There's a difference between "we don't have any money" and "we don't have a budget for that (yet)." The usual advice about monitoring social media for comments about your company ends with pointers to free tools and a few of the commercial options. But if you're a manager trying to make the case that your company should listen to social media, these free services from social media analysis vendors will help you justify the budget to keep going.
Free tools from social media analysis companies:
Commercial tools with free trials (length of trial):
- Attentio (7 days)
- BuzzGain (15 days)
- Crawdad Technologies (30 days)
- CustomScoop (14 days)
- CyberAlert (14 days)
- Dialogix (7 days)
- Distilled (1 month)
- eCairn (1 month)
- Lexalytics
- MightyBrand (14 days)
- Scout Labs (30 days)
- Sentiment Metrics (14 days)
- StrategyEye
- Trackur (14 days)
- VibeMetrix (14 days)
If you already have a budget and need to explore your options, the Guide to Social Media Analysis is for you. The second edition features profiles of 63 vendors, along with an overview of the market and tables to help find specific capabilities.
I went through everybody's web sites, but I might have missed some. Mention yours in the comments if I did, and I'll add it to the list.
Comments (8)
Hi Nathan,
Yes, companies can start by using the free tools for monitoring their brand, products and competitors in social media such as:
- google blog search
- Native searches in major video sites like Youtube, etc.
- Twitter searches like terraminds or summize, etc.
This quickly brings to light some of the benefits of the commercial tools as they begin to experience the benefits of monitoring & engaging online. They can get a sense for how time consuming it can be to do this manually. By doing it this way, they can track how many hours they are putting into the manual aspects (cutting & pasting, searching different sites, searching all the brands/keywords, integrating data into reports, doing analysis, etc.). This helps significantly with a business case.
By the way, Radian6 does offer free trials (typically 7 days).
Marcel
CEO, Radian6
Posted by Marcel LeBrun | May 15, 2008 2:55 PM
Nathan,
I couldn't agree more. We actively encourage people to compare SentimentMetrics to other services and free tools.
In fact this is the best way for them to see for themselves how advantageous it is to use a commercial offering. Both in terms of analytical capabilities and time saving.
Leon Chaddock
CEO
Sentiment Metrics
PS. Did you get my email on the recent functionality we have released? One item in particular we discussed on the phone a while back.
Posted by Leon Chaddock | May 15, 2008 3:54 PM
Our Freemium account has no time constraint and is a full-featured intro to our premium 'commercial' accounts- anyone can sign up...try it!
Posted by Martin Edic | May 15, 2008 4:17 PM
Please add trendrr.com to the list - open source tracking and graphing. - Thanks M
http://Trendrr.com
Posted by Mark | May 16, 2008 8:30 AM
If you are interested in spanish media monitoring I recommend you our services.
http://imente.com/index_eng.html
Thanks!!
Posted by Quim | August 7, 2008 3:52 AM
Our free version is fully functional and has no expiration date. You are limited to five keyword phrases and 1000 total results, however you can clear a search and enter a new one. Anyone can sign up at http://sm2.techrigy.com
For more info come to our webinar next week:
http://tr.im/sm2web
Posted by Martin Edic | December 10, 2008 2:47 PM
do anybody hear about buzzmonitor an opensource project develop for the worldbank: http://buzzm.worldbank.org/download
?
Posted by acti | March 4, 2009 12:13 PM
Yes, and that's a good point. If you really have no budget—but do have the required technical capabilities—you should consider the BuzzMonitor, which I wrote about following its 2007 release.
Posted by Nathan Gilliatt
|
March 4, 2009 12:23 PM