Social Media Monitoring | Social Media Explorer

Social Media Monitoring and the “Likely Voter” Model

by Tom Webster · November 2, 2010

This is not a political post, but as I write this, I am on a plane headed to our election headquarters, as my company prepares to conduct the National Election Exit Polls on behalf of the major news networks. While this is an enormously complex effort, one thing we don’t have to worry about is predicting whether or not you actually voted. After all, if you are interviewed leaving your voting precinct, you just voted.

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Viralheat Makes More Social Media Monitoring Free

by Jason Falls · August 25, 2010

In February, we talked about social media monitoring newcomer Viralheat and how they were lowering the barrier to entry for social media monitoring by offering quality results at lower-than-typical prices. Now the rising start-up is doing even more to shake up the monitoring landscape by offering a top layer of monitoring results through its Charts feature to anyone … for free.

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Trackur White Labels Ultimate Package

by Jason Falls · June 14, 2010

Social media monitoring firm Trackur has revamped its website and package offerings and now offers complete white-labeling, custom domain names and direct client logins with their Ultimate platform. The changes were announced yesterday on Trackur’s blog by CEO Andy Beal. While several other platforms do allow for white-labeling, especially if you’re willing to pay them a boat-load of money, Trackur’s Ultimate package is just $297 per month for those signing up before June 30. It jumps to $377 per month afterwards.

What this means is now ad agencies don’t have to spend a wad of money to claim they offer social media monitoring themselves. Rejoice!

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ListenLogic Offers Market Research, Monitoring Hybrid

by Jason Falls · June 4, 2010

I’ve had a series of conversations with a market research and social media monitoring solution called ListenLogic recently. Before I could get around to writing a lengthy post about what they offer, I ran into Vincent Schiavone, ListenLogic’s founder, at Social Media Plus in Philadelphia. So we sat down for a chat for SME-TV.

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NetBase Makes Market Research Faster, Cheaper

by Jason Falls · May 24, 2010

The first 459 times I suffered through product demos and webinars for market research and social media measurement solutions the companies all wound up with the same promise: We’ll give you a 50+ page PowerPoint deck each quarter that has 150 full-color charts and graphs you don’t understand or care about with a cover page of “actionable insights” that we spend about an hour coming up with all for the low, low price of $150,000 per year. Ever since, I’ve been in search of something that A) Produces more meaningful information and B) Is priced somewhere other than the “are you effin’ kidding me” range.

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Why You Shouldn’t Trust Automated Sentiment Scoring

by Jason Falls · April 26, 2010

Automated sentiment scoring has evolved as the feature du jour of the social media monitoring platforms of late. So many services were offering it, even big players like Radian6 had to bring it to the table for fear of losing prospects. It’s not enough to tell brands how many conversations are being had. Social media monitoring services have to now must report on whether or not they like us.

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Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail

by Jason Falls · April 2, 2010

It doesn’t matter which social media monitoring service you use. None of them do what you want them to do. They’re good at doing part of the job, but not all of it. And sadly, they probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.

Social media monitoring, whether done with free services like Google Alerts and custom searches, SocialMention.com or even freemium versions of great tools like Trackur; or using paid services like Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian, HubSpot or Scout Labs, are all software platforms. They’re computer algorithms and search spiders that collect information and put it together in a place where you can find it. Some of them do a decent job of organizing and stacking and sorting all that data so you can hit a button and get a pretty chart or graph, too.

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