Social CRM or Social CEM - What makes a Social Business?

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?


Paul Greenberg who blogs on CRM at ZDNet and is author of CRM at the Speed of Light (great read) has been instrumental in sharing knowledge on the rapidly changing and evolving world of CRM. CRM is a business strategy designed to optimise profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction. As social channels have developed so too has the complexity of dealing with the associated volumes of conversations around brands and products. Consumers now have power to voice their opinions openly.

Organisations are now rapidly trying to integrate information into their CRM systems (many of which are old legacy systems such as SAP/Siebel). Kate Leggett provides some practical views on this and the need for organisations to take control. So what is the main debate about?

Many people are frustrated with the many current practices of CRM that fail to deliver a good customer experience. Many can relate to long waits on phone lines, multiple interactive voice response lines, lack of consistency with information...and the list goes on. Despite masses of investment in Siebel/SAP and Business Process Mapping organisations seem to have removed not complimented the customer experience. The drive to reduce costs not enhance the customer experience was the main driver behind many CRM initiatives and outsourcing programmes.

The main problem is that CRM platforms measure customer interactions solely upon product purchase history and preferences. These measures are product centric and historical and don't consider or take into account experience or forward looking trends & preferences.

Is CRM as simple as this sometimes (watch the video)?

Enter the Social Customer?

One of the classic cases of bad customer service and the use of social media was the management by United Airlines of Dave Carroll's guitar which was badly handled both in terms of customer service and PR. The power of the social customer to influence and amplify their voice is here. But let's not forget that companies should tread a careful line between service and rewarding those that shout loudest. While traditional is still available, many organizations are often responding to customers faster when the complaint comes in via a social media site.

As a result, are we teaching customers to use social media as their customer service escalation path? Are we instilling bad behaviours of immediacy? Whether we like it or not real time is approaching just as a generation have changed to the timeliness and expectation associated with different communication methods: from letters to faxes to emails (initially by PC and then the move to mobile) and now Twitter. We are moving to closer to real-time.

Paul Greenberg defines social CRM (SCRM) as: "the company's programmatic response to the customer's control of the conversation." Its about the company taking hold of the reins of the conversation, not the other way round.

Brian Solis: SCRM affects the whole organization and is transformational. According to Solis, 'the ability to identify active communities of relevance', tracing influential people and channels, and the dissection of all phases of the process of decision making, all in real-time, are crucial aspects of social media marketing.

Involving these ‘influencers’ and communities, and the linking of CRM to interactive marketing actions are some of the core elements of an integrated, social CRM. As Brian intimates we are moving to an experience economy.

So What is Customer Experience Management (CEM) ?

Customer experience is one of the great challenges for innovation. It is interactions between an organization and a Customer. Of course this involves the customer relationship management, however this is only one element of the service delivery. It is the blend of an organization’s performance, the thoughts and feelings that customers have. As the customer moves from through the touch-points of its association with the organisation - it is the experience.

But where is this heading?

The struggle that organisations face is not purely at the operational level of integrating systems, processes and adopting these tools. The fundamental shift is on how organisations transform their structures, cultures and values to reflect a more customer focused approach to evolve to this new focus on customer experience. This is also a necessity to adapt and be agile in rapidly changing environment. Organisations will need to focus on the perspective of their customers and empower their employees to deliver it well; they need to become a social business. Happy customers become advocates and bring along their friends.

What of the future?



Brands and organisations are having to face a point where the consumer and organisation are converging in the relative role of 'real time' experiences. Supplying goods and services will be associated with facilitating unique consumer experiences on demand and these may be off-line and on-line or augmented These experiences may be facilitated by a brand community or a new experience environment to interact with and co-create value.  Since experiences are not easily replicated or copied these will be the value and uniqueness where brands will battle for consumer attention.

5 steps to start your social business strategy

Why focus on integrating social business technologies?

The trends have been discussed and explored, the case studies are readly available and the technologies are proven - now is the time to invest and build capabilities for a social business.


McKinsey highlights the case that adoption is critical for organisations to become social businesses. The simplification of integration, lower costs and adaptive systems create a rational for change that is undeniable; social business is the focus for 2011.

Benefits of being a social business:

• Increasing internal efficiency and knowledge collaboration


• Improved customer relationships


• Improved innovation through customer participation

But it is the need to adapt to changing customer behaviours and maintain mind share in congested markets that is driving much of the change. Let's revist some of the trends that are happening that affect how organisations market to customers.

Many organisations are still grabbling with how to use social media to engage their customers, but besides a few leading brands many are failing. But why? Well one of the main reasons is that in changing over to social media many are still broadcasting information and not engaging in developing a relationship. For others it has to date been a tactical dip in the water often isolated from the main organisational strategy.

Organisations now need to recognise the greater impact of a social business strategy to engage customers and unlock value.

5 steps in developing a social business strategy

The American Marketing Association (AMA) article on social business design, highlights the changing nature of work, a shift to cultures of sharing, and evolution of personal technology create emerging market opportunities. It points to a social business strategy.

1. Learn first - Explore

To start with, an organisation and key stakeholders should use an expert to quickly get up to speed with the technologies and how they are being used.  A good consultant can deliver this and at the same time focus on your industry and/or market and what is relevant. Also use and involve people in the business who are interested and knowledgable. This is the explore stage of developing a social business strategy.

2. Framing and developing the questions

Develop the questions that apply to the organisation. These lay the foundations for developing a strategy and will help to prioritise any research needed. Involve key stakeholders in formulating the questions; some people have different perspectives, roles, knowledge and skills. These all add value at this stage. As a team prioritise them and sort them into long term and short term.


Here a few key questions as examples:

• How are our customers using these social technologies
  


• What markets/products and customers should we focus on


• What internal changes might be needed


• How do these technologies change our business model

3. Benchmark the business

Many of the questions that around strategy often relate to markets and competitors. We have in an earlier blog covered some of the key tools for social monitoring. However here are some further reports and information that may be useful:

• Media Monitoring: The Complete Guide (pdf)


• The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 (pdf)


• Generations 2010 from (Pew Internet) pdf

Why benchmark your brand/business? Benchmarking helps you understand your market, competition and provides you with recommendations to differentiate. A good benchmark report will provide strategic options towards developing a competitive advantage. A benchmark report can be used to understand where your customers are, who are key influencers, their interests...It can be the start point for understanding how you are going to measure your business.

4. Identify the opportunity and invest

Choose a project that can deliver some tangible wins. If it is marketing to your customers, then consider that the ultimate goal is to focus on the long term aim is to build a community around the brand and delivering sustainable value. This means tactically building on each promotional campaign to develop the brand community rather than disposing of customer data and assets each time. This then engages customers in each stage of the brand journey.

A critical part at this is to set the goals, objectives and review the measures that you are going to use. We dealt with the ROI measures that can be used in an earlier blog.

5. Content, Quality and Engagement

Content is the reason your customers come to you, the reason they will connect emotionally with your organisation or brand. However, in todays digitally diverse world many organisations under estimate the time, effort and cost of good quality content. The content strategy is vital and should be thought of early. Multi channel communications must have consistency to reinforce each other and produce a unfiying customer engagement.

Managing and producing content is becoming increasingly difficult due to the technical skills required.

Key tips

• Know Your Voice - Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand


• Time Your Content - Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to pproduce and when you’re going to publish


• Add value - Know your Customer. Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something; understand this track it keep it fresh.


• Solve Problems - Humans have survived for so long because they’re great at answering questions. Work collaboratively with your brand community to solve their problems, help with their interests...


• Be True - Good content isn’t fake. It doesn’t make promises that it can’t keep. It’s human and honest and that is why it makes a human connection with its audience.

As with any business the more time and energy that is spent at the planning stage improves upon the execution. It is about being great, delivering to high standard and implementing well and a good strategy determines much of this.

Be Agile

In today's changing world organisations need to adapt continually. The days of annual long range plans are gone. Scanning the environment, brnging on board intelligence and then adapting plans are vital to success. So set the goal of becoming agile and adapting to stay ahead.

Social media and agile leadership

View more presentations from TribalCafe.

Quora - Research or Traffic? + resource of all Q& A Sites

Why use a Question and Answer Site?

Question and answers sites are not new. Yahoo answers has been around since 2005 and Yahoo! Answers staff claim 200 million users worldwide and 15 million users visiting daily; pretty impressive. So why do we need more Q & A sites?

To get an idea of the popularity of these sites and the number of questions have a look at this link here which has lots of many interesting numbers.

Well it seems people like to share with others what they know and some people like to learn by reading the questions and answers; which makes it a social exchange. Sometimes people are not able to find the exactly the right information that want using search engines, particularly for complex questions.

A Look at Quora

Quora





Much of the initial seeding and following of Quora came from the Tech sector which is in part the reason for its stellar propulsion into the media. Quora has a simple user interface and these in providing information on similar questions aims to reduce repetition, thus creating a more Wikipedia-style library of questions/answers.

Key points:

• content indexed by Google


• rapidly growing database of questions and answers


• system reduces replication by merging questions


• collaborative and open - with integration of Twitter and Facebook


• people can write their own answers as weel as pose the question


• Organised by topic

In Quora - what features would make it better by Andrew Cooke

We think it is early days yet for Quora and they will add more features and functionality as they gain more momentum.

What makes social Q & A different

Social Question and Sites work slightly differently to just a simple search engine question e.g. using Google. The common features amongst social Q & A sites are that people can view responses to questions, comment and reply as well as see who has made those comments.

Many sites have use incentives e.g. Mahalo Answers and Yahoo Answers. But it is the openess and connectivity and how they integrate with Facebook and Twitter that defines the social element within sites such as Quora . These sites thrive based on people's natural social and inquisitive nature.

How will businesses and brands use Q & A sites like Quora?

These are the main opportunities to explore and review:

Customer Service/PR

• Brands will need to monitor these sites and ensure accuracy of information about brands/products/services so that brand reputation is maintained. However, Brands will always need to monitor the broader social networks (as well as have dedictaed support channels)  to understand customer service issues . Q&A sites (particulalry those that have high visibility) do need to be monitored and moderated closely.

Customer/Competitor Research

• Deep Research - These sites are not good for any deep level of research. Whilst you may have masses of followers single questions rarely are sufficient to fulfil any serious research need. Surveys are much better for this (see online survey tools below).


• Light research - these tools are excellent for competitor listening and brand monitoring. Of course this does depend on your industry and the user base of the Q & A site you choose. But following people in your industry whether they are experts or competitors may provide some useful insights.

Customer engagement

• Brands can use sites like Quora to invite people to participate with them and to be seen to value their opinions. By asking questions about likes, passions, interests brands can gain some insights much in the same way they would use a focus group. The possibilities are vast. But brands need to be cautious that they don't set false expectations with people and don't create user fatique by asking too many questions. For engagement the answer is in the question.

Mashable details some more ways to use Quora that worth exploring and could be replicated across other Q & A sites.

Some thoughts on the future - Knowledge is Power but is it Democratised

Knowledge has up until recently had a high price. But as technology has facilitated crowd sourcing, sites like wikipedia, slideshare, docstoc... the ability to gain knowledge, aggregate and share it has made knowledge more univerally accessible and lowered the cost of knowledge.

The level of participation from people is incredible and this for the most part is done for free. There are sites that use rewards and money as incentives but there are more than do not (the quality argument comes in here).

Collectively gathering this knowledge is one thing, but accessing it and mining it are another. Perhaps this is the future possibility that many of these platforms have as an ultimate goal; the deliver to customers of a personal service through intelligent agents at the moment in time when needed. Artificial Intelligence has made swift progress in recent years - see these:

• Man vs. Computer


• Startup Turns Artificial Intelligence into Serendipity Engine for Mobile


• Google's Artificial Intelligence Translates Poetry


• AI may soon become reality: Penrose

Further, if as studies suggest, companies spend $8 billion per year on consumer research. But we are all contributing more data and sharing our personal information each day through Facebook's open graph, Twitter....combine these attitudes, opinions....and together you have the new 'oil' that is data.

SMB's and Enterprise

We have detailed the main generalist sites but we thought we would also add two other parts. Firstly there's a Q&A site called Focus.com that is intended specifically for SMBs.

Secondly if we pick up on the idea of knowledge management and routing questions to the right people there are two internal enterprise solutions worth looking at.

Opzi

Opzi is an internal Q&A site. It uses a Yammer-like model: users sign-up with their company e-mail address and then they can ask and answer questions specific to their company.

MindQuilt

MindQuilt promotes itself as a knowledge base focused on routing questions to the appropriate person.

The main Q & A sites and a full list of others

Yahoo Answers



Yahoo answers is large Q&A and second to Answers.com for numbers of users.

Key points:

• reward system for participating; levels and points (gaming)


• asking questions costs (5 pts)


• users can vote (thumbs up) to the quality of your answer


• well populated knowledge base


• easy user interface and indexed on Google


• Social sharing is limited e.g. Delicious bookmarking

Mahalo Answers



Mahalo offers the ability for those who seek answers to give tips to the best response. Integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Open ID and Linkedin.

There are different karate belt levels depending on how many points you’ve earned and your belt color determines how frequently you can post or ask questions; which leads to money.

Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google.

Linkedin Answers



LinkedIn Answers is a service similar, in essence, to Google Answers or Yahoo Answers. LinkedIn is quite different to many of the social networking sites online. It is positively geared towards businesses and business members. Since peoples profiles are linked to the question and answer you can judge how well qualified the response. It is a great tool for exploring opinions and thought within the business community. Limited capability to share.

Answers.com



Answers.com delivers responses from users as well as quality information from reference sites such as like Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary.

Answers.com provides a number of videos to help with using it. Using Twitter and Answer.com - Answers.com Starts Answering Questions On Twitter

Formspring




Formspring.me is a question and answer social networking site which allows users to ask questions on a variety of topics. The site has social networking features such as friends, following and messaging. Questions are considered to be messages on the site and users can find their friends by searching the Formspring.me site, via email address, or with Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions lets Facebook users ask their friends, or Facebook users at large, questions on any subject. These questions can be tagged to fit into various categories and written up just like any other update from the top of Facebook profile pages.

Following the trend of making Facebook pages more public, question pages are seen by anyone on the service. Facebook is encouraging users who want to ask private questions to use Facebook's private messaging system instead. This has the possibility to trounce any competitor site and be a serious distractor for other players Quora.

Answerbag

Answerbag is also another user-powered Q&A community. Questions and Answers are listed in different categories while you can rate up and down any of the answer depending on its accuracy.

Fluther



Twitter announced that it has acquired software company Fluther in December of last year. Fluther describes itself as a "free Q&A collective that specializes in getting fast answers from the right people." .This is a recognition of Twitters need to expand its platform capabilities and range of services.

Others

• Yedda


• Lycos IQ


• Trulia Voices


• Minti Questions and Answers


• Rediff QnA


• Grupthink


• Dizzay


• KnowBrainers


• The Answer Bank


• AllExperts


• Able2Know


• AskMe Helpdesk


• What Should I Say?


• Simply Explained


• Ask a Librarian


• Askeet!


• Rediff Q&A


• Fluther

How you can use Q & A sites

There is a high level of interest in Q&A sites and inparticular Quora. What does mean; well simply put it is about traffic and eyeballs. If you have a question that stands out and has a high following/response rate then the probability it will transfer into traffic to your website or other social networks.

Why you should use them

From a  business perspective (and it depends on your business) these sites can be used as light research tools, but some are better than others. You need to consider what your objective, who you want to reply and what you are trying to find out - what is the question e.g. research on Facebook answers and Linkedin answers provides you with very different audiences.

Getting to know your market/customers - Focused Research

If you want to conduct some more in depth research with customers use a survey detailed below is a list of sites.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey offers a popular online hosted survey tool that works well for basic surveys. They offer a free version and a Pro version - at about $20/month or $200/ year.

Zoomerang

Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but offers in general a somewhat more powerful package for somewhat more money. Like SurveyMonkey, they offer a very limited free package; the more useful advanced package is offered to nonprofits for $350 per year for unlimited surveys, questions and respondents.

SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo offers a low cost solution with some advanced features. The free version supports 250 responses per month; they also have a range of more advanced packages from $20/month to $160/month.

PollDaddy

PollDaddy offers surveys surveys and polls that can be easily embedded into external websites and applications. They offer the ubiquitous free package, with a maximum of 10 questions and 100 survey responses per survey. More advanced versions cost between $20/month and $100 /month.

How are you using Question and Answers sites?

Survey sites

Social Business and Strategy Thoughts

What is a Social Business Strategy?

A strategy is quite simply it is the long term plan on what to do to achieve a goal.

A good strategy defines a very clear route on what an organisation is looking to achieve and answers the question on how it will do this. A social business strategy then is focused on how an organisation is to integrate social technologies to help it achieve its goals. There are two areas of opportunity for an organisation; to improve performance and productivity internally and to improve customer engagement externally.

To make some decisions then about a social business strategy organisations have to think about how the context of these within their business and the fit to their customers. Before deploying resources (people, money...) some key questions need to be answered...e.g.  how will these technologies affect our business model, what new models will evolve...

How do we develop a social business strategy?

If you understand your business goals then aligning a social business strategy to your goals becomes easier. For most organisations the primary need is to effectively integrate social technologies into marketing to their customers. But targeting how you are going to do this requires some research. Why? well there are a host of reasons here are a few:

• You need to differentiate your product/service and have a unique proposition/strategy compared to your competitors


• Because the more you understand your customers the better chance you have of finding unique ways to interact with them, engage them and add value to your communication.
  
  
  
  • The aim is to understand who your customers are, where they are and what they are interested in, what problems they face, what behaviours they exhibit, what they think about your type of products/services...
  
  
  
  


• The best marketing insights come from research and then provide unique ways for genuine customer engagement


• If you know your market better than your competition chances are you will have a competitive edge; be able to change faster and adapt.


• If you understand your current position ve. competitive brand you will have a benchmark point from which to improve and understand how to set a strategy tht creates a tangible point of difference.

Where to start?

This all depends on the size of your oganisation, structure, culture...but an initial opportunity is to identify what is being said about your brand/business/product or service on the network. Many tools exist from simlple to more complex.



Our Blog on Social Media Monioring Tools covers many of the main free and paid for tools that you might use. But in order to start with you need to set yourself some objectives for what you are going to listena for and research.

• Define an Objective


• Decide where to monitor


• Decide what to monitor


• Match your requirements to the right technology (social monitoring tool)

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.



Many organisations have now got beyond the question of the need to apply social technologies and now need to answer the questions of how to integrate these. In moving to a social business they recognise that they do not have the skills. Importantly the questions that they need to strategically answer and the research needed sit outside their scope and so they need to partner with an agency.

For others that have already tested solutions scale and integration become critical; but scale often means setting a strategy to migrate from legacy systems. However, the strategy needs to be set for initially integrating solutions into CRM, marketing and sales solutions for marketing, customer service and sales.

Some of the challenges facing organisations today are how to :

• Integrate solutions in the enterprise space for CRM


• Building internal capabilities and teams (training, education and recruitment)


• Work across divisions and departments to develop projects - traditionally it is marketing that has led social media strategy but now internal communications, PR, customer service... need to be involved.


• Develop business model/stakeholder by-in and ROI


• Develop clear marketing strategy including integration into website - see below (click to enlarge).

What do you think the big challenges are now?

How well are organisations researching and setting their strategies?

The Top 20+ Social Media Monitoring Tools

Why use Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social media monitoring tools enable organisations to listen to the many  conversations that people have online. With the explosion of social media channels and the volume of conversations from Facebook to Twiter means that there is a lot of data.

the reason that many organisations want to understand these conversations is because people are discussing brands, describing their attitudes and feelings about them, as well as their intention to possibly buy. In many cases as well though brands are also facing into the fact that these social channels are now also where customers are complaining and so a new customer service channel has opened up whereupon brands now listen and address issues customers might have.

The opportunity for organisations is straight forward they need to be listening to and part of these conversations to develop customer relationships and to manage reputation. They can now listen-in on the conversations of their customers, potential customers and other stakeholders in a way that was previously impossible. By using social media monitoring it is possible to develop insights from the conversations people are having online every day and to make improvements to products, customer service and marketing as a result.

With the social media monitoring tools organisations can effectively  measure the impact of their marketing and so develop key metrics to measure performance of social media campaigns. With have gathered together some information on social media monitoring tools for you no matter what your need.

Some of the benefits of social media monitoring:

• Research key influencers and groups by chanenl and community enabling deep and different behavourial understanding


• Customer service teams can listen out for customer issues online and then and resolve them; especially when integrated through API's into their CRM systems


• Understand competitors marketing and key influencers. This means that marketing departments can find out what customers are saying about competitors’ products.


• PR Managers can quickly respond to reputational issues, potential PR disasters before cause any long term damage or spread across the social network.


• But fundamentally it also allows organisations to understand the epp and flow of interests and topics that are relevant to their customers. This then can lead to innovative ideas for developing new products and services.

But first we will exaplin a bit about the terminology that sits around the social media monitoring.

Terminology

There are few terms you’ll need to be familiar with before we talk about the tools, so let’s take a moment to cover them before we jump into the details.

Influence

If you find there are customers who have a strong opinion of your brand, it’s important to understand the influence of those customers.

• How many followers do they have?


• Do they get retweets?


• How many external links point to their blog?


• How many comments do their blog posts attract?

Several of the free tools listed below include this measurement to assist in your monitoring and response efforts. All of the paid options include it.

Sentiment

Are the comments positive or negative? Most current tools attempt to assign sentiment to a post automatically. While this is helpful for brands with tons of mentions, it’s only about 70% accurate in most cases, so manual verification and spot-checking is encouraged across the board before making any decisions based on influence data.

Volume

This is simply the amount of "buzz" that exists. Many monitoring tools give the ability to chart volume for specific keywords over time. This gives you a great way to measure the impact of your marketing efforts and social media campaigns, especially when combined with sentiment. A lot can be learned about your brand and your customers by investigating spikes in social media volumes.

Workflow

Workflow is the process of assigning, tracking and responding to social media, typically in a team environment. An effective workflow can prevent double responses and missed opportunities.

Now that we have an understanding of the purpose and the terminology surrounding social media monitoring, let’s take a look at some tools that can help you monitor your presence.

We have listed below the main Social Monioring Tools

DEEP ANALYSIS TOOLS

Radian6

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.

Radian6 features an Engagement console that lets you listen, engage, and plan in one handy desktop application. Monitor the performance of all your brands, services, and keywords across every social network platform simultaneously. This is the powerful solution that will propel your business to the next level. For example, radian6 does not limit itself to the major social media platforms: it extends performance searching to include blogs, forums, photo and video sites, comments, and millions of other sites on the Web. radian6 aggregates data from all across the Internet, filters and segments it, and reports and charts it for you based on a host of user definable and selectable metrics.

Alterian SM2

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.

With marketing agencies in mind when SM2 was designed, you get relevant performance data from social media platforms that helps you make the most out of your marketing time and money. Find out who’s happy and who’s mad about you, your company, and your products. Gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing and use the information to design your next campaign. Special features of SM2 include a custom workflow tool, language and geographic filters, as well real time alerts. Try the free version or pay by the volume of results.

Lithium

Cost: Base plan of $249/month for five users and five searches. Free 14-day trial.

Lithium 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

Attensity360

Cost: $399/month for one license. Discounts for longer subscriptions. Free 15-day trial

Attensity360 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.

MODERATE TO LIGHT TOOLS

Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

Backtype
BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so you can find out what people are saying about the topics that interest you.

Blogpulse Trend Search
Create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others. Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.

Blogpulse Conversation Tracker
When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. From those seeds sprout links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

Boardreader
BoardReader can be used to find and information on the forums and message boards. Boardreader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously.

BoardTracker
A search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with





Google Blog Search
Blog Search will help users to explore the blogging universe more effectively. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. You can select the time frame for the posts and set up alerts.

Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It also predicts the future for one year.

Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool gives you insight into interest levels of different topics. It also suggest alternative words and phrases that might be tied to your filed of interest. You can segment results by location or language.

Google Trends
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

GraphEdge
GraphEdge helps you make sense of the Twitter. How many of your followers you’re really reaching? How quickly your network is growing? Who’s dumping you? Who your most influential followers are, and how to reach them?

HowSociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites.

Icerocket
Trend Tool, enter up to five items to see mentions trended over time. Search feature finds blogs that mantion the phrases you enter.

Klout
Klout measures influence on topics in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers on given topic.

Monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

Omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

Quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

Retweetist
Find out who is retweeting you or other Twitter users. Discovering trends, popular topics and popular people by tracking retweets across Twitter.

Samepoint
Samepoint crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Our categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google.

Surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Search
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site.

Topsy
When you search on Topsy it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. The results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Results are ranked based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.

Trackur
14 day trial. Trackur is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Trendrr
Trendrr allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources. Free for 10 trends

Trendpedia
Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics and organizes the articles in a trend-line that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trend-line from three months ago up to today.



Tweet Scan
Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Status.net-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, and JSON.

TweetVolume
Enter words and phrases to find out how often they appear in tweets. Compare up to five different keywords.

Twitalyzer
There are a variety of uses for the Twitalyzer, but most people use it to track their use of Twitter over time, benchmarking themselves against other Twitter users, and helping to determine which social media strategies are working (and which are not.)

Twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

TwitterCounter
Track your Twitter follower count up to three months into past. Compare your numbers with other Twitter users. You can also see statistics of whom you are following and your tweet frequency.

Twitter Grader
Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search
Searching Twitter gives you insight into what’s hot at the moment and helps you find who is tweeting about the topics you are interested in. Advanced search lets you specify dates, languages, people and even attitudes.

Twitter StreamGraphs
The Twitter StreamGraphs is a content visualization tool to let you create StreamGraphs from the latest tweets containing a given word or from a particular user.

Twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL.

Twendz
Twendz gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.



Usernamecheck
Does wht it says. Check your user name across 68 social networking sites.

What’s the Buzz?
Type in a keyword below and find the buzz about it in blogs and social bookmarks. It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days and the Google Trends chart for the keyword. It finds blog posts tagged with and containing the keyword. It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

YackTrack
Enter what you want to see comments for and f there are comments on any of our supported services, you should see them.