Overview of monitoring solutions in 2014

Since  the study on monitoring tools  that we carried out in 2011, the panorama of online monitoring solutions has changed a lot. Their use has become more democratized and companies are now very aware of the volume of online conversation that they must monitor. We went from being afraid of online conversations to wanting to take part in them . It is therefore absolutely necessary to automate the processes.

But how do you find the perfect solution? The offer has exploded and there are currently more than 500 monitoring solutions on the market. In this 2014 edition, we have therefore chosen to analyze free solutions as well as paid solutions and “luxury” solutions. The objective is to help you better understand why and especially when to pay.

The issue is no longer in the collection of data . Free solutions like Alerti are very good at fetching a large amount of relevant data. The challenge now lies in the analysis of the data , in the power of the analysis that the tool will provide. We no longer just want to understand what is being said at a specific moment, we want to go further: understand what our potential customers want, predict the success of a future campaign, etc.   

Here are some ideas for the tools of the future:

• We no longer just want to identify the content, we want to understand the context of the content
• Keywords can no longer be the only search criteria, we must go further: search by similar user, search by similar conversations, search by similar url…
• The notion of range is still very vague and calculations are still often done by hand. A way will have to be found to standardize measurements to provide relevant data
• Finally, data must be integrated into the daily life of marketers: it is no longer just a tool used to produce monthly reports, it becomes a gold mine for adapting communications in real time.

Highlights of the report:

• A total of twelve monitoring solutions have been selected to suit all needs and types of business: three free ( Mention , Social Mention and Topsy ), three at less than $150 per month ( Tracker , Alerti and PeopleBrowsr ) and six at more than $400 per month for medium, large companies and agencies ( Semeon , Agility PR Solutions , Engagor , SDL SM2 , Simply Measured and Radian6 ).            
• Among the free tools, Mention is the one that stood out by integrating a greater number of features than other tools in its category. Regarding low-cost tools, Alerti has surpassed the competition thanks to the quality of its data collection and the multiple possibilities of interpreting them. Finally, in the category of great players, Engagor won the evaluation thanks to the performance of the feature set and its user-friendliness.
• In terms of quantitative data, Simply Measured is able to fetch the highest amount of mentions, compared to its competitors. Two of the tools analyzed only take into account mentions in four languages ​​or less. When it comes to tone analysis, no solution shows outstanding results. All oscillate between a general accuracy of 62% to 71%. Generally, negative mentions are more difficult for an automated tool to identify correctly. Tonality analysis therefore remains an important issue in 2014.