Social Media Monitoring
As an Investigator, you must realise that even the Vatican uses social media. Some forms of social media are taking on some of the characteristics of email. This information rich environment is something that Investigators and Researchers must understand. To be effective, one must also understand the tools available to conduct thorough research of the social media content.
One must also be able to create accurate budgets for this type of research. To set-up, optimise, and monitor research feeds that cover multiple social media and news sites can take many hours. These services allow one to monitor the social media space for new data or derogatory content. One particular strength of these services is that they search Blog comments, and can track comments and posts of individual contributors. While these services are aimed at PR agencies, they also offer significant utility for the Investigator, but they can be very expensive tools to use.
Techrigy
Techrigy (pronounced tek-err-jee) offers a free account that gets you up to 5 Search Words/Phrases, and store up to 1000 results. This is a great way to learn how to use the system.
Radian6
Unfortunately Radian6 is expensive — you pay just to have it in your toolbox, and then pay more for each social media research project you undertake. These costs must be understood at the outset and budgeted into the costs of the Investigation.
Filtrbox
Unfortunately, at Filtrbox their annual fee for individuals appears to be $1,000USD.
Backtype
Backtype lets you search comments that mention a brand, company, or topic, but it also lets you search comments left by a particular person.
Attaain
AttaainCI costs $150 per month for unlimited searching and monitoring. It’s less sophisticated than Radian 6 and Filtrbox which rate Blog comments from positive to negative. This is aimed at the Competitive Intelligence professional rather than the PR agency.
Hi Richard,
Our firm RepuMetrix Inc. offers best of class online reputation and social media monitoring at a fixed price. More importantly, we are one of the few paid service vendors that include human review in all our tiers of service.
If you or any of your visitors want to find out more about our pricing and how each tier of service differs, visit the main page of our RepuTrack™ site.
Joseph
@RepuTrack
I’ve seen the Radian6 product demonstrated. One of the things that I have a hard time with in regards to services that claim to offer ‘real time’ social media monitoring services is that I often find blog postings or tweets on actual sites that fail to appear in the social media reporting tool’s reports. This leads me to believe that either the tools do not offer ‘real time’ monitoring or that the scope of what the tool is monitoring is less than adequate. For instance, maybe a given tool is looking at blogspot blogs, but doesn’t consider confidentialresource.com in it’s pool of blogs. Regardless, thanks for this posting. There are a couple of tools here that I hadn’t heard of.