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):
- Andiamo Systems (14 days)
- Attentio (7 days)
- Crawdad Technologies (30 days)
- CustomScoop (14 days)
- CyberAlert (14 days)
- Distilled (1 month)
- Sentiment Metrics (14 days)
- StrategyEye
- Trackur (14 days)
If you already have a budget and need to explore your options, the Guide to Social Media Analysis is for you. The new version, with around 60 company profiles, will be available around the end of June. If you buy the first edition now, you'll automatically receive the update as soon as it's available.
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 (4)
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