Tuesday, April 27, 2010

A definitive list of social media measurement & metrics tools?

(Updated December 2, 2011)

Last week Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group, along with his colleague John Lovett, published a nice report on social media analytics. It's a very useful framework for thinking through how to measure the rights things, which in turn will focus attention on the right kinds of activities.

But how to measure? Way back in 2006, Owyang took a snapshot of the companies that offer tools for social media metrics, and came up with a list of forty-two firms. In the last week I've trawled the web to update his list (and thanks to Ken Burbary for a nice wiki list of different tools), and come up with an astonishing 82 firms that offer some kind of social media measurement solution. And I'm pretty sure I've missed a bunch.


Help me update and correct the list. Please send me your additions, along with any other comments on these tools, and I'll post an update. If there's enough interest, I'll also try and categorize these solutions better -- there's certainly a lot of diversity in this list.


SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Updated: February 11 2011


Company Comments
Alterian SMM
Appinions SMM
Andiamo Systems SMM
Attensity SMM
Attentio Multilingual
Beyond Analysis Gone
Beevolve SMM
Biz360 Acquired by Attensity.
BrandIntel Gone
Brandwatch Brand monitoring
BurrellesLuce SMM
Buzzcapture SMM
BuzzGain Meltwater Group Product
BuzzLogic Now TwelveFold Media
BuzzNumbers SMM
CIC Business Consulting BI tool Chinese market
Cision SMM + other tools
Collective Intellect SMM
ComMetric Mapping to financial data and stock tickers
Converseon Agency with some tools
Cover-All Technologies No longer supporting SMM
Crimson Hexagon SMM
CustomScoop SMM
CyberAlert SMM
Cyveillance Brand monitoring, QinetiQ company
Cymfony SMM + other tools
Dow Jones & Company Insight SMM + other tools
EchoMetrix Gone
eCairn SaaS metrics solution
EmPower Research Custom technology solutions
Ethority
SMM
Evolve24 SMM
Jive FilterBox product.
HowSociable Free gadget
Imooty SMM
Infegy Brand monitoring
Integrasco SMM
Intelligence Technologies Gone out of business
JamIQ Asian languages
J.D. Power and Associates acquired Umbria
Jodange See Appinions
Kaleidico
No longer supporting SMM
Kaava Corporation Marketing services, some SMM
KDPaine and Partners No tools but strong analysis
ListenLogic social CRM?
Lexalytics Sentiment detection
Linkfluence French language
Lithium Social CRM
Market Sentinel Brand monitoring
mBlast SMM
MediaBadger Consulting firm with tools
MediaHound SMM competitive intelligence
MediaMiser Media monitoring
Meltwater News Media monitoring
MetaTale Gone.
Metrica Multilingual, part of Gorkana Group
Millward Brown Precis
Moreover technologies SMM
Netemic SMM
NetEquity Gone.
New Media Strategies
No longer supporting SMM
Nielsen Online NetRatings
Onalytica SMM
OneRiot
Gone.
PRMetrics Free customizable social media portal
Radian6 SMM, acquired by SalesForce.com
Relevant Noise See Zeta Interactive
Report International Brand monitoring
RepuMetrix Brand monitoring
ReputationHQ Gone
SAS Business intelligence tool with SM
SamePoint Gone
Scanblog Gone.
ScoutLabs See Lithium
Sentiment Metrics Not just sentiment
Socialarc SMM
SocialMention Social search engine
Statsit No longer Relevant
Synthesio Multilingual
Sysomos Business intelligence tool
Tealium No longer relevant
ThoughtBuzz SMM
TraceBuzz SMM
Trackur SMM
Thomson Reuters BuzzAnalytics and OpinionAnalystics
UberVU Now Crimson Hexagon
ViralHeat SMM, Free API
Visible Technologies SMM
VMS Gone
Vocus SMM
WaveMetrix SMM
Zeta Interactive Relevant Noise product for SMM

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

What's wrong with this picture?

If you've read a magazine or newspaper over the last few weeks its been hard to avoid the iPad advertising. My favorite appeared on the back cover of The New Yorker:












Wait a second.... Here you have a print advertisement for the iPad, inexplicably promoting the New York Times, a newspaper which has yet to figure out a way of making any money from distribution via said iPad.

Clearly, the Apple gang have no sense of irony.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Optimistic Economist

When an internationally known economist bets his career on social media, you pay attention.

I first heard the Michael Mandel speak in February 2009 when, as he put it, “the economy was stone dead.” At the time he was chief economist for BusinessWeek and had authored more than 50 of the magazine's cover stories. What I liked about him then – and what I enjoyed again last week when I heard him speak for a second time – was his rational, resilient optimism.

Back in 2009, Mandel showed reams of data giving a historical perspective on how bad the current recession was (answer: very bad), how we got here (answer: greed and deregulation), and how we can recover (answer: innovation). Mandel is a big fan of innovation as the engine that drives the US economy. He's consistently argued that the only way to dig-out from the current recession is to find ways to generate growth through innovation. As he put it, saving your way out of a recession “takes forever”. Over the past decade, he contends, too much innovation has failed to mature and become commercially disruptive.

Last week, Mandel pointed out that the current recession is so deep any recovery will likely be slow. However, describing his job as “divining the shape of economic booms from weak signals”, he sees early optimistic signs in a few market sectors, chief among them being media and communications. He's especially bullish about the online sector and its disruptive effect on everything from journalism to advertising, although he sees massive changes ahead for the entertainment industry, too. He pointed out that in 2010, about $62 billion will be spent in online advertising (about 15% of overall advertising spend), and this will climb to $146 billion by 2020.

None of these insights are especially original but Mandel has, as he put it, bet on his own predictions: Last year he left BusinessWeek and founded his own online venture, Visible Economy. He's pretty blunt in his opinion of old media – while many argue that the business model for journalism is in question, he contends the problem is more fundamental. For Mandel, conventional journalism is broken, and no longer delivers what people want, when and how they want it.

He could be right.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Yet another redundant and ill-informed opinion on Apple's iPad

It seems like everybody has something to say about Apple's iPad, so in the interests of complete redundancy I thought I'd chime in.

I should say up-front that I've never seen a real, live iPad, have only a vague idea of what it can do, and have no intentions of buying one. In other words, I'm much like all the other ill-informed pundits out there.

So let me begin with a confession: I love books of the dead tree variety. I actually collect books (I've just finished reading a first edition of Steinbeck's The Moon is Down), and I'm currently wading through all of Dickens' novels after buying a used set from the 1900s. So the iPad phenom got me thinking: what if things got reversed, and in a parallel universe the iPad came before the invention of books?

I get that the iPad can stream video, host a bewildering range of applications, and can make pretty good buttered toast. It's a multi-functional device, but its primary use-case is to provide a new platform for books and book-like content. The ability to meld multimedia content is pretty cool, as is the ability to bring the conventions of Web content to the format of the book. But as a portable tool for conveying a linear narrative, it has a bunch of issues. There's the bed-and-beach problem (you want to read a skinny computer in either location?). There's the drop-and-dry problem (I might handle my Steinbeck carefully, but a paperback is pretty indestructible). There's the share-and-sell problem (I'm not enthralled by some of the lock-in issues around the content I might buy). And have I mentioned battery life? In my parallel universe, if you had an iPad and no books, I think some latter-day Gutenberg might invent them anyway.

I know I'm a Luddite on this. My guess is, the current iPad will be a complete flop but some later incarnation will be a wild success. And books will become history. I have no idea how this will change what we read - would Steinbeck and Dickens exist in an iPad age?