“The ability to filter in/out or cluster conversations based on the relevancy of channels, sites, influencers, communities is indeed important and something that social media monitoring tools should definitely provide in one way or another” – that’s what eCairn provides. If you’re interested, I’d love to tell you more.

You can reach me at laurent.pfertzel@ecairn.com if you wish.
Laurent

Thanks for your comment, much appreciated. You are absolutely right that context is important in effectively and efficiently turning social media monitoring results into insightful, actionable, and valuable engagements for companies and brands. Especially if certain topics can mean different things in different communities, markets, geographies, and so on. The ability to filter in/out or cluster conversations based on the relevancy of channels, sites, influencers, communities is indeed important and something that social media monitoring tools should definitely provide in one way or another. However, in our experience, identifying, focusing, and staying on top of the relevant communities is more often that not an ongoing activity that requires both social media monitoring tool intelligence and human involvement.

-Alex

Laurent

Thanks for the voice mail and the comment.

Regarding the blog post, it was not intended as a vis-à-vis comparison, but it always gets interesting when you put down actual numbers. The numbers are from a real-world listening campaign we are running right now for one of our clients and they are accurate to our best effort of being objective and impartial. No hidden agendas really. What we tried to do early on for this client was to see if there were any variations in the results we were seeing from Radian6 vs SM2. Some variations were to be expected obviously, but where do you draw the line? Anyway, it seems Radian6 did provide a broader coverage for this particular case (and search configuration setup) and we might even be able to dig a bit deeper to try to pinpoint what’s reported differently by each tool. Do you have anything specific in mind when you say you would like to look further into the variances? On our side, we should have a few suggestions that may help filter out more noise and improve search effectiveness (at least maybe for this case).

-Alex

Thanks for the note. You are absolutely right that a buying decision involves a number of factors including quantity and quality of results, depth of analysis, availability of more advanced metrics, ease-of-use, flexibility, and, of course, pricing. And probably even more factors depending on the exact needs and goals of the potential user. However, my focus here is more on what types of variations on the quantity and quality of results are to be expected between social media monitoring tools for similarly optimized searches.

Now, you make a great point regarding the relevancy of results. I went ahead and updated the original blog post with a graph that shows the percentage of results that were relevant for our campaign’s scope. Both tools do reasonably well there, except for the one search that is based on an acronym that stands for a number of terms (only one of which is of interest to our campaign). In that search, the noise margins are very high for both tools, especially due to the high number of Twitter posts that provide very little context for keyword filters to effectively work on to exclude non-relevant content. So, although the searches were actually optimized in the same way in both tools, it is the case that more detailed and ongoing optimization is still required in both cases to achieve meaningful numbers.

Maybe what I am trying to say here is that there is no silver lining. Social media monitoring tools (like search engines a few years back) provide us with a new wealth of information (within certain variations from technology to technology that do need to be analyzed to some level) that was previously unavailable. However, turning this information into intelligent and effective decision making still requires human involvement at a strategic and tactical level.

-Alex

Just dropped you a line at the office and left a message on voicemail. I thought I’d let you know here as well in case you see this first. We certainly pride ourselves on providing the broadest coverage in the biz so I’m glad your analysis backed that up. Having great filtering, segmentation and sentiment analysis options go without saying in this industry but what I would really love to know more about is the specific variances as you discovered them if you are up for it. We’re always up for building on what we have.

Here’s my number if you get a chance – 506-444-1905 – and my email is attached to this comment.

Looking forward to connecting and learning more.

Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6

I have been working with Techrigy SM2 for a year, so I’ve talked with many that are considering both solutions. There are some factors to consider when comparing tools.

1. Spam filters will great affect results. Were both searches optimized? Was the content relevant in both tools?
We know that our spam filters are a bit more assertive and because of this we allow users to turn off the spam filter. So my question would be what percentage of content in other tools is irrelevant?

2. How to manage and analyze the search results? SM2 offers the ability to create categories making it possible to analyze across unlimited categories which makes reporting so much easier.

3. What about sentiment, tone and a customizable dictionary?
SM2 offers automatic sentiment and tone. And we have a customizable dictionary that accommodates various verticals.

Techrigy SM2 also allows full historical results back to fall 2007. This offers a huge flexibility in allowing the user to compare the conversations over this past year to the previous year.

Also, in considering pricing there are some differences. Techrigy SM2 is multiple profiles and we don’t charge additional fees for more users.

I’d be happy to show you the category aspects in SM2. Our customers find it quite powerful!

Connie Bensen
Director of Community Strategy
Techrigy / Alterian
@cbensen