Evaluating Buzz Monitoring Tools - Suggestions?
My team is currently in the process of evaluating buzz monitoring software to get a better grasp on Jive, its competitors, and the enterprise software industry in general. When I say "buzz monitoring," I mean a tool that tracks blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news sites, and other online communities for specific keywords, and helps aggregate and analyze that data to determine trends, supporters, product feedback, etc. I'm hoping some other folks out there may have feedback for Justin and I?
Right now, here is an initial list of products being reviewed:
- BuzzLogic - we were also evaluating this when I was at Anvil Media
- BuzzMetrics - BrandPulse/BlogPulse (by Nielsen)
- BuzzPerception (by CustomScoop)
- Orchestra (by Cymphony)
- Radian6 - thanks to @davidalston, @RichardMcinnis, and @lebrun on Twitter
- SEER (by VML)
- TruCast (by VisibleTechnologies)
- Umbria
The basic requirements are as follows:
Track/Monitor
- Track social media by site and by source (some bloggers post on multiple sites)
- Allow for both branded search ("Jive"), competitors, and general industry terms ("collaboration software")
- Including advanced search operators (and, or, not) to filter noise
- Weighting/ranking of posts -- some are high impact (ZDNet) some are low impact (personal blogs)
Analyze
- Allow for trend analysis
- Data import/export to integrate with Google Analytics, Eloqua, and SalesForce traffic & lead data
- Record tone of post (positive, neutral, negative)
- Record meme of post
- Record product discussed in post (Clearspace, Clearspace X, Openfire, etc.)
- Allow for human intervention in automated processes
- Weighting
- Tone
- Meme
React/Participate
- Tools for getting involved in external conversations
- Track replies to comments
- Track offline/back-channel communication (a.k.a. CRM when conversation ends up on email)
- Depending on the CRM capabilities of the tool, we might also consider integration with SalesForce.com to manage blogger relationships
Does anyone have experience with these products and services? Any recommendations? For example, Jason Falls has a great video over on his blog about his visit with Radian6.

