I’ve been asked a few times about my media/social media monitoring and have shared some stuff, so thought I’d just post it here!
I use a suite of free tools to do our mainstream and social media monitoring tools.
That being said, I’ve looked into a few services (they all give excellent demos and free trial periods, supported, which is great) and charitable pricing (usually a 50% discount!).
We looked at 3 services:
Sysomos http://www.sysomos.com/
Radian6 http://www.radian6.com/
Digitalhug http://www.digitalhug.com/
Radian6 definitely has a weaker user interface, but lots of training videos and good support. The others have more intuitive interfaces.
In the end we didn’t go with any of them as, for our needs, we’re getting what we need from free tools at this point, although I can see us moving to one of them in the long-term, as our needs get more sophisticated and we run more campaigns that we want to measure.
I would say that you it’s worth checking out these 3 for sure (heck they’re Canadian! Well, Radian6 was bought by Salesforce, and Sysomos was bought by someone, but Canadian startups yay!) – they’ll give a live walk through (usually a webinar) and then demo account to play with it. Create a list of criteria you need the system to do for you and then play with them at the same time, rating how they do based on what you need.
The best general and unbiased reviews of monitoring services I’ve seen come from a group in the UK called Fresh Networks. Check out their stuff:
Social media monitoring review 2010 – download the final report
http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2010/06/social-media-monitoring-review-download-the-final-report/
They compared Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos.
Tead also related blog postshttp://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/category/series/social-media-monitoring-2010-review/
Some additional useful reading for you:
http://davefleet.com/2009/11/review-sysomos-social-media-monitoring-tool
Radian6
http://davefleet.com/2009/03/reviewing-radian6-features/
You won’t find digital hug reviews, they’re kind of hidden company (strangely), but their tool rocks.