Social Media Security on a Big Budget
In addition to the free resources, the following are examples of paid services for implementing several forms of social media services that help securely manage the data flows about your company. The main reason for using these paid services is that there is a large landscape to track when a company is bigger and has more interactions in the social media sphere. If a large company is using only Google Alerts, all the e-mails it receives are not being managed properly. A better filter is needed and some of the more robust paid services can greatly assist in managing this data. We will examine three services in this section. The Appendix lists many tools that you can also explore.
When you do select a paid service for monitoring, ensure the product offers
An understandable user interface
Integration into other tools, such as SalesForce.com
Easy-to-generate metrics
Comprehensive search of numerous sources
Extraction and export data capability
Real-time analysis
Filter and summary dashboards
Push capabilities
Radian6
One of the most popular monitoring tools on the market, the Radian6 software platform (bought recently by Salesforce.com) allows organizations to listen, measure, and engage in conversations across the social web. Radian6 tracks mentions on over 150 million social media sites and sources and returns the results for exploration, understanding, and action. Like most tools in this category, it can monitor blogs, tweets, news sites, video sharing sites, and discussion boards.
For a company that might be overwhelmed with a lot of data, the analysis, reporting, and filtering functions are very important in these paid monitoring services. Figure 14-5 shows an example of the Radian6 dashboard.
Cost Radian6’s volume-based plans have a starting price point of approximately $600 per month for 10,000 “posts” (as of this writing).
Lithium (formerly Scout Labs)
Rebranded as Lithium Social Media Monitoring, Scout Labs was recently acquired by Lithium. Lithium lets brand owners track what’s being said about those brands on social media sites. The platform allows you to create persistent searches, giving you real-time access from the minute you log on. The automated sentiment feature gives you an “on-the-fly” look at the tone and sentiment of your social customers.
Another Lithium feature is Buzz Tracking. Buzz Tracking gives you real-time metrics around how much buzz is out there, how much of it is yours, how much of it is your competitors’ and what’s buzzing industry-wide. Saved Items lets you share bookmarks, notes, and social media mentions with the entire team or select recipients. Some potential differentiators from the Radian6 platform include:
Automated sentiment
Quotes showing you what your customers are passionate about
Frequent words analysis
Buzz Tracking
Cost Lithium’s monthly plans start at $99 for smaller organizations and up to $749 for a large customized solution.
Reputation.com
Reputation.com monitors what’s being said about your organization online for a monthly fee and will have specific content “destroyed” or removed. Determining what data points need to be destroyed and where those data points need to be prevented from showing up is a very difficult process The platform offers three distinct services: MyPrivacy, MyReputation, and ReputationDefender. MyPrivacy seeks out and removes your personal information from the Web. MyReputation monitors search results, highlights potential problems, and promotes the biography that you push out. ReputationDefender increases positive content and actively combats false, misleading, or irrelevant Google results for businesses and business owners. This service is more about your reputation than content monitoring tools like Radian6 and Lithium. It addresses threats to your reputation by trying to manage public content actively.
Cost Plans start at $4.15 a month. Reputation.com also offer customized business solutions.