Top Social Media Monitoring Tools

Posted on 30 juni 2015 by slurrpmedia

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:

The most important criterion for placement on our longlist is a complete coverage of sources (monitoring online news, blogs, forums, and social networks).
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.)
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) .
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.

25 Free Email Tools

Posted on 25 juni 2015 by slurrpmedia

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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

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.
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.

See what your subject line will look like in Litmus’s subject line checker.

Spam and Deliverability Tools

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.
Email Spam Test . This is also powered by SpamAssassin, but has a different layout and response format.
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.
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.
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.
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

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.
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.
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.

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.
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.
“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.
“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

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.
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.

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.
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.
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.

Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business

Posted on 25 juni 2015 by slurrpmedia

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.”

55 great productivity tools and, resources for startups and entrepreneurs

Posted on 15 mei 2015 by slurrpmedia

Between commuting to office, catching up with your inbox, to rushing for review meetings, it’s a hard life, as any entrepreneur will know. They are always on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their day. Running a startup is a daily challenge, but there exist tools out there to simplify almost all aspects of a business, enabling entrepreneurs to minimize distractions and focus on their ‘core’.

Right from naming and registering a business, to managing teams, to handling marketing and customer relations, these tools can help you ease up the process of running your business.

Here are 55 great tools that can assist your business in being effective and efficient:

Asana: Asana is a Project Management and Collaboration Tool which helps keep teams organised, connected and focused. It is one of the most popular project management tools and offers convenient integrations.

99designs: 99Designs is the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design. It is a great platform to find able freelancer designers, especially for logo and web designing.

AngelList: AngelList is a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers. Its goal is to introduce entrepreneurs to sophisticated investors, and simplify the process of early stage business. An AngelList profile is also an important visibility platform, practically synonymous with a birth certificate in the startup world!

Animoto: Animoto makes it easy to create professional-quality videos. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from photos, video clips and music.

BetaList: BetaList provides pre-launch startups with their first hundred users. It lets them understand the market and enable them to reach the product-market fit.

Brand24: Brand24 is a tool which allows one to monitor one’s brand, product and services online. It is also a great method of measuring the buzz around a brand, product or keyword.

Bunchball: Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball provides cloud-based software as a service gamification product intended to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics.

Codecademy: Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in eight different programming languages. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other.

CoFoundersLab: CoFoundersLab offers an online matchmaking service that connects entrepreneurs with compatible co-founders looking to join a startup. It helps aspiring entrepreneurs connect through their online platform and in-person events.

Doorbell: Customer Feedback is probably the most crucial aspect of an early-stage business. Doorbell helps gather in-app user feedback for free. It is available for websites, iOS and Android.

Dropbox: Dropbox is the premier file backup, sync and sharing solution beloved by more than 4 million businesses. It lets you store and share huge chunks of data through the cloud.

Evernote: Evernote is a closed based freemium suite of software and services, designed for note taking and archiving. It is a modern workspace that syncs between all of your devices.

Expensify: Expensify provides an online expense management service for customers worldwide. It eases the process of tracking expenses and is one of the most popular expense reporting apps for phone & web.

Fontello: Fontello is a tool to build custom fonts with icons and helps you easily create a unique text branding for your business. It packs vector images into webfonts.

Free Invoice Generator: Free Invoice Generator provides for an easy to use free invoice template to create invoices in PDF. It ensures a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order.

Germ.io: Germ.io is a project management tool centred around ideas. It lets you get from ideas to execution by helping you capture every eureka moment.

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Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction is an online customer engagement community platform connecting businesses with their customers to foster better relationships. Companies of all sizes use Get Satisfaction’s platform to modernize customer support, accelerate sales and differentiate their brand.

GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service offering distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Over 4 million people use it to share code.

Google tools and resources

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is definitely one of the most important tools to advertise online.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It shows you the full customer picture across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones.

Google Trends: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It can be quite useful for targeting the right customers online.

Google Web StarterKit: Web Starter Kit is boilerplate and tooling for multi-device development. It is a front-end template that helps one build fast, modern mobile web apps.

FullContact for Gmail: FullContact for Gmail supercharges your Google Contacts and lets you know everything about your Gmail contacts, right from your inbox. You can see the name, photos, social profiles, company info just by hovering over an email address.

Hey startups and entrepreneurs, help us with this survey! If you’ve been running a startup for some time, we need your opinion on running a business. Fill out this survey, and we may use your opinion/quote in one of our upcoming articles.Take the 5-minute survey here.

We’ll randomly pick up three individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

Homerun: Homerun is a lightweight tool that makes recruitment personal and effective. Homerun enables businesses to create authentic job openings, receive richer applications and review applicants faster and more effectively.

HootSuite: Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform. It is a social relationship platform that empowers users to execute social media strategies across their organizations.

How Much To Make An App: How Much to Make an App lets one calculate the cost of a building a mobile application. You just need to choose the desired features, and it estimates the cost of those features within seconds.

HubSpot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It includes tools for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization, among others.

intercom.io: Intercom shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them . It provides for live conversations and allows sending targeted email and in-app messages, triggered by time or behavior.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is especially useful for film, music, art, theatre, games, comics, design, photography, and more.

LaunchRock: LaunchRock is a platform that enables its users to create viral “Launching Soon” pages with built in sharing tools and analytics. It help its clients incentivize and reward users for telling others about their projects through email and social networks.

MailChimp: MailChimp is a popular online email marketing solution which lets one manage contacts and send emails. It helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.

Meetup: Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It can help you meet your fellow entrepreneurs in your region/industry and get a better understanding of the market.

Meldium: Meldium is the simplest way for teams to access the cloud tools they need. By aggregating and monitoring accounts across any web service, it frees one from tedious account management.

MobileDevHQ: MobileDevHQ is an enterprise organic app marketing platform that offers mobile marketers with app store optimization (ASO) solutions. The platform enables app marketers to analyze and optimize the app store presence of an app, track an app’s relevant search ranking queries in an app store, discover top chart rankings, analyze keywords etc.

Moqups: Moqups is a stunning HTML5 App for creating high fidelity SVG mockups, wireframes and clickable prototypes. It lets you create website and app prototypes without any technical knowledge.

Moz: Moz is an industry leader in building tools to facilitate inbound marketing easy. It provides automated research and analytics tools which lets you focus on strategy and insights and allows you to gain a quick understanding of the competitive landscape in any given search result.

Go Daddy: GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host and domain name registrar. It offers dependable and stable services to ensure smooth online presence.

Naminum: Naminum is the leading free startup name, company name, business name and website name generator on the web. It helps you find a suitable name for your business.

Near Me: Near Me is a peer-to-peer commerce solution enabling anyone to setup their own branded marketplace. Users can create peer-to-peer marketplaces to share, trade, swap or rent anything all over the world.

Upwork: Previosuly called Elance-oDesk, Upwork is the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers meet. It is an effective platform to get quality output at affordable costs.

Pixlr: Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The apps range from simple to advanced photo editing and can be used on PCs, and smartphones or tablets.

PostMark: PostMark is a web app which removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for web apps, all with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. It lets you see who opened your emails, where they opened it, what clients and platforms they used, and even how long they read the email.

Prezi: Prezi is a popular cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. The product employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) and lets you create striking presentations.

QuickMVP: QuickMVP is a tool that helps entrepreneurs test a new business with a Landing Page Builder and Google Ad Creator. It is one of the easiest ways to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.

Recruiterbox: Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to one’s business. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software.

Rewardstream: Rewardstream lets one create engagement and lead generation through well-designed, best-practice-driven, and highly tailored referral marketing plans tuned to meet one’s business’ changing needs. It makes it quick and easy for marketers to incorporate digital, mobile, and word-of-mouth referrals into their customer acquisition and brand awareness mix.

Scoop.it: With a focus on content marketing, Scoop.it helps professionals and businesses publish content online in a meaningful, easy and rewarding way. It is a convenient form of finding and creating content for social media marketing.

Shopify: Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website solution that allows one to sell online by providing everything needed to create an online store. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.

Sidekick: Sidekick lets you see Who Opens and Clicks Your Email. With Sidekick email tracking, one can get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one’s emails.

Slack: Slack is a team communication tool that allows for real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. It is an advanced messenger and can help ensure smooth team co-ordination.

SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. It lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically in real time.

Termsfeed: Termsfeed lets one create elaborate legal documents in minutes. It lets one create custom agreements that can be legally binding for users: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies.

TinyJPG: TinyJPG helps make websites faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60%. It analyses images and chooses an optimal strategy to apply the best possible JPEG encoding, keeping the quality impact but reducing the size at the same time.

UICloud: UI plays an important part in defining customer experience for any app. UICloud collects the best user interface designs and provides a search engine to find the best UI elements for one’s need.

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular web platform to create beautiful websites and blogs. It provides for hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes.

More on productivity, productivity tools and apps here:

5 productivity tools that every startup must know about

The myth of multitasking – how it dumbs you down

We’ll randomly pick up 3 individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

5 Tools to Boost Your Social Media Productivity

Posted on 22 april 2015 by slurrpmedia

#1: Resize Social Images

Photos trigger better social media engagement. However, because each social platform has its own preferred dimensions, resizing your images to meet the sizing guidelines for different social networks can be time-consuming.

This is where Social Media Image Maker comes in. It’s an easy-to-use image-sizing tool that works for a large number of social networks, including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube.

Social Media Image Maker makes it easy to resize your images for fifteen different social platforms.

Using Social Media Image Maker helps make the process of resizing and retouching your images much less labor-intensive. It’s a good way to free up your time for other important tasks.

#2: Monitor Analytics in One Dashboard

To make sure your social marketing efforts are paying off, you need to measure their impact and track ROI. These tasks are much easier to do with a tool like Cyfe, the ultimate social media dashboard for managing campaigns.

Cyfe tells you about the likes, views and clicks received by your Facebook content and provides in-depth Twitter and LinkedIn analytics. It also offers a truckload of data that helps you evaluate the performance of your social campaign.

Cyfe gives you a detailed look at your presence across various social networks.

Things change quickly in the social media world, and by staying on top of your campaign’s performance, you’ll be ready to initiate a course correction if something goes awry.

#3: Identify Influencers

Social networks play a huge role in influencing consumer decisions.

This is why one of your key social objectives should be connecting and engaging with brand influencers. These are people who often have hundreds of thousands of followers, and building meaningful relationships with them provides more exposure for your brand. Sustained and meaningful influencer engagement can drive traffic to your site and lead to more sales.

The problem is, how do you find brand influencers? There are two great tools that can help you with that: Brandwatch and BuzzSumo.

Brandwatch gives you social data from the perspective of brand mentions. You get a ringside view of all of the chatter about your brand and products.

Brandwatch uses social media monitoring to find influencers who are creating and participating in conversations in your niche.

This data helps you identify the conversations that matter, as well as the people behind those conversations. You can then start engaging with key influencers in your niche who can provide real value to your business.

BuzzSumo enables you to search for the most popular content by topic, discover content ideas and search for key niche influencers. You can search for influencers based on their topical expertise, number of followers, location, follower interaction and authority.

BuzzSumo helps you zero in on the influencers who are best positioned to give your brand a nudge with their own audiences.

#4: Upload Video to Multiple Sites at Once

If videos aren’t part of your content marketing campaign, you are missing out on an important lead generation opportunity. To take advantage, you need to create videosand upload them not only to YouTube, but also to plenty of other video sites.

Obviously, handling all of these video tasks requires a lot of time and effort. What’s more, how do you keep track of the views your video gets on each site?

TubeMogul enables you to upload your video to dozens of video sites at once, simplifying and optimizing the process.

It also gives you an overview of analytics for each site, enabling you to track the performance of your video across each platform. You know which sites are attracting the most viewers and whether your video has been optimized to attract your target audience.

TubeMogul provides data on the performance of your social media videos.

The idea is to use videos to optimize conversions, and TubeMogul helps you do just that.

#5: Automate Scheduling

One big challenge for marketers is managing the time they spend scheduling and sending content to various social profiles. These important tasks can be time-consuming and may go wrong if you aren’t careful. You don’t want to end up in a situation where you forget to send a post or simply don’t have time.

Enter Buffer, a popular social media tool that simplifies scheduling and posting. All you need to do is create a content lineup and use Buffer to choose which social profile you want that content to be sent to and when.

Use Buffer to schedule posts and choose which profiles to send your content to.

You can link your Buffer account to your Facebook pages, profiles and groups; Twitter; LinkedIn profiles and company pages; Google+ pages and App.Net profiles.

By using Buffer, you can focus on creating content, and the app will take care of spreading it across social media. What’s more, Buffer offers intuitive analytics that tell you which posts have performed best.

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