The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics

In Brian Solis' latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers, he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.

If you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008. Of course I recognise we've reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I'm tracking. And wow is this market exploding.

(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled "Listening + Conversation Management Systems".)

If you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch. Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt.

_____________________

Each and every vendor here is invited to contribute to or collaborate on the Influence Scorecard initiative... please get in touch if this is of interest to you, whether or not you are listed here, whether or not you are into Social Web Analytics, Business Performance Management, Reputation Management, or Competitiveness.

_____________________

Social Web Analytics is often referred to as Social Media Analytics, but I believe there's a difference. Social Media is just one aspect of the Social Web, as explained in my post here.

11 Comments

Add yours →

Anonymous says:

Hi Phil

Thanks for your posting on all the Social Web Analytics companies. We appreciate you including BuzzNumbers in your list.

It's also great to see such a great set of vendors out there.

In my opinion most of the products and vendors out there solve either different problems, or a similar problem in quite a different way. This provides great variety although sometimes a difficult choice for social web analytics customers.

Challenges for vendors and customers evaluating the solutions out there include:

- Coverage (Are all Websites, News, Blogs, social media, video, websites, forums covered?)

- Delivery Speed (How long does it take to deliver new information to customers from posting time? Minutes? Hours? Days?)

- Network Analysis (How messages spread between nodes in the social web?)

- Influence Measurement (How are mentions measured for influence? What methodology is in use?)

- User Analysis (How to identify single influencers across multiple websites/forums/blogs/twitter/youtube etc)

- Integration (Are API's supported? What about RSS or CSV Exports?)

- Sentiment Analysis (How accurately are conversations analyzed? Human language is very complex, especially sarcasm and other cultural expressions)

- Country Analysis (How accurately are conversations grouped by country?)

- Reporting Features (How easy is it to generate and export data from the system?)

- Data Ownership (Do you own the data in the system or does the vendor? What can your data be used for, eg Market analysis or Vendor PR? )

Its great to see some really innovative solutions to these problems coming from the market right now.

A wiser man than myself once said, "a rising tide lifts all boats".

Happy to discuss further if you would like to contact us.

Regards

Nick Holmes a Court
CEO, BuzzNumbers
Twitter @nickhac
Web: http://www.BuzzNumbersHQ.com

30 June 2009 — 2:59 pm

Reply
Philip Sheldrake says:

Thanks Nick. I covered these off in my ebook for sure, except perhaps data ownership if I recall correctly. Good one. Particularly with the anachronistic Newspaper Licensing Agency's recent announcement that they want to charge organisations for, effectively, a screengrab! Crazy people. Which century are they living in?

30 June 2009 — 3:16 pm

Reply
Anonymous says:

I definitely want to be part of the Influence Scorecard and would like to come to the gather in NYC later this fall (I live in NYC, anyway).

Marshall

3 July 2009 — 5:39 pm

Reply
Michael Troiano (@miketrap) says:

Please check out Crimson Hexagon, I think you'll find it unique in the field.

More about the patterns than the dots, details here: http://crimsonheagon.com

11 July 2009 — 12:06 am

Reply
Philip Sheldrake says:

Thanks Michael. I hadn't come across Crimson Hexagon before, so apologies for the omission. I've just watched your demo video and it looks like you claim market leading semantic analysis capability. Care to share the basis of that analysis approach?

I've added Crimson Hexagon to the list here.

Best regards.

11 July 2009 — 9:19 am

Reply
Michael Troiano (@miketrap) says:

Sure... We've been very open about our enabling science, which is derived from work at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard. The paper is here (.pdf): http://gking.harvard.edu/files/words.pdf

16 July 2009 — 9:49 pm

Reply
Laurel Earhart says:

Hello! I'd like to add http://www.SentiMetrix.com to the mix. We analyze 50,000 social and traditional media sources and have a free tool that allows the user to compare up to five brands, companies, people, etc. Give us a try!

7 January 2010 — 8:05 pm

Reply
Philip Sheldrake says:

Thanks for getting in touch Laurel, and SentiMetrix duly added to the list... http://www.sentimetrix.com

I've also found my way over to http://oasys.umiacs.umd.edu/oasys/references.html to understand how your system tries to interpret sentiment.

Best, Philip.

7 January 2010 — 8:24 pm

Reply
Alison says:

Hi Phil - There are large enterprises and agencies using Social Radar (http://www.infegy.com/socialradar.php) for social web analytics. Let me know if youâ€™d like to see a Social Radar demo and testimonials - Alison (a) infegy.com

15 March 2010 — 1:48 pm

Reply
Medicare OutSourcing says:

We'd like to implement a web analytics solution that helps us know who all are visiting our website http://www.sunknowledge.com to the extent that we are able to contact them. Any ideas on the web analytics solution that we should implement?

28 June 2010 — 4:04 pm

Reply
Philip Sheldrake says:

Dear Medicare Outsourcing,

I think you may be confusing Social Web Analytics for Web Analytics. The latter refers to a system or service that monitors your web server and translates log data into informational format for your analysis of key website performance metrics such as bounce rate, dwell time etc.

If you need help in this regard, I recommend consulting with Marshall Sponder: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/work-with-me/

Best regards.

28 June 2010 — 4:13 pm

Reply