Vocus: A New Social Media Monitoring Product
August 9th, 2010 •
6 comments
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Vocus, a public company with more than 4000 customers worldwide recently launched a new social media monitoring product. Despite the heavy competition in the marketplace, the product is doing well. I caught up with Kye Strance and discussed the new product, its target audience and how it’s selling.
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Hi Jennifer,
I listened to the podcast. The truth is in the pudding anyway
. My belief is that “monitoring” (i.e entering a bunch of keywords to magically get a list of the “who matters”) doesn’t work well. It’s also what I hear from the back channel of clients I work with. I like the fact that they move beyond ‘monitoring’ to ‘engagement’.
If you’re curious, we provide a similar product…which doesn’t work with a set of keywords. We call it a “community and influencers marketing platform”.
Laurent
Hi Laurent: Would like to hear more. Always interested in products and companies doing social media/marketing better.
Monitoring is not as important as engagement but you have to have monitoring to get to engagement.
Hi Jennifer,
Nice interview. I agree with Kye that minimizing the noise is important in order to have accurate analyses of what you’re seeing. It’s very important that the blogs in a social media monitoring tool’s index, for example, filter out blogs that feed off of other sites and aren’t actually kept up by a real person. If you don’t pay for a tool that can do that for you, you will have to spend time doing it yourself.
I don’t agree, however, that the web 2.0 teaches us to write better press releases, unless, Kye, you mean more personalized requests ? We can really personalize things now, so you can spend 20 min writing the Perfect Press Release that will probably get ignored, or send a short message that is to the point and personal and real. Guess which one gets opened more often (in my personal experience).
Nice to discover your podcast, though, and now I’ve found you on Twitter
Best,
Michelle @Synthesio
Laurent,
Why should monitoring be limited to entering a bunch of keywords and getting a list of results?
Advanced platforms will perform a number of tasks, such as:
- filtering out what is irrelevant (by training a classifier, not keyword-only filters)
- analyze the sentiment of the mention (positive, negative, neutral). It should be possible to train the system for the specific monitoring task, as a negative customer service email is very different from a negative hotel review
- reporting : trends by source (where are people talking about the monitored company or concept? Twitter? Facebook? Blogs?)
- workflow management (assign mentions to someone inside the company responsible to manage the comment/mention, ex: customer care)
- engagement..
I think that the credibility of social media monitoring platforms is negatively impacted by the free tools that are doing basic “real-time” searches, which isn’t what a monitoring platform should be.
I agree with Pascal. Free tools are ruining the reputation of Social Media Monitoring tools. A tool shouldn’t just bring back data, it should provide actionable insight. Free tools do not do this sufficiently.
Michael, Thanks for weighing in to a discussion that happened almost a year ago. Appreciate your listening. I will send these thoughts to VOCUS.