Social Media & Brand Monitoring Part 3: Sysomos, TruCast

Social Media has given every one of us an equal voice in what is being said on the internet about a brand, and with that changed the way our entire world works.

The more saturated the world wide web becomes, with information geared towards making money, not always in an honest way, more and more searches are conducted through social media sites that can give a firsthand, personal experience testimonials using the brand.

That, in turn, changes the way companies are advertising and handling consumer’s complaints. It changed launching campaigns, and reshaped the way advertisers are learning what works and what doesn’t.

There are online tools to help brand managers and small business owners track, analyze and react to what is being said about them on the World Wide Web. They help control the visibility, what is being said and where, and enables real time reaction.

Sysomos

“Business Intelligence and Social Media” – that is how Sysomos labels itself. What’s happening online, what it means for your products or brands, and how to engage in the conversation, are some of the areas their software enable their customers to do from one centralized place.

They provide Social media analytics that gives you the tools to make the right decisions. Their database has an archive of data collected from forums, micro-blogging, videos, blogs and other social sites.

The company, in existence since 2005, employs logarithms to scan information in the form of crawlers (similar to what Google does when new pages are uploaded) and categorizes, breaks down and aggregates that information from all over the world. That includes sites that are not in English, with the help of a translating tool.

Sysomos prides itself for having a 4 tire security against spam, which is meant to produce a spam-free and true report, for being able to produce results in real time and for enabling you to reach and react to the information in a timely manner, any time of day or night.  It also has an automated sentiment report to make it easier to navigate through the information.

The site will give you analytics; who is talking about your brand and where they are located. You can compare the information to those of your competitors. You can choose to identify the influencers who are talking about your brand and start a conversation. All this can be done with the same platform and you can share information and assign responsibilities to other team members.

A spinoff of the University of Toronto research project, this Canadian company’s flagship offering –  “MAP” (Media Analysis Platform) was launched in 2007, and was aimed to serve corporations, marketers, public relations agencies and advertisers. Another program called “Heartbeat” was launched in 2009, and is a cost effective version of the program. In 2010 the company announced the third major product, “Audience”, in beta testing for social media ROI (Return On Investment).

In 2010, Sysomos was acquired by Marketwire, a press release distribution company. The company holds webinars to explain the benefits of their system. Their pricings start at $500 a month and go up to $1,000.

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Facebook Page Central:

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Trucast

The newcomer to the social media monitoring is Trucast from Visible Technologies. It launched in August 2010, and offers the ability to track, analyze and participate in forums, social networks, blogs and online communities.

It is aimed at advertisers, brand managers, market researchers and corporate customer service, public relations and communication professionals. It is built to handle massive amounts of information (they say it handles up to 70% more than competing companies) and you can follow up to 40 different topics. The company will categorize it and transform it to actionable business insights which show the purchase behavior of clients, which areas of customer relations needs to be improved and how to build brand loyalty. They say they dig deep into social media data as well as other industries and third party data sources like newsgroups, bulletin boards and online news sites.

Their clients include Microsoft, Panasonic, Hormel and Dell. Their statistics has shown that using their software, Dell managed to reduce the negative sentiment about them by 50%.

They do not publish their prices.

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Sources:

• CrunchBase: Sysomos
• Read Write Web
• Sysomos: Products
• Sysomos: Blog
• TruCast.net
• Visible Technologies
• Wikipedia: Sysomos