Top Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social Media Monitoring Tools have become a mainstay in the range of Online Marketing Tools. Due to the large number of providers, it is often difficult for companies to gain on overview of the market and find the appropriate tool for their needs. Once again, Goldbach Interactive has set itself the goal of identifying the top tools of 2013 and shedding some light on this heavily competed market.

Compared to the previous year, the growth-rate of the monitoring tool market has slowed down. The top tools have further established themselves, but competition in the market remains heavy. Tools are being bought up, retired, or completely overhauled – and new tools are constantly pushing their way into the market.

The Method

Of more than 300 identified Social Media Monitoring tools, the Top 5 tools were filtered out over the course of a several step process:

1. The most important criterion for placement on our longlist is a complete coverage of sources (monitoring online news, blogs, forums, and social networks).
2. A questionnaire with further criteria leads to the shortlist (i.e. monitoring as the primary focus of the tool, international source coverage,e-mail alerts, etc.)
3. The Top 15 are selected through a detailed tool evaluation by Goldbach Interactive based on webinars, an additional questionnaire, and live tests (simultaneous access to demo-accounts, for which every provider must perform under the same predefined queries) .
4. The tools with the best rating amongst all criteria are classified as Top 5.

The Top 5 Tools

Five tools were especially convincing. The following monitoring providers (ordered alphabetically) can hold their own in a head to head comparison, and offer impressive features in addition to wide source coverage and a range of analysis options.

Engagor: Community Management und Monitoring in one fell swoop

It’s all in the name: In the area of engagement and CRM, this tool scored the best. With a multitude of workflow functionalities, community management is an efficient task. Engagor  also convinces with its source coverage in Eastern Europe (an increasingly important market in the monitoring space, which was taken as a sample for this report’s evaluation). A clear shortcoming: navigation is a bit confusing. The trial account of the tool was very convincing in terms of speed and actually makes real time monitoring possible.

Heartbeat (Sysomos/Markedwired): Established Analytics Tool

The tool offers excellent analytics capabilities and engagement functionalities. While the source coverage in Central Europe is very strong, the results from the Eastern Europe sample could be improved. Additional advantages lie in the easy usability and comprehensive, advanced functionalities. Heartbeat is one of the few tools that simultaneously offers language and country filters. The only weakness: As an established player in the market, development of the platform has noticeably slowed.

Radarly (Linkfluence): Hot Newcomer

Radarly is THE new kid on the block: impressing through a good user interface, simple filter options, speed, and comprehensive owned media statistics, the tool is attracting a lot of positive attention. The overall impression is complemented by a wide range of engagement functionalities and good service. The only possible weakness lies in Radarly’s narrower source coverage compared to the average for Top 5 Tools.

Synthesio: Easy Navigation

The ease of use and intuitive nature of Synthesio stand out in the tool. While integration in CRM is possible, engagement functionalities are neglected. Strengths lie in source coverage of Eastern Europe, the use of new KPI’s and interesting source categorization (through predefined categories). An additional advantage: the option to have the sentiment of posts manually rated by the provider.

Talkwalker (Trendiction): Data Quality

The second positive surprise: Talkwalker shows well developed analysis functionalities and is definitely ahead in the area of service. Especially the source coverage in the Eastern European space (random sample) was especially convincing. Through a proprietary crawler, Trendiction ensures an excellent standard in terms of data quality and even serves as a data provider for many other monitoring providers. Only in the area of engagement does the tool still show room for improvement. Especially exciting are the comprehensive filter and reporting possibilities.

Top 15 Tools

In addition to the top tools, several providers shine through individual functionalities.

Brandwatch narrowly missed the Top 5 and is especially compelling with the ability to customize individual dashboard tabs. At the time of rating, the owned media analysis “Channels” which has now been integrated with their latest release, could unfortunately not yet be tested. A promising update Update, which could make Brandwatch a favorite tool.
Not easy to rate: Radian6. A high profile on the market and worldwide presences clearly justify consideration. Information was provided by Cision distribution partner for Radian6. Radian6 continues to convince users with versatile functionalities and analytical possibilities. The mature engagement console is a strong equal to the Top 5 providers in terms of interaction capabilities, but the tool is demanding in terms of usability.

UMT Delta stood out with integration possibilities for the monitoring of radio, TV and print media, while Simplify360 caught our attention with its versatile engagement and workflow functionalities. Their source coverage for Europe, however, is still lacking.

Meltwater Buzz was again also a top contender this year, with sophisticated Social CRM possibilities. Also worth mentioning are SoDash and Buzzcapture which shine through innovative ideas like automatic answers to certain types of posts and new reporting capabilities.

Full-Service-Provider

Several full-service providers were already identified in 2012. These solutions place importance on customer needs, account setup, support and data processing instead of just providing a software license. Over the course of the last months this segment has changed: several providers parked their services or were not reachable.(Ethority and Cogia, however, contacted us after publishing the German version of this report and confirmed that their service is still active.) Synthesio, on the other hand, no longer only focuses on a full service offering, but has moved into a license driven business model.

bc.lab is a provider with a compelling full-service offering. The platform is well laid out and offers precise sentiment analysis through manual screening of posts, in addition to a high standard of data quality. This makes the tool especially suited for the monitoring of difficult terms.

Also eye-catching

Additional tools, which could not be rated according to the predetermined categories, but still offer interesting solutions are: Attensity Analyze, ARGUSAvenue and Adobe Social.

Accurate Sentiment Analysis

With roots in text analysis, Attensity Analyze positions itself as Social Media intelligence and analytics tool. The provider especially focuses on the qualitative analysis of discovered posts and less on the quantitative criteria of Social Media conversations. The tool provides the possibility of comparing individual topics about products via an innovative, automatic sentiment analyses. The sentiment is determined based on sentence structure and won us over with its high success rate. The less than modern interface is a bit deterring, on the other hand.

The Swiss Market

After Swiss tool provider Netbreeze was bought up this past year by Microsoft, Argus der Presse has built out its classic media monitoring offering with a Social Media solution. ARGUSAvenue focuses on the Swiss market, monitoring a range of local sources except forums. In addition to the possibility of determining sentiment in a general sense, and also in relation to the company, Argus offers the compelling option of an editorial service. In terms of analytics capabilities, the service still has room for improvement. With its local focus, Argus could be an interesting alternative for Swiss clients.

Social Media marketing as a holistic approach

Adobe offers a marketing suite, Adobe Social, which is composed of a diverse set of components including a Social Media monitoring solution. The strengths of the monitoring tool are apparent in the area of workflow, the measurement of campaigns, and through the good integration possibilities with other Adobe software. This makes the tool especially suited to steer several online marketing activities with one tool. Areas that could use improvement include the earned media monitoring space.

Top Trends this Year

Three trends became apparent during the performance of this analysis, in addition to the continued development of the tools: the individualization of dashboards (all the way up to modular composition of entire tools), sophisticated reporting functionalities, and broader coverage of sources.

Individualization

The 2012 report already included several tools with dashboards or graphics that could be individualized. In the last 12 months, many tools have made progress in this area. Radian6 was a pioneer in 2011, with widget based data visualization. Brandwatch has also built out the possibility of customizing every tab in the dashboard with individually selected components. SM2 and Engagor modulare Dashboards an. InsbesondereSynthesio und Radarly also recently began offering modular dashboards.

Reporting Functionalities

E-mail alerts and automatic, standardized reports have been considered basic functionalities of monitoring tools since some time. Now certain providers are going one step further and offer sophisticated, individual reporting options: Buzzcapture allows users to create a report by “Drag and Drop”, which can be reached via an individual URL and is automatically updated. UMT Delta, Engagor and Synthesio also have the ability to put together individual reports. With Talkwalkerit’s even possible to export reports into a custom PowerPoint presentation template.

Broader Source Coverage

The top tools of the report already draw on a very extensive base of sources (next to the classic earned media channels, also allowing the monitoring of connected owned media profiles). Since the last report, a clear building out of the source basis is noticeable. Tools like Talkwalker, UMT Delta and ARGUSAvenue allow the integration of radio, TV, and print media. By now it is standard practice that client wishes for specific sources can be taken into account. SM2, Radian6 and Radarly go one step further and even allow users to add sources themselves. New social media platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, or Foursquare are already being searched by most monitoring crawlers. Engagoris a pioneer in this space, and has shown quick reaction in the past years integrating new platforms.

Results from the Live Test
This year’s Social Media Monitoring Tool Report is topped off through a live monitoring test. Each provider was challenged with the same search queries, to search the social web from the 13. – 19. of May. The infographic shows, which providers were set up with a demo account and took part in the live test.

The following results were observed through the test:

• Not one query resulted in two tools finding the same number of posts.
• Tool features and functions strongly vary.
• Few tools offer the possibility to set a language and country filter at the same time.
• The discovery speed for finding posts turned out varying results: the fastest tool needed 15 seconds, the slowest made «Realtime Monitoring» impossible with a 40 minute delay.
• In regards to the speed of loading graphical analyses and switching between individual tabs, performance leaves a lot to be wished for in some cases. Results ranged from real time navigation to load times of several minutes.

There are discrepancies between the indications of the provider and the results of the live test (i.e. in the source coverage), which resulted in a reclassification of the Top 5 favorites after the live test.

Summary

Testing a tool is the best way to find the appropriate solution

All of the tested platforms can be considered Social Media monitoring tools, but the results could not be more varied. Every tool offers individual functionalities and differs in focus and approach from other monitoring solutions. While the focus of some is more on engagement and workflow, others are betting on developed analytics and reporting functions. This makes the search for an appropriate tool more difficult.

Organizations must therefore first look inwards and analyze their own needs. Based on this, favorites can be selected to find out with which tool the demands are best addressed, optimally through testing.

Development of the tool market

It is interesting to observe how the tool landscape has changed within one year. Two trends can be identified here: on one hand, well known providers are establishing themselves further with their tools and developing functions and features for breadth. On the other hand, small and specialized tools are appearing which are compelling with their clear focus on specific functions.

Google News Optimization Tips

This week Google put out a video to give publishers more information on how Google News works and how best to optimize for it. I pulled out some of the more useful tips, combining information from some of the slides with additional details provided by Google’s Maile Ohye.

Article Ranking Factors within a Story Cluster

While there are a wide range of ranking factors these four were highlighted:

• Fresh and New – Priority is given to articles that are recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. Articles need to be “objective news” to lead a story cluster (op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription content are not eligible to lead clusters).
• Duplication and Novelty Detection – More credit is given to original sources of content. Google News uses “Citation Rank” to try to determine the original source (i.e. a lot of subsequent articles linking to a particular source or referencing it within editorial text).
• Local / Personal Relevancy – Weighted by section and story; more credit given to local sources. For example the Charlotte Observer is likely to be given more weight on stories about North Carolina.
• Trusted Sources – Trusted sources are given a boost in each edition and section via various signals. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.” For instance Google News factors in how often articles from particular sources are clicked on in determining user trust.

Image Optimization for News Search

• Use large image sizes with good aspect ratios
• Include descriptive captions and ALT text
• Place image near article title (helps Google News to associate the image with the subject matter)
• Use inline, non-clickable images (as opposed to linking them to something else)
• JPG images are preferred (PNG was specifically cited as not being as good)

the video:  

Google News Optimization Best Practices

• Articles must be on unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google News to differentiate articles from static Web pages. Three digit URLs are not required if you submit an XML news sitemap.
• Don’t break up the article body – Articles should have sequential paragraphs; don’t break them up with user comments or links to related posts.
• Put dates between the title and body – Helps the date extractor to establish the correct publication date.
• Titles matter – Create good HTML title tags and on-page article headlines. The title should be “extremely indicative of the story at hand.”
• Separate original content from press releases (and other forms of non-news content) – separating articles in the directory structure helps Google News identify what is specifically news content.
• Publish informative, unique content – Sites are encouraged to produce strong original content as opposed to repurposing or duplicating stories

Some other information:

• Story clusters (i.e. a group of articles on a particular topic) are ranked according to “aggregate editorial interest.” So news that generates a lot of coverage will be given priority on the home page and category pages.
• Using XML news sitemaps is encouraged.
• Articles are now re-crawled to look for updates, typically within the first 12 hours. This confirms a recent discussion in a Google help thread (See Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articlesfor more information).
• To get your videos into Google News you need to create a YouTube channel. Other video hosters may be included in the future, but for now YouTube is the only way in. Creating textual descriptions and transcripts is helpful.
• PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News, used “delicately” since the linking structure of a brand new article is going to be different from an article published years or months ago.

MEDIA INSIGHT The Top 14 Video Services for Publishers and Brands

Words are cheap; and if you’re a millennial, they are also very, very boring. What youngsters want these days is video. Lots and lots of video. They want to consume content via video; create their own videos; and share videos across multiple social platforms.

Snapchat’s MyStory and Instagram’s Hyperlapse have taken off like wildfire, but they are merely the tip of the wildfire iceberg. The statistics for internet users’ hunger for video content is undeniable: YouTube gets more than 1 billion unique users per month; and now the video-hosting site can deliver stats to marketers (or any content creator) in real time, and that’s just the beginning.

Launched way back in 2005, YouTube seems like almost ancient history, or some sort of utility, like the water company of the Internet. There are all kinds of places that are serving video content to users that have nothing to do with YouTube or its family of Google-owned sites. In fact, Facebook comes in at a strong second behind Google, with a steep drop-off before getting to AOL and Yahoo. For good or bad, we are all being served more video content than ever before, just as high-quality video content is becoming easier and easier to create with mobile devices, which brings us back to Hyperlapse and MyStory.

Here’s a quick rundown on all the great new video-making toys that are trying to win the eyeballs in the new Internet video game:

http://instagram.com/p/sK2peBAaEl/embed/captioned/?v=2

Instagram Hyperlapse — So simple, yet apparently not-so-easy to have engineered: Hyperlapse allows users to take pro-quality stop-motion video to compress the time of a skateboard trick, or traffic over a bridge, or a sunset from an airplane window. Although Hyperlapse has become instantly popular, it is up for some immediate competition with a similar feature on the Apple iOS 8update.

Timehop — It’s hard to think about, but social media has been around for, like, years. Timehop takes the ephemera of your old Twitter posts (and Facebook and Instagram and…) and lets you know what you were doing this day last year, two years ago, what have you. Timehop gives historical weight to your recycled social media posts of yore.

SnapChat Story — The good folks at Snapchat decided to make a platform for stories, where you can host your snaps for 24 hours to tell your special story. Most people who want to save their Snaps save them on another social platform like Facebook or Tumblr, but if you want to string a few Snaps together for about a day, now you can with Snapchat Stories.

http://vine.co/v/h1Yz2Bad73K/embed/simple

Vine — Vine is to Twitter what Hyperlapse is to Instagram, although now that Vine isn’t the next big thing, what do we need with six seconds of looping video anymore? In the ever-evolving world of social media platforms, it’s be new or go home… but maybe with these new camera tools and editing options, Vine won’t have to go home.

Lightt — That’s Lightt with two T’s. It bills itself as a semi-pro video production app with in-app editing and music features. If you’re serious about video production, this app is worth checking out.

Vyclone — Taking mobile video production to the next level, Vyclone allows you to produce multi-camera videos with no break in the audio, as long as you can wade through a few of its non-intuitive editing features.

One Second Epic — By epic, One Second Epic means that it’s like Vine, but for 10-second videos instead of just six.

Evergram — If Timehop is the ghost of social media past, the Evergram is the ghost of social media future: it’s an app geared for leaving keepsake videos for later, even years to come.

YesVideo — Remember home movies? There was once a TV show that featured the funny ones. A new service called YesVideo allows you to easily upload and share the videos that you might have on VHS video or Super-8 film. Order DVDs and share on Facebook! Thanks, YesVideo.

Animoto — You add the photos and music, and Animoto will create seamless video slideshows with your pre-existing photo and music content.

Directr — Directr, a video production tool in the same class as Lightt and Vyclone, was the one that was acquired by Google’s YouTube, so expect Directr to be the next-generation industry standard for in-phone video editing and production.

GoPro — OK, so GoPro, as you know, is the craziest video camera ever made for the craziest people who make the craziest video with it, which is now the content that the company uses to market not just the camera, but the videos themselves and the lifestyles that support them. Just look at GoPro’s YouTube channel if you have any doubts. Then again, it can make your dog’s eye videos look pretty awesome too – like this one that has been viewed 13 million times.

Ocho — It’s 8-second videos. Ocho! Get it? Eight seconds! Of video! And it supports timelapse, filters and lots of other cool effects to make any video look special.

Storehouse — Seamlessly combine videos and photos and text into stories withStorehouse. It won an Apple Design Award for visual storytelling, so that can’t be bad.

3 Myths About Duplicate Content

The words “duplicate content penalty” strike fear in the hearts of marketers. People with no SEO experience use this phrase all the time. Most have never read Google’s guidelines on duplicate content. They just somehow assume that if something appears twice online, asteroids and locusts must be close behind.

This article is long overdue. Let’s bust some duplicate content myths.

Note: This article is about content and publishing, not technical SEO issues such as URL structure.

Myth #1: Non-Original Content on Your Site Will Hurt Your Rankings across Your Domain

I have never seen any evidence that non-original content hurts a site’s ranking, except for one truly extreme case. Here’s what happened:

The day a new website went live, a very lazy PR firm copied the home page text and pasted it into a press release. They put it out on the wire services, immediately creating hundreds of versions of the home page content all over the web. Alarms went off at Google and the domain was manually blacklisted by a cranky Googler.

It was ugly. Since we were the web development company, we got blamed. We filed a reconsideration request and eventually the domain was re-indexed.

So what was the problem?

• Volume: There were hundreds of instances of the same text
• Timing: All the content appeared at the same time
• Context: It was the homepage copy on a brand new domain

It’s easy to imagine how this got flagged as spam.

But this isn’t what people are talking about when they invoke the phrase “duplicate content.” They’re usually talking about 1,000 words on one page of a well-established site. It takes more than this to make red lights blink at Google.

Many sites, including some of the most popular blogs on the internet, frequently repost articles that first appeared somewhere else. They don’t expect this content to rank, but they also know it won’t hurt the credibility of their domain.

Myth #2: Scrapers Will Hurt Your Site

I know a blogger who carefully watches Google Webmaster Tools. When a scraper site copies one of his posts, he quickly disavows any links to his site. Clearly, he hasn’t read Google’s Duplicate Content Guidelines or the Guidelines for Disavows.

Ever seen the analytics for a big blog? Some sites get scraped ten times before breakfast. I’ve seen it in their trackback reports. Do you think they have a full-time team watching GWT and disavowing links all day? No. They don’t pay any attention to scrapers. They don’t fear duplicate content.

Scrapers don’t help or hurt you. Do you think that a little blog in Asia with no original writing and no visitors confuses Google? No. It just isn’t relevant.

Personally, I don’t mind scrapers one bit. They usually take the article verbatim, links and all. The fact that they take the links is a good reason to pay attention to internal linking. The links on the scraped version pass little or no authority, but you may get the occasional referral visit.

Tip: Report Scrapers that Outrank Your Site

On the (very) rare occasion that Google does get confused and the copied version of your content is outranking your original, Google wants to know about it. Here’s the fix. Tell them using the Scraper Report Tool.

Tip: Digitally Sign Your Content with Google Authorship

Getting your picture to appear in search results isn’t the only reason to use Google Authorship. It’s a way of signing your name to a piece of content, forever associating you as the author with the content.

With Authorship, each piece of content is connected to one and only one author and their corresponding “contributor to” blogs, no matter how many times it gets scraped.

Tip: Take Harsh Action against Actual Plagiarists

There is a big difference between scraped content and copyright infringement. Sometimes, a company will copy your content (or even your entire site) and claim the credit of creation.

Plagiarism is the practice of someone else taking your work and passing it off as their own. Scrapers aren’t doing this. But others will, signing their name to your work. It’s illegal, and it’s why you have a copyright symbol in your footer.

If it happens to you, you’ll be thinking about lawyers, not search engines.

There are several levels of appropriate response. Here’s a true story of a complete website ripoff and step-by-step instructions on what actions to take.

Myth #3: Republishing Your Guest Posts on Your Own Site Will Hurt Your Site

I do a lot of guest blogging. It’s unlikely that my usual audience sees all these guest posts, so it’s tempting to republish these guest posts on my own blog.

As a general rule, I prefer that the content on my own site be strictly original. But this comes from a desire to add value, not from the fear of a penalty.

Ever written for a big blog? I’ve guest posted on some big sites. Some actually encourage you to republish the post on your own site after a few weeks go by. They know that Google isn’t confused. In some cases, they may ask you to add a little HTML tag to the post…

Tip: Use rel=“canonical” Tag

Canonical is really just a fancy (almost biblical) word that means “official version.” If you ever republish an article that first appeared elsewhere, you can use the canonical tag to tell search engines where the original version appeared. It looks like this:

That’s it! Just add the tag and republish fearlessly.

Tip: Write the “Evil Twin”

If the original was a “how to” post, hold it up to a mirror and write the “how not to” post. Base it on the same concept and research, but use different examples and add more value. This “evil twin” post will be similar, but still original.

• Example Guest Post: Common Website Navigation Mistakes
• Example Post on My Site: Website Navigation Best Practices

Not only will you avoid a penalty, but you may get an SEO benefit. Both of these posts rank on page one for “website navigation.”

Calm down, People.

In my view, we’re living through a massive overreaction. For some, it’s a near panic. So, let’s take a deep breath and consider the following…

Googlebot visits most sites every day. If it finds a copied version of something a week later on another site, it knows where the original appeared. Googlebot doesn’t get angry and penalize. It moves on. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

Remember, Google has 2,000 math PhDs on staff. They build self-driving cars and computerized glasses. They are really, really good. Do you think they’ll ding a domain because they found a page of unoriginal text?

A huge percentage of the internet is duplicate content. Google knows this. They’ve been separating originals from copies since 1997, long before the phrase “duplicate content” became a buzzword in 2005.

Disagree? Got Any Conflicting Evidence?

When I talk to SEOs about duplicate content, I often ask if they have first-hand experience. Eventually, I met someone who did. As an experiment, he built a site and republished posts from everywhere, verbatim, and gradually some of them began to rank. Then along came Panda and his rank dropped.

Was this a penalty? Or did the site just drop into oblivion where it belongs? There’s a difference between a penalty (like the blacklisting mentioned above) and a correction that restores the proper order of things.

If anyone out there has actual examples or real evidence of penalties related to duplicate content, I’d love to hear ’em.

25 Free Email Tools

Don’t let anybody tell you an attractive email newsletter has to cost a lot of money. These free resources can get your emails to look like they came from a Fortune 500 company, all for a lemonade stand price. If you are starting out on a shoestring budget, or if you just love to stretch a dollar, bookmark this page. You’ll want to come back here again.

Email Service Providers

These are just a few of the email service providers that offer free accounts. I have not included any of the WordPress blog plugins for email marketing because you are better off with a known email service provider. You’ll get better delivery and better tracking than if you used a plugin on your own.

1. MailChimp. Send up to 12,000 emails or mail to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. You’ll have access to MailChimp’s email template builder and an array of tracking and signup tools. The only drawback is the free plan does not include autoresponders. You’ll need to upgrade to do an automatic campaign.
2. Constant Contact. This giant of email marketing providers also offers a free trial, but it only lasts for 60 days. You get access to dozens of email templates and autoresponders, plus social media and tracking analysis. The drawback? You only get to mail to 100 contacts, but you can mail to them as often as you’d like.
3. Mad Mimi. Less well-known, but delightful to use, Mad Mimi’s free trial lets you have up to 2,500 contacts and send up to 12,500 emails. It has pre-designed email templates, but its email builder interface is easy enough for almost anyone to use. Autoresponders, called “drips,” are included.
4. ReachMail. ReachMail has one of the most generous free plans. You can mail up to 15,000 messages — and store up to 5,000 contacts — per month. You’ll get all the tracking and deliverability support expected, plus you can create surveys and include social media engagement. The drawback? You’ll see the ReachMail logo at the bottom of your emails.
5. Kualo. If you want to combine your hosting account with email marketing, Kualo is worth a look. A free trial includes 15,000 emails sent each month and 2,000 subscribers.

Subject Line Optimization

6. MailChimp’s Subject Line Suggester. The only way to access this tool is if you are in your MailChimp account and have started building your email message. But if you are willing to get that far, you’ll have access to a tool that lets you compare your email subject line to all the email subject lines ever sent in the MailChimp system, with performance data. Given how powerful subject lines are, that’s a nice advantage.
7. Litmus’s Subject Line Checker. This is very different from what MailChimp offers, but it might be helpful. You’ll be able to see how your subject line will look across a dozen different email clients. With this tool you can make sure the critical part of your subject line isn’t getting cut off.

Spam and Deliverability Tools

8. Lyris’s Content Checker. This gives your email a “spam score” and suggestions for how to tweak your email message to improve that score. The tool is powered by SpamAssassin, a popular spam filter that many email service providers include only for paid accounts.
9. Email Spam Test . This is also powered by SpamAssassin, but has a different layout and response format.
10. Contactology’s Email Spam Checker. This is very similar to the Email Spam Test above, but the two tools can give different recommendations, so comparing their results can be interesting.
11. Return Path’s Sender Score. If you did decide to use a WordPress plugin to manage your email marketing, then this is a good tool to check regularly. The Sender Score tool will take the domain name or IP address you’re mailing from and give you back some metrics on how it looks to the eyes of an email client’s spam filter. It’s a quick way to measure your email’s reputation.
12. Send Forensics’ Email Deliverability Test. No matter which email service provider you use, this tool is worth checking for every email message you send. It gives you a detailed analysis, but also shows you how other recently-sent emails in your industry compare to yours.
13. MXToolBox . This tool is more technical than other spam checkers, but if you’re having a problem, send your webmaster to this site. It might turn up something interesting.

HTML Creators, Converters, and CSS Optimizers

14. Dialect’s Premailer. This is an elegant tool to clean up the HTML code in your email. It will switch most of it to CSS, which is better for email clients, and make suggestions that will improve how your email message renders.
15. MailChimp’s HTML to Text Email Converter. Do you have an HTML email but also want to send a text version? This is the tool for you. You can format more than just emails with this.
16. Da Button Factory. Not all email clients are set to automatically show images, so it’s critical your call-to-action buttons are viewable whether images are turned on or off. Enter the CSS button. This nifty tool lets you create buttons and export them either as PNG images or as CSS code. If you’ve ever spent an hour fighting with Photoshop to get a button made, you’ll love this.

Free Images and Image Shrinkers

When it comes to engaging people, images rule the web. The problem for emails on a budget is to find great images, and then to get them to be small enough that your emails don’t get blocked. These four resources make that easy.

17. Web Resizer. This tool lets you shrink photos down to 70 percent of their original size with minimal loss of image quality. You can also do simple image edits like crop, resize, and add a border.
18. Free Online Picture Resizer. This tool is similar to Web Resizer, but also lets you grab pictures from other websites. Be aware of copyrighted material when using this tool.
19. “7 Libraries Of Sensational Photographs You Can Use For Free.” This article from BestsellerLabs.com lists enough free image resources to keep you busy for awhile.
20. “The 15 Best Free Images Websites on the Internet.” This article from Pocket-lint.com has even more free image resources — enough to dress up your emails for months to come.

Landing Pages and Email Alternative Views

21. Litmus Scope. Just in case someone can’t see your email correctly, it’s a good idea to include a link to a web page version of your message. Use this to create that web page in just a few clicks.
22. Lander App Free Trial. Most email messages need landing pages. You can make beautiful landing pages for free with this tool, so long as you send no more than 500 people a month to each page. You can even connect your Google Analytics account to the pages.

Email Rendering Previewers

There have never been more ways to view an email. So look at least one of these tools and see how your message will look before you send your next newsletter out.

23. Litmus’s Free Email Testing and Rendering Previews. This is currently the best tool to see how your email looks in 26 different email clients. It also checks for broken links and offers coding suggestions for optimal rendering. The preview does take 10 to 15 minutes to load once you’ve entered your email’s HTML.
24. Email on Acid. This tool is similar to Litmus’s previewer, but in a nicer interface. Email on Acid also offers a paid feature called Mozify that lets subscribers see a pixelated version of your images even if their images are turned off. It’s not free, but it’s a nice tool. Also, check out the blog for email rendering tips that most blogs are afraid to talk about.
25. Email Reach Free Trial. This is another rendering tool you can use for free — if you’re willing to give your email address. Email Reach boasts having the “world’s most reputable whitelist.” If you’re having problems with deliverability, you might want to test that assertion.

28 Insights on Business and Marketing by Warren Buffet

I’ve been a consultant or owned a business for almost over 30 years. When you’ve been in business or worked with as many business owners/entrepreneurs as I have you start to see trends. I thought I’d try to capture some thoughts I’ve learned so far in this journey. What follows has no order or sequence it’s just general truisms I’ve discovered working with some amazing people throughout the years…

1. There are things in your business you should be doing, and you know you should be doing but you put them off last. Do these first.
2. More unproductive time is spent doing the things you should outsource. Find opportunities to outsource things you really shouldn’t be doing and if you can’t outsource then find ways to put these into a system where you are more proficient.
3. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much, only the tools and the way you communicate with your target market has. Learn the foundations of marketing, branding, and positioning.
4. Start the day with the most important thing you need to do and end the day with asking what you accomplished. If those 2 things don’t match up make a change immediately.
5. The phone is still one of the best networking tools on the planet and beats social media hands down.
6. Follow up and consistency are the cornerstone of a strong and growing business.
7. Your target market is more educated on your product, service, or idea than they have ever been. This gives you an opportunity to really solve solutions; the challenge is solving the right solutions.
8. People make decisions both emotionally and logically. If these are out of sync in your offering or process people will run for the hills. Your offers have to make emotional and logical sense.
9. People have made up their mind before they talk to you. It’s your job to help them come to the conclusion that you, your product, or idea is what they have been seeking.
10. Rely on experts. It is said that you don’t know what you don’t know. Don’t allow this to happen in your business. Find the things that are critical to know to give you a competitive advantage and work with experts to help you understand how to capitalize on these things.
11. Instill a dedication to being the best for yourself and your team. This will take you farther than any marketing strategy.
12. Test your reasoning and thoughts. Design tests in your business and marketing so that you can prove yourself right or wrong. Then iterate these.
13. All businesses need systems, what are yours and have you developed them.
14. Understand your markets buying signals and buying timeframe. In certain markets there are trigger events that cause your market to be aware of a problem or seek a solution. The birth of a child is a good trigger event that spurs a whole host of purchase decisions. What is your target market buying signals, timeframe, and trigger events?
15. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources. If you get someone’s attentionrespect it and give them what they want or seek.
16. If you’re just getting started or rebooting, start with your big idea, a strong website, and find unique ways to reach people who want what you have. Spend zero amount of time in social media until you have this figured out.
17. You have hidden revenue in your business; the trick is finding where it’s at with as little amount of effort as possible.
18. Act. More people fail by not acting than they do by getting their idea in motion. When you act you get feedback, when you get feedback you improve, and when you improve you ultimately get to something that works in the marketplace.
19. Trust yourself. You know deep down inside that your idea will work now prove the world wrong.
20. Quantity rarely trumps quality. This is even truer when you look at the amount of effort and time you put into your business. Make sure it’s quality and not quantity that you are measuring.
21. No clear metrics. Write down and track the key metrics that drive your sales, prospecting, and efficiency of your business.
22. Focus on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Or better yet find ways to flip the things you can’t control in your mind in a way that you can control them within yourself.
23. Learn to look at a situation in 3 ways, your way, their way, and as an observer looking at both.
24. Most sales can be defined by a straight line, and this straight line happens even before you talk to your prospect. The better you get at managing that line the more sales and business you will create.
25. Seek a yes or no, if it’s a maybe you should run. A yes or no is a decision, maybe will always have lingering questions.
26. Your success is your own. No one cares more about your success than you. Don’t rely on someone else to be your driver in success.
27. Find a way to banish need from your negotiations. The other side can sense this. Even if you do need that deal or that project operating from this mindset will make it harder to close.
28. Know your why.

7 Restaurant Rating Sites, other than zomato for Owners to Monitor

As such, it is in the restaurateur’s best interest to find out what’s on patrons’ minds in terms of their experience with the establishment.

Here are seven restaurant-related rating-and-review sites that can help.

1. Urbanspoon

One of the more popular review sites devoted exclusively to the dining industry, Urbanspoon allows customers to add places they frequent to its directory.

Restaurant owners and managers can claim their listing by clicking the “Is this your restaurant?” button located in the top-right of the page.

Restaurants can also add their listing, in the event it is not in the directory. Urbanspoon will call to confirm the authenticity of the listing and reviews all new listings prior to adding them to the site.

Urbanspoon limits restaurants to updating their business information, responding to user reviews either publicly or privately, and seeing voting trends for their business. Owners cannot edit or remove reviews, but can contact Urbanspoon for those that violate its guidelines and request removal.

2. OpenTable

Designed as a site that allows customers to make reservations online, OpenTable includes customer reviews and ratings.

For online reservations, OpenTable charges restaurants monthly and per-reservation fees for their use of the system. Restaurants must sign up to the service to gain inclusion in the directory.

Subscribing restaurants get access to a management portal where they can customize floor plans, assign tables, and get information about their customers to provide more personalized service.

Although owners are not allowed to respond to customer reviews publicly, all reviews are accompanied by a “Contact Author” link that restaurateurs can use to contact the reviewer directly via a private message.

In addition, the site offers both paid and free promotional tools for use by restaurants.

3. Restaurantica

Like Urbanspoon, Restaurantica — owned by Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada — allows patrons to add listings, which restaurant owners can then claim. Doing so enables them to edit their information and interact with the site’s members.

Restaurants can add up to three cuisines, list hours of operation, the price range, accept reservations, add photos, and link to their website.

The messaging system enables owners and managers to comment on reviews and interact with customers before or after a visit, as well as offer incentives to entice customers to return. Advertising options are also available.

4. Dine.com

Started in 1994, Dine.com is one of the oldest restaurant rating-and-review sites on the list. It offers personalized recommendations to members based on their food preferences and, like the others, contains member ratings and reviews.

Owners who claim their listing can get a custom URL for the restaurant, create photo albums, add a detailed description, and create their menu online. In addition, they can post messages and get feedback directly from customers.

One drawback to Dine.com is that it does not have a verification procedure such as phone or direct mail that ensures the authenticity of the claimed listing. Anyone can claim to be the owner, and the only authentication comes in the form of an email with a confirmation link.

5. MenuPages

Limited to a handful of cities — New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles among them — MenuPages enables consumers to download restaurant menus or view them online.

Like the others, it allows users to rate and review restaurants. But there appears to be no way for owners to respond. Owners can, however, list or update menus and advertise on the site.

6. Zagat

Founded in 1979, Zagat predates the commercial Internet. Initially, its founders, Tim and Nina Zagat, husband and wife, produced printed guidebooks that consumers could purchase. That is still the case.

Since going online, Zagat is one of the most well-known and trusted restaurant rating-and-review sites. It curates the best restaurants in 18 major cities worldwide.

Acquired by Google in 2011, Zagat integrates into Google+ Local. Restaurant owners must use Google My Business to claim their listing. Doing so enables them to update their business information, including address, cuisine, hours of operation, phone number, and website.

Zagat uses a partner site, SinglePlatform, for all menus. Business owners can send an email requesting that their menu be added or updated.

To determine ratings, Zagat uses a survey process that begins with local editors who create a list of notable restaurants within a city. Once added, patrons can vote on the places they visit.

Customers are asked to rate establishments based on attributes such as food, decor, and service. Ratings are then averaged and presented on a proprietary 30-point scale.

7. Gayot

Named after the French food critic, André Gayot, who coined the term “Nouvelle Cuisine” in the 1970s, Gayot is a professional guide to dining, hotels, travel, and lifestyle. It contains ratings and reviews of local restaurants written by professional food critics and restaurant patrons.

Gayot evaluates restaurants on a particular rating system based on a 20-point scale and includes comments about décor, service, ambience, and wine.

Restaurant owners do not have the ability to claim their restaurant listings. However, they can advertise on the site to gain more attention.

Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business

The online landscape is saturated with more than 200 tools and platforms claiming to be able to help you track and assess mentions of your business or brand in social media channels. While there remains a lot of churn in the field, a number of listening platforms have evolved to help you go beyond basic monitoring into an integrated approach that helps inform multiple parts of your business: product development, customer support, public outreach, lead generation, market research and campaign measurement.

Born as a way to respond to crises and manage brand reputation, social media monitoring, or brand monitoring — which ties into social media measurement and analysis — is finally maturing into a business process that helps the bottom line.

A comparison of pricing, features & clients you rarely see on the open Web.Today we’ll turn the tables on these companies and offer some business intelligence that you rarely see available on the open Web: a comparison of social media monitoring vendors, with descriptions of their strengths, clients and pricing. Many offer end-to-end solutions, providing not just tracking capabilities but a rich set of analytics and response tools to help you grow your business and engage with individuals who influence broad swaths of the market.

Social media monitoring vendors come in all shapes and flavors. Some cater to small business with modest budgets that want to handle monitoring analysis internally. Others service global corporations that want access to expert analysts as well as a robust suite of social tools that plug into business processes. So this roundup is admittedly mixing apples and oranges. (See our discussion of social CRM below.)

To draw some distinctions, we’ve broken this package into two groupings:

• 20+ social media monitoring & engagement vendors for business (below)
• 10 lower-priced monitoring services for nonprofits & organizations (on our sister site, Sociabrite.org)

Monitoring should plug into your business processes

Companies that will succeed in the 21st century will be social businesses, committed to forging deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. So use the new year as a fresh impetus to create a Social Media Plan (Socialmedia.biz can help with that), begin monitoring and consider evaluating an outside vendor by signing up for a free trial.

Keep in mind: Listening to conversations and gathering data is only one phase of a multi-step process that also involves engagement, metrics and acting on what you learn. As Jeff Nolan writes, “In its most pure form, social media monitoring is both listening and responding to social channels.”

Here is our guide to the Top 20 Social Media Monitoring Vendors for Business. Have your own favorites? Please add them in the comments below! And if you have any corrections or updates to the information here, please share that as well.

Radian6/Salesforce Cloud: A proven solution for big brands

1Radian 6, purchased by Salesforce in 2011, works with brands to help them listen more intelligently to your consumers, competitors and influencers with the goal of growing your business via detailed, real-time insights. Beyond their monitoring dashboard, which tracks mentions on more than 100 million social media sites, they offer an engagement console that allows you to coordinate your internal responses to external activity by immediately updating your blog and Twitter and Facebook accounts all in one spot. Fully automated. Cost: The dashboard starts at $600/month, though registered nonprofits can apply for two free uses per year under the company’s Giving Back program. They also offer free trials to students and educators for research and project purposes. Radian6 uses a monthly subscription based pricing model, with the monthly fee varying depending on the number of topics monitored each month. Clients: Red Cross, Adobe, AAA, Cirque du Soleil, H&R Block, March of Dimes, Microsoft, Pepsi, Southwest Airlines — a wide range of clients. Owner: Independent. Also: See our interview with the CEO of Radian6.

Collective Intellect: Social media intelligence gathering

2Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect, which started out by providing monitoring to financial firms, has evolved into a top-tier player in the marketplace of social media intelligence gathering. Using a combination of self-serve client dashboards and human analysis, Collective Intellect offers a robust monitoring and measurement tool suited to mid-size to large companies with its Social CRM Insights platform. It applies spam management techniques and text analysis to clean data sets, delivering customers rich intelligence.Cost: Pricing starts at $300/month and scales based on specific client needs, according to published reports. Clients: General Mills, NBC Universal, Pepsi, Walmart, Unilever, Advertising Age, CBS, Dole, MTV Networks, MillerCoors, Paramount, Verizon Wireless, Viacom, Hasbro, Siemens. Owner: Independent.

Lithium: Adjust your campaign on the fly

3Lithium monitors your search-specific mentions and sentiment in social media outlets and outputs them into easy-to-read graphs and numbers resembling the stock market. Lithium will aggregate information from a variety of platforms including blog posts and comments, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and many others, and it’ll assess emotions surrounding your brand pre-, mid- and post campaign so you can adjust your strategies accordingly. We miss ScoutLabs, which is now part of Lithium. Cost: Base plan of $249/month for five users and five searches. Free 14-day trial. Clients: Best Buy, BT, Barnes & Noble, FICO, Disney Online, Stubhub, Motorola, Coca Cola, Focus Features, Netflix. Owner: Independent. Lithium bought ScoutLabs in May 2010.

Sysomos: Manage conversations in real time

4Sysomos’s Heartbeat is a real-time monitoring and measurement tool that provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly graphics. Heartbeat organizes conversations, manages workflow, facilitates collaboration and provides ways to engage with key influencers. For more, seeReadWrite review. Sysomos also offers a Media Analysis Platform. Cost: Entry-level price of $500/month. Clients: IBM, HSBC, Roche, Ketchum, Sony Ericsson, Philips, ConAgra, Edelman, Shell Oil, Nokia, Sapient, Citi, Interbrand. Owner: Marketwire.

Attensity360: Actionable insights

5Attensity360 operates on four key principles: listen, analyze, relate, act. Attensity360 will help monitor trending topics, influencers and the reach of your brand while recommending ways to join the conversation. Attensity Analyze applies text analytics to unstructured text to extract meaning and uncover trends. Attensity Respond helps automate the routing of incoming social media mentions into user-defined queues. Cost: $399/month for one license. Discounts for longer subscriptions. Free 15-day trial. Clients: Whirlpool, Vodofone, Versatel, TMobile, Oracle, Wiley. Owner: Independent. Attensity bought Biz360 in spring 2010.

Alterian SM2: Providing daily brand sentiment

6UK-based Alterian SM2 tracks mentions on blogs, forums, social networks like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, Craigslist and ePinions. SM2 monitors the daily volume, demographics, location, tone and emotion of conversations surrounding a brand and aggregates results into positive and negative categories for quick review by anyone on staff. Cost: Pricing is based on volume of results and ranges from $500/month to $15,000/month. “Freemium” trial plan allows for five keyword or phrase searches and a total of 1,000 results. Alterian also provides additional custom solutions. Clients: Rosetta, MDAnderson, Pursuit, YouCast. Owner: Independent. Alterian bought Techrigy in July 2009.

Crimson Hexagon: Actionable data for your business

7Cambridge, Mass.-based Crimson Hexagon taps into billions of conversations taking place in online media and turns them into actionable data for better brand understanding and improvement. Based on a technology licensed from Harvard, its VoxTrot Opinion is able to analyze vast amounts of qualitative information and determine quantitative proportion of opinion. Cost: Pricing based on number of seats or number of searches. Clients: CNN, Hanes, AT&T, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Mashable, Microsoft, Monster, AdWeek, Thomson Reuters, Rubbermaid, Sybase, the Huffington Post, A&E, the Wall Street Journal. Owner: Independent.

Spiral16: Flexible pricing, competitive analysis

8Spiral16 takes an in-depth look at who is saying what about a brand and compares results with those of top competitors. The goal is to help you monitor the effectiveness of your social media strategy, understand the sentiment behind conversations online and mine large amounts of data. It uses impressive 3D displays and a standard dashboard. Cost: Pricing starts at $500 for five queries or Internet searches, though there is no solid pricing model and Spiral16 will work with companies to tailor plans that fit their budget. Online demo available. Clients: Toyota, Lee, Cadbury. Owner: Independent.

Webtrends: Mobile & social analytics

9Webtrends offers services geared toward monitoring, measuring, analyzing, profiling and targeting audiences for a brand. The partner-based platform allows for crowd-sourced improvements and problem solving, creating transparency of their products and services. Cost: Pricing varies depending on packages and services chosen, but Webtrends is geared to big players. Social Accelerator packages start at $15,000/year, app packages start at $1,500 to $12,000/year. Clients: CBS, NBC Universal, 20th Century Fox, AOL, Electronic Arts, Lifetime, AA, Glam, Nestle, the City of Calgary. Owner: Independent.

Spredfast: Campaign & social media management

10We weren’t sure whether to include Spredfast in this Top 20 roundup because of its versatility. it’s not only a monitoring service but a social media management, measurement and campaign tool — in other words, a full-onsocial media dashboard and integrated communications client (Threadsy is another). In the end, Spredfast made the cut because you can pull relevant conversations from multiple networks into your dashboard, track referrals and conversions, summon up analytics and jump straight to analysis and reports. See our recent full review. Cost: Pricing begins at $250/month for businesses. Clients: AOL, Nokia, IBM, Sierra Club. Owner: Independent start-up.

NM Incite: Going for depth

11Global brands look to NM Incite‘s expertise across marketing, sales, product development, customer service, business strategy development and in deep verticals for monitoring and social media intelligence. This is a service geared to multinationals rather than nonprofits or mid-size companies. Cost: Five figures is typical. Clients: Toyota, ConAgra, Intel, Sony, Nokia, AOL, HBO, Barclays, Whirlpool, GE, Discovery, Coca-Cola. Owner: NM Incite is a joint venture of the Nielson Co. and McKinsey & Co. Nielsen Buzzmetrics was spun off into NM Incite as part of its launch in June 2010.

Converseon: Tech + human analysts

12New York-based social-media consulting firm Converseon, named a leader in the social media monitoring sector by Forrester Research, builds tailored dashboards for its enterprise installations and offers professional services around every step of the social business intelligence process. Converseon starts with the technology and adds human analysis, resulting in high-quality data and impressive functionality. Cost: Pricey. Cost varies according to which suite is used. Clients: Dow, Amway, Graco, other major brands. Converseon has more than 200,000 customers and 10,000 channel partners in 100 countries. Owner: Independent.

dna13: An emphasis on simplicity

13Ottawa-based dna13‘s MediaVantage will monitor all of your media coverage and present it in an easy-to-read format allowing you to respond from one platform. dna13 provides on-demand software solutions for brand and reputation management, including a PR and corporate communications software suite and a monitoring service for real-time insight into brand, reputation, competitors and industry issues. Cost: Packages start at $560/month. Initial $500 set-up fee. Clients: Wachovia, Miami Heat. Owner: CNW Group Co.

Attentio: Track global conversations

14Belgium-based Attentio tracks global conversations taking place across social media (blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter, YouTube) and online news sites. The multilingual service offers brand reputation management, campaign/product release impact, sales opportunity tracking and sentiment analysis along with a dashboard to track media in real time. Cost: Pricing starts at £500 ($775 US) per month for a one-year subscription; costs for tailored reports begin at £5,000 ($7,750) . Clients: Johnson & Johnson, Skype, Microsoft, Disney. Owner: Independent.

Visible Technologies: High-end monitoring & analysis

15In the fall 2010 Visible Technologies replaced its truCAST technology with Visible Intelligence, its new enterprise social intelligence platform and services. The new platform helps clients monitor, analyze and participate in social media conversations as well as protect their executive and corporate brands online. Visible adds analyst support to their client servicing to help you understand the landscape and determine which intelligence to act on. Arrange a demo via @Visible_Tech on Twitter. Cost: Typically $25,000 to $45,000, according to press reports. Clients: Microsoft, Vail Resorts, Xerox, Boost. Owner: Independent.

Cymfony: Enterprise-class monitoring platform

16Cymfony provides market influence analytics by scanning and interpreting the millions of voices at the intersection of social and traditional media. It offers a listening and influence platform, Maestro, that integrates distinctive technology with input from expert analysts to identify the people, issues and trends impacting a business. All the standard metrics are included: posts/conversations, tonality, influencers, share of voice and so on. Cost: Pricey but competitive with other deep monitoring and analytics firms. Clients: Fortune 2000 clients. (A lack of transparency may be telling.) Owner: A unit of Kantar Media.

Buzzcapture: Insights into market buzz

17Amsterdam-based Buzzcapture provides insight to organizations on the buzz in their market. Buzzcapture can track companies, products, product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, influencers, evangelists, critics and campaigns. All the information collected is analyzed and presented into understandable reports and entered into your dashboard. Cost: Typical price range is EU10,000 to EU70,000 ($13,000 to $91,000 US) for each research topic or group of products, with a standard license costing €30,000 ($39,000 US). Clients: TNT, Vodofone, ING, Nissan, BMW, Microsoft, AstraZeneca. Owner: Independent.

BuzzLogic: Tied to ad buy

18BuzzLogic uses its technology platform to identify and organize the conversation universe, combining both conversation topic and audience to help brands reach audiences who are passionate on everything from the latest tech craze and cloud computing to parenthood and politics. However, the social media monitoring tool is no longer available as a standalone product. It now comes as part of BuzzLogic’s ad platform, requiring a media buy to connect to unique audiences through BuzzLogic. Cost: Unknown. Clients: Starbucks, American Express, HBO, HP, Microsoft. Focus on advertisers. Owner: Independent.

Meltwater Buzz: Overseas strength

19Released in April 2009, Meltwater Buzz monitors, tracks and analyzes user-generated content on more than 200 million social media sites to help a brand understand its user sentiment and gauge competition. All data is stored in one intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard and a customer support representative is provided for the duration of the subscription. Meltwater, founded in Norway in 2001, now has 50 offices around the globe. It’s worth mentioning that they come from a traditional media tracking background, and with purchase of BuzzGain in February 2010, they added many more social media monitoring capabilities. BuzzGain is now baked into Meltwater Buzz. Cost: Standard subscription of one year for $13,000 gets you access for three to five users. Clients: Porsche Automotive North America, Vita-Mix, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Bausch & Lomb, Pabst Blue Ribbon and other corporations, nonprofits, government agencies.Owner: Meltwater Group.

Brandwatch: A focus on brand mentions

20UK-based Brandwatch trawls the Internet looking at news, blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites and finding mentions of brands, companies, products and people. Clients define keywords (brands, topics, people names, products) and receive reports and brand summaries that they can take action on. Cost: Pricing, based on a monthly subscription, starts at about $300/month. It operates on a per keyword pricing model. Clients: Aviva, Activision, CheapFlights, The Body Shop. Owner: Independent.

Note: BuzzGain, which was originally listed at No. 19, has been absorbed into Meltwater.

Social CRM or simply monitoring services?

In this overview I sought to avoid the insidery, wonky discussion around social CRM (customer relationship management), but it’s worth a quick mention. Paul Greenberg, organizer of the first Social CRM Summit last year, explains SCRM this way:

Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

Jacob Morgan, principal of Chess Media Group, points out that social CRM means different things to different people. While the vendors listed above offer robust social media monitoring and listening tools, they plug into their clients’ business and social CRM processes in different ways (see Chess Media’s chart above and its free Guide to Understanding Social CRM).

“Two years ago, all the vendors you mentioned called themselves social media vendors,” Morgan said. “Now that social CRM is the hot term, all of the vendors simply changed the name from social media to social CRM. Everything else is the same.”

Other paid social media monitoring solutions

There are literally dozens of social media monitoring services in the marketplace, so this roundup is meant as a guide to the top-tier vendors rather than a comprehensive list. If you’ve had success with other vendors, please mention them in the comments below.

Disclaimer: We have worked with some, but not all, of the companies above; in such cases, we’ve based our assessment on recommendations from colleagues, pricing and perceived value. Please note that many of the other monitoring vendors listed outside the Top 20 also deserve consideration, based on your company’s specific needs, costs, features and if you find a good cultural and personality fit.

Our accompanying piece in this package on Socialbrite, 10 paid monitoring services for nonprofits and organizations, offers short capsule reviews of Trackur, Thrive, eCairn, Hootsuite, BuzzStream and other monitoring services.

You may have good results with some of these additional services:

• Amplified Analytics: This tool is geared chiefly toward product reviews and marketers interested in tracking reviews across multiple sites.

• Appinions: “Automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media.”

• Atlassian: Australian-based software company with global reach, offers tools to track, test and collaborate on the social Web.

• Bit.ly Pro: The Pro version offers custom short links like pep.si (for Pepsi) and 4sq.com (for Foursquare), a dashboard that lets you monitor the real-time aggregate traffic of your shared content across the bit.ly universe, and easy integration with tools like Tweetdeck and CoTweet.

• Cision: Cision (formerly Bacon’s Information) monitors social, print, broadcast and online media outlets, then organizes the information, which a dedicated analyst delivers to a company’s in-box every day via an executive news briefing. Cision searches more than 100 million sources to assess conversations about a brand. Clients include UCLA, Gerber and R&R Partners.

• CustomScoop: BuzzPerception: A veteran in the media monitoring space, CustomScoop monitors traditional and social media, calling themselves the “leading application for online news clipping.” BuzzPerception includes a phase of human filtering to generate the most relevant results for a brand. Pricing starts at $299/month. Jen Zingsheim, a representative, provides this update: “While we started out as a traditional media ‘clipping service,’ we’ve been including blog content for years and also monitor Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. We can tailor reporting to fit client needs, and have a robust suite of analytical tools, too — along with a free, 2-week trial to see if we fit your needs.”

• Digimind: Digimind designs and develops Digimind Evolution, a Competitive Intelligence Management software platform that enables companies to deploy and to manage competitive intelligence units and projects.

• Dow Jones Insight, owned by News Corporation, touts a wide array of languages and geographies, a global footprint and a less-than-stellar dashboard. Its hefty $5,000/month pricetag is based on the fact that it’s heavily based on analysts’ involvement.

• Evolve24 is a competitive listening platform that specializes in reputation management. Evolve24 is a smaller player in the market with only about 20 customers but its customer base consists of large enterprise-level installations.

• FindAgent: Founded in 2002, UK-based FindAgent specializes in digital media monitoring and media analysis. Focusing purely on online content, the company, owned by OpenAmplify, has developed technologies to find, analyze and manage mentions in social media and traditional media. More than 500 companies use FindAgent’s semantic text analysis technology.

• iCrossing is a global digital marketing agency that combines talent and technology to help world-class brands find and connect with their customers.

• Jive: Jive Software, which acquired Filtrbox in 2010, offers a host of social media monitoring options.

• Moreover Technologies: Moreover and its Newsdesk 4 offer tools for media monitoring, reputation management, market and competitive intelligence and content sharing from 1.8 million sources.

• MotiveQuest: At the high end of monitoring services, MotiveQuest typically charges $70,000 per project, according to published reports. CEO David Rabjohns says MotiveQuest provides a full range of services. “You don’t have to use a dashboard. Just come to us with a business problem and we will help you find relevant insights. The core of our approach is digging beneath the buzz and the sentiment to identify primal human motivations. We have identified that these most strongly affect sales and share.” Clients include Microsoft, Nike, Citi, Audi and Kraft. MotiveQuest is positioned in the Strong Performer category in a 2006 Forrester report and it has a Slideshare presentation on leveraging motivations in social media.

• MutualMind: A relative newcomer, MutualMind helps marketers, agencies and PR firms track discussions, understand sentiment, identify influencers and use the resulting insights to improve positioning and marketing strategy. Pricing ranges from $500 to several thousand dollars per month.

• NetBase offers social media analysis tools that help marketing and sales professionals to understand consumer opinion, emotion and behavior online.

• Nimble is an LA-based start-up due to come out of private beta soon with a promising set of monitoring capabilities across multiple networks. Says Nimble’s Maria Ogneva: “We tie monitoring to the customer record. The real beauty is that you can monitor based on a keyword, respond as you need and even create a task right from the social media mention — whether it happens to be a tweet, FB message, LI message — which can be edited, calendared, delegated and commented on for team workflow that ties back to the record — the key ingredient here.”

• Optify is a real time marketing applications suite that offers several features to help you track, monitor and measure the success of your social media activities.

• ReputationDefender: The company offers four suites of online reputation management and privacy controls.

• RepuMetrix specializes in tracking online mentions that are perceived to be harmful to a brand’s reputation. Pricing starts at $350/month for one user.

• RepuTrack: RepuTrack is a reputation monitoring service that tracks and analyzes the conversation around a brand and delivers it in an actionable way.

• SAS Sentiment Analysis Manager: Part of SAS Text Analytics program, the Sentiment Analysis Manager “crawls content sources, including mainstream Web sites and social media outlets, as well as internal organizational text sources [and] creates reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, customers and competitors in real time.”

• Sentiment Metrics: United Kingdom-based company provides tools to listen to consumer conversations across more than 20 million blogs, 5 million forum posts and 30,000 online news sources, social networks and microblogs, including Twitter. Clients include Sony, Subaru and HSBC.

• Trendrr: Mostly focused on the entertainment community, Trendrr lets you track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of channels, ranging from social networks to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can also have Trendrr do a Social Media Audit, providing an analysis of your social media presence, dissecting volume of mentions, sentiment, links, influencers, demographics and more. Pricing: $499 and $999/month, with enterprise package beginning at $2,499/month. NBC Universal’s Oxygen TV show “Bad Girls Club” is a client. Owner: Wiredset LLC.

Look for a shakeout in the field very soon. Other monitoring services include Attensa, Beevolve, blueReport, BrandsEye, Buzzient, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, Memery’s Dialogix (from Australia), Filtrbox, Imooty, Infegy Social Radar, InfoNgen, Ingage Networks, Jungle Torch, Lexalytics, ListenLogic, Looxii, Market Sentinel, MediaMiser, MutualMind, Networked Insights, Noteca, Position2 Brand Monitor, Press Army, ReputationHQ, Scup, Silverbakk, Social Report, Sprinklr, StrategyEye, Synthesio, Trendrr, Viralheat and Whitevector.

— Maria Ogneva, who heads up social media for Nimble, provided input for this article. Updated and revised on Jan. 13, 2011.

Related

• Radian6 and the Yellow Brick Road for Brands — our interview with the CEO of Radian6 (Socialmedia.biz)

• Spredfast: A tool to organize your conversations (Socialmedia.biz)

• Biz360 (now Attensity360): Tracking business intelligence (Socialmedia.biz)

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• 14 free tools to measure your social influence (Socialbrite)

• Social media monitoring: Articles (Socialbrite)

• Social media metrics: Articles (Socialbrite)

• The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 (PDF)

– See more at: http://socialmedia.biz/2011/01/12/top-20-social-media-monitoring-vendors-for-business/#sthash.tbM2MUme.dpuf

8 Ways to Make Your Business More ‘Human’ on Facebook

Facebook comprises the bulk of daily Internet-related activity for many of its 1.4 billion users, particularly those who access the site via mobile devices.

For some, Facebook is the Internet — functioning as a portal for news and information, not unlike AOL and Prodigy did in the early days of the World Wide Web.

More importantly, Facebook is a place where its users hold conversations with family and friends and where they routinely share stories of the happenings in their lives, both significant and trivial.

Taking into account how well Facebook has woven itself into users’ lives, businesses need to find ways to integrate their message — indeed, themselves — into conversations in a more human, people-centric fashion, maximizing the value of the “social” aspect of social media.

Here are eight recommendations for you to consider.

1. Think Customer Service, Not Just Marketing

More than likely, your marketing efforts on Facebook won’t translate into sales — at least not directly. Even when sales do occur, they typically comprise only a small percentage of your overall volume.

Instead of merely thinking of your Facebook page as a sales and marketing channel, view it as a vehicle for customer service, such as in this example from AnswerFirst Communications, a telephone answering service.

You could also use Facebook Messenger to hold personal, real-time conversations with customers. Facebook is testing a business version of the platform, for which you could sign-up.

2. Provide Information Your Customers Care About

Most people operate with a “what’s in it for me” mindset, which means the content you produce on Facebook needs to focus on customer concerns and interests rather than your own.

That is not to suggest an occasional promotional post announcing a sale, new product, or contest is out of bounds, only that, when creating content, you should put the needs of your customers first.

The article “8 Facebook Post Types for Boosting Engagement” contains tips for content that will resonate with your customers.

3. Put a Personal Face on Your Company

In social media, people relate better to other people than they do to businesses. So, on Facebook, put your people at the forefront.

Through its “People Make the Difference” initiative, Knight Oil Tools, an oilfield services company, routinely showcases employees who have reached particular milestones, such as employment anniversaries.

Stories don’t always have to relate directly to business. When feasible, share personal stories, such as activities involving you and your employees, hobbies you enjoy, birthdays, or other meaningful events. Even use an occasional “selfie” when doing so.

For example, Brendan’s Irish Pub, based in Camarillo, Calif., celebrated its HR director’s birthday with a Facebook post.

The rationale: As people get to know you on a personal level, they may become more interested in your business.

4. Feature Your Customers

There are several ways you can shine the spotlight on your customers. Ask them to share photos of themselves using your products, praise them publicly via a post, or start a “customer of the week” series. Testimonials are another good way to feature customers while building brand reputation and trust at the same time.

SmartPak, an equestrian retail company, features profiles of customers talking about their use of its products, via Facebook posts.

5. Share Your Support for Charitable Causes

If your company supports a local charitable activity, such as a fundraiser, share it in a post. Include photos of you and your employees participating in the event. Many people — Millennials in particular — appreciate companies that express social consciousness and concern for their communities.

Community Coffee, a retail coffee brand, used Facebook to promote its “Military Match” coffee donation campaign.

6. Incorporate Humor

Reading and sharing humorous stories is a big part of what draws people to Facebook. While your business needs to stay true to its corporate culture, when possible, insert some humor in the form of a funny story, anecdote, or image.

T-shirt retailer, Johnny Cupcakes, borrowed inspiration from the newly released “Mad Max” movie to create this humorous image.

7. Tell Your Company Story

Form relationships with your customers and fans by telling them why you started the business, lessons you’ve learned along the way, and plans. Also, share your company values and the passions that drive you.

The Facebook page posting interface includes a feature called “Milestones,” intended for just that purpose. It enables you to build a chronology of your company’s history that includes its founding, significant achievements, and landmark events.

8. Talk About What Inspires You

Another reason people use Facebook is to find inspiration, so share what inspires you. Post quotes and photos, stories about people who mentored you, or significant events in your life, both personal and professional.

Even though Facebook is notorious for triviality, it is the meaningful moments that occur in a person’s life that others respond to most.

Conclusion

Facebook may not be the best avenue to sell your products or services, but it is a platform where you can sell “you,” and where your business can express its individuality and unique personality.

It is a place where you can socialize with your customers, developing a more personal relationship with them over time. As people get to know you, the trust that will accrue as a result could, in turn, lead to sales.

7 Ways to Get People to Share Your Content

People who are new to content marketing sometimes say, “I want my post to go viral.” Or, “We want content guaranteed to go viral.” It’s a great goal, but even the best marketers in the business don’t go viral every time they publish.

Getting a post to go viral requires a mix of first-rate content, a responsive audience, and serious content promotion skills. It is rare for an unknown blogger or videographer to come up with even a genius idea and have it hit the mainstream.

While viral hits are unusual, practical marketers with reasonable resources can see a viral win at least a couple of times of a year. They just have to understand their audience, content promotion, and what content tends to get shared.

We’ve covered content promotion in other articles. (“The Secret to Successful Content Marketing” is a recent article.) But we have not considered what makes people share content. So let’s take a look at that now.

There are two levels of sharing content. First, there are the deep psychological forces that shape our behavior. Then there are the more tangible, quantifiable things that get people to share — like added images, colors, and features that get us to click.

Psychological Forces Behind Sharing

It appears no one, even online, likes a sour puss. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found people are far more likely to share positive content than negative. Other data supports this.

HubSpot’s Dan Zarella, for example, found negative comments suppressed audience growth.

The U. Penn researchers also found people shared content that inspired awe in them. Awe was the most powerful indicator of sharing. That’s also what Noah Kagan, the Internet entrepreneur, found after he studied 100 million articles and how they were shared.

Practical, useful content is also far more likely to get shared. You can see this all over the Internet, in “most popular posts” lists on almost any site. “How to” posts do well, especially when they are easy to understand and to apply. The New York Times discovered this in their study, The Psychology of Sharing. Ninety-four percent of the people they interviewed “carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient”.

How to Get People to Share Your Content

1. Make it easy for people to share your content. Any more than 2 to 3 clicks of a button, and it’s too much work to share your content. One simple example of making content easy to share is “tweetables”. Blogger Michelle Shaeffer recently added tweetables to her posts and got significantly more traffic.

2. Ask them to share it. Don’t make people remember that they could share your content, either. Remind them with a call to action. Pinterest pins with a call to action get 80 percent more shares. Tweets that ask people to retweet them get 51 percent more retweets than tweets that never ask.

3. Use images. Tweets with images are 94 percent more likely to be shared, and photos on Facebook get 53 percent more likes. According to media firm Social Bakers, 93 percent of the 5,000 most shared posts on Facebook last spring were photos. Only 3 percent were status updates.

It works for Twitter, too. Tweets with images are 92 percent more likely to be retweeted.

4. Create “round-ups” as blog posts or other content. Round-ups are a content format. You ask a bunch of experts one question, then round up all their answers in a blog post. Round-ups can also be SlideShares or audio recordings, but most of the time they’re blog posts.

Round-ups can get very high share counts. That’s because once the post is published you can reach out to everyone who participated in it and suggest they promote the post. Experts who get asked to do roundups typically have large audiences. So instead of just you promoting your post, you have all the experts you worked with promoting your post.

Round-ups leverage the principle of influencers. They are just one tactic of the growing popularity of “influencer marketing.” Here’s some more evidence of the power of influencers.

5. Write listicles. Listicles are articles based on lists. This post is a hybrid listicle. Some people look down on listicles as being too formulaic. But for better or worse, listicles get shared more than almost any other format. That’s why people like me keep writing them. To see an example of how widespread listicles are, check Jeff Bullas’s very popular blog. These are the most popular posts on his site.

Eleven of those twelve posts are listicles. Noah Kagan’s analysis of 100 million articles also confirmed listicles get large amounts of shares. In his study, only infographics get more shares than listicles.

6. Write strong headlines. We published an entire post on how to write better headlinesa few months back. It’s worth a read if you want to write better headlines. Your headline largely determines whether or not your article gets shared. 80 percent of people will never read beyond your headline.

One of the most important keys to writing good headlines is grab to your readers emotionally. There’s a tool that can measure the emotional power of your headlines, and even give them a score. It’s the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing ValueHeadline Analyzer.

While this tool is helpful, don’t abuse it. Don’t promise things in a headline that your content can’t deliver. Facebook recently named this “linkbaiting,” and has banned it.

7. Write long-form content. The blogger who advised us all to “write epic s*&%,” was on to something. Epic content gets shared. Three different studies support this.

Here’s what the Buffer app blog found on a recent content audit.

Here’s what Neil Patel found.

And finally, here’s Noah Kagan’s data.

There’s plenty of proof that longer posts get more shares, but less than 5 percent of bloggers write posts longer than 1,500 words. That’s according to Orbit Media’s survey of 1,000 bloggers from earlier this year.

Those are just a few ways to get people to share your content. There are dozens of tricks of content creation, content promotion and audience engagement that I haven’t mentioned here.

What’s your favorite way to get people to share your content?