainly losing customers. And, of course, apart from your time, it’s generally free. No other form of marketing can boast that.

As a result 34% of companies are engaging in social media marketing (Forrester Research) and certain industries are completely dominated by social media channels. In the tech industry, for example, most of the top news sources are blogs. Neville also pointed out that the 3rd fastest growing service online is still YouTube, asking the questions “Are you using it for marketing?”

I also found Katy Howell’s session interesting – as she explained how she takes a client from “trying” social media marketing, to actually benefiting from it. She highlighted the case of Primark – which has 178,000 friends on Facebook. Obviously that sounds fantastic… until you realise that they’ve never posted anything to these members. They’ve never actually communicated with them. Where’s the benefit of that?

Katy doesn’t stand for that nonsense. In the case of Baileys (the syrupy liqueur), a client of hers, her goal was to get people to drink it at times other than Christmas. First off she researched her target market, discovering (weirdly in my view) that some and like it hot and some like it cold. She then focused on identifying truly active and influential people – the ones who are prepared to DO something – inviting these groups to start exchanging hot and cold recipes. Now, the interesting thing was that lots of Baileys’ “followers” and “friends” actually dropped out, meaning their stats went down. But that didn’t matter, because the ones who DID something managed to increase sales dramatically enough to make everybody happy.

Other interesting points I picked up from the morning session included Eaon Pritchard’s comment that the average Amazon page has 16 different ways of providing or viewing peer-to-peer recommendations. He also provided the most excellent example of a small business using Twitter, in the form of @albionovens – a bakery in Shoreditch which tweets when its pastries are baked (I kid you not!). I also liked Eaon’s assertion that social media cannot work alone – to work properly it needs both offline interaction and to be adopted throughout an organisation.