Radian6 is the clear market leader when you look at the feature set of all the tools. I'm in the process of purchasing a tool and found that most lack key features such as deep reporting, routing, and managing volume.
EricaMcClenny, Always looking for cool new tools to help businesses grow and build value with consumers. My personal challenge is to smush the spam machines!
Moloko, are you looking for multiple location management or one brand/company initiative?
Moloko
It is for my company and they really help manage all aspects and well as great reporting. The key that puts them above most is the workflow built into the service that easily allows for engagement.
EricaMcClenny, Always looking for cool new tools to help businesses grow and build value with consumers. My personal challenge is to smush the spam machines!
I'd be happy to send you some information about our platform. We fit most of what you're looking for but our reporting is on actionable items not just pretty graphs and charts! Our notifications and analysis prompt action. The ease of use is also key if you're wanting engagement from non-tech savvy/marketing savvy departments and employees.
Thanks for keeping this list live - can be difficult to keep up in an ever-growing space with so many emerging companies + technologies. Take a peek at Gloto www.gloto.com (disclaimer: i'm an advisor) > mobile-to-Web platform for brand-safe social engagement and interactive campaign experiences.
Seconded - love that it's a live list, though our (HootSuite) description is a little lacking, eg. we also support Twitter, and in addition to that multiple social assets at one time. Maybe we could connect to discuss?
Jeremiah - Thanks for including @Sprinklr (sprinklr.com) on the list. We are actually extremely focused on scalable conversation management and SoMe optimization for Fortune 2000 type companies. Much more so than listening (I know the website needs to be updated :-)). Please let us know if you'd be interested in a briefing (rthomas at sprinklr dot com) as I don't have your direct contact info. thanks - Ragy PS: Please say hello to Charlene
I like the emphasis on listening that Jeremiah pointed out. Listening - not talking, promoting, measuring, optimizing, yada, is the most_social _aspect of tools like yours.
Mike Lee, An idealistic realist, humanistic technologist & constant student.
I find it interesting that the main focus of these SMMS platforms is to aggregate, publish, and manage, and not so much to offer analytics & reporting. (I thought they offered that, but maybe I heard wrong.)
While it's great to use a single tool for all of my social media needs, a social media marketer would probably love to get reports on useful metrics (conversions, influence, discussions perhaps) - not just for themselves, but for executive presentations, investors, etc. And a tool that is intelligent enough to help minimize the risks you've stated would be even more valuable. Perhaps it could do this by visually encapsulating each social media channel & providing a summary of each community's "personality" and traits.
As an aside, I can see how SMMS platforms are analogous to CMS platforms. CMS platforms allow users to publish and manage their website content. It sounds like SMMS platforms allow users to publish and, to some extent, manage their social media content. (In some cases, they can't edit their social media content though.) Analytics & reporting isn't offered by CMS platforms by default, so with that same mindset, I can understand why SMMS platform developers aren't offering it as well. But I hope someone does. It would be a valuable set of features and could be a great product differentiator.
SeanCunningham27
Check out MessageMakerSocial for analytics and reporting ...
Adding to that, listening capabilities is on top of my list. There are obvious great tools for listening cross platforms such as Radian6 but on the other hand these systems lacks in publishing capabilities.
I'm walking through the list above, but if anyone has already done so please share your views of the tools!
Francesc Gómez Morales, Mashup mind & Analytical heart - Internet for the personal and social change
Hello!!
Congratulations! It's an interesting list, very complete, but I miss Hootsuite. Isn't Hootsuite a right SMMS?
Thank you!
Roger Kondrat, Marketing Director of West17Media - Need online marketing support, strategic planning, campaign planning or website development for your company?
He said he added it but it doesn't look like he followed through.
Interesting - at Optaros we've been talking about a new category/platform of W3CM, a somewhat unwieldy acronym for "Web Community, Content, and Commerce Management" (Web Three C M).
It's increasingly important to have integration between your community platform, your transactional/commerce platform, and your content management platform - all needed for a full view of your customer and their interactions with your brand.
One more addition to this great collection of tools. Sproutsocial that we have in the company been looking at. Have a look at http://sproutsocial.com/
Mediabeast
I am the Co-Founder and former CTO of ThePort Network. For the last year I have had a small team in the Philippines working on what you are calling SMMS. We have a strong listening and publishing component and an email digest similar to NutShellMail. IMHO, the vast majority of small businesses need something simple. If they listen they will discover very few people are actually talking about them. But they have to listen just the same.We have an aggregator to listen to their industry and competitors and to curate content they think appropriate to their audience. We support global publishing to multiple networks and scheduling. What sets us apart is we license a turnkey solution so business with existing client bases can offer SMMS under their own brand making it a potential revenue generator. We believe that it is not in the best longterm strategic interest of most businesses to see a third party offering the solution to their existing client base. Demo can be seen at www.moderationmarketplace.com.
Hootsuite is great but is mainly for twitter. You can post from hootsuite to facebook etc, but for it's listening capabilities it works best with twitter.
Not surprising that all of the comments here are from SMMS companies pushing their wares. You all may find out that real social media can't be controlled and managed at the corporate level. Can Social Media really be managed in this way??? The premise is yes but my guess is that the reality is no. Reminds me of when Push technology was all the rage. Think I'll return in 5 years time to see how may of these posters shilling their wares are still in business. Visited Awareness.Com' customer pagee and linking over to 'sites' I see 60% are either 404 or have dropped the platform. HMMMM...
bostonmike
Alex, we appreciate your comments. I should point out that at the time of your post, the Awarenessnetworks.com PAGE was in the midst of a complete redesign so I apologize if you were not able to locate our customer sites. Please feel free to take a look at the current site and provide any feedback, we welcome your suggestions.
Regarding your assertion that social media can not be controlled at the corporate level – I beg to differ. I think where you are getting confused is a brand’s ability to control what is said about them vs. what they say about themselves. If what you are referring to is the former, we are in agreement. If you mean the latter, I could not disagree more. The messages a brand delivers through social media (again, the corporate messaging) should be controlled and managed. I have not heard of ANY brand that freely says “Publish whatever you want, without guidelines or restrictions”. The implication of this on any public company could be severe to say the least. For more evidence, check out companies like Dell, JetBlue, Zappos, Ford, etc that have been highlighted and awarded for their managed, centralized approach to social media at a corporate level.
The tools listed above, Awareness included, give brands the ability to manage the content they are posting and distributing through the social web. You may not work in a large enterprise, but I assure you this is a major issue for them as content is typically coming from multiple departments and individuals and can lead to a lack of brand consistency and messaging. If you would like to chat about this in more detail, feel free to drop me a line.
Roger Kondrat, Marketing Director of West17Media - Need online marketing support, strategic planning, campaign planning or website development for your company?
Roger Kondrat, Marketing Director of West17Media - Need online marketing support, strategic planning, campaign planning or website development for your company?
Hi Jeremiah. Thanks for adding StrongMail to the list. Can't find us on the list. Can you forward a link to the list where we appear? @strongmail or jsoto@strongmail.com. Cheers!
Social media is one types of Channel maker. As the process to moving a marketer or finder to easier, Also real time change can make more things to do it.
Sprout Social should also be added to the list! It's a great social media tool for small businesses and brands that is easy-to-use and affordable. Can be found at http://sproutsocial.com
Interesting list! Your Articles are very knowledgeable and understandable.
sprecherapp
You can erase Bantamlive from your list. Constant Contact announced yesterday they would kill bantamlive im July and all customerdata. That makes people not going into the cloud with their business data...
At LoudDoor we have developed the first News Feed Optimization Platform for Facebook. If you have 2 minutes the video on our homepage (www.LoudDoor.com) explains what we do and the unique problems we solve.
I'd love to be added to this post. If you want to speak to me personally just drop me a message: jeff AT LoudDoor DOT com.
You should also include Nimble (www.nimble.com) in your list of SMMS. Nimble Connect is free and was recently launched in public beta. Nimble is a SMMS with a CRM system at its heart. Currently it integrates Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pulling everything into one unified inbox. You can also look at the Contact profile and see their social media feed as well as appointments (and with the soon to be released Nimble sales) and sales actions. Well worth a look. In the interests of full disclosure I am a Nimble launch partner.
JosephDowell
Developing a social CRM is a great idea, since internet marketers have lots of social media account to monitor closely, therefore they should be organized. Thanks for sharing!
Jeremiah, I enjoyed your post about the state of social media management systems, and the trend toward vertical solutions. As you said, vendors must "understand business –not just technology, offer services and reliable SLA, and deep integration with other social systems."
Their tool is built for hotel industry, where tight integration with review management is very important.
It will be interesting to watch this space develop over the next 12 months...
janetaronica
Great list! As someone who writes "lists of tools" types of articles all of the time I know you're gonna get bombarded with the "hey whataboutme??" comments :) but I think you highlighted the really high-quality tools in here. Tough to get a comprehensive list and even tougher to acurately "taxonomize" them.
I use TweetDeck and Hootsuite, they have all the features I need. I'm research enterprise software to see what I can do for me, but right now TweetDeck and Hootsuite do the trick.
A year out, this is still a good list, but some things of note have changed.
1. KeenKong never really launched. It re-branded itself as a tool for financial services and then went entirely stealth -- maybe Frederic Guarino (@fredericg) can give some insights into what's going on over there.
2. Unlike many acquired companies, CoTweet has managed to maintain its soul under the ExactTarget acquisition, and by all accounts, it looks poised to make some major moves in the next year.
3. Webtrends acquired Transpond about six months ago and turned it into the Webtrends Apps shop. In the sake of full-disclosure, I'm just coming off a several month contract with Webtrends, but I encourage anyone considering, or currently using, Wildfire to take a look at Webtrends Apps (http://j.mp/eEB8A8). It's a particularly compelling and intuitive product suite.
Just my thoughts....
Shannon E Casey1
As an up and comer in Social Media Strategy, trying to research all the different Social Media Management Platforms has cause me many headaches. I currently use cotweet to manage my brands but what I really want is one universal platform that not only allows me to schedule DIFFERENT tweets and facebook posts (not integrated), but also provides valuable insights that include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Analytics. I've been reading about hootsuite's new updates that feature customized analytics reports and also allows you to share these reports with team members listed on the account. However, I would like to know if this platform allows you to export this data and store it to my hard drive. Also, are there other platforms that have all these features? Or is it more beneficial to have separate platforms for managing and then analytics? I know hootsuite's developments are relatively recent, but if anyone has tested it out I would appreciate your feedback.
Nice post but do check Actionly for Social Media Monitoring that tracks your Social ROI. Plans range from free to $100/mo. We have recently integrated with Google analytics and track your Social Media ROI. Actionly also does Brand tracking across Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube etc and also allow managing multiple Twitter or Facebook accounts from our dashboard. Schedulable reports, Email alerts, Sentiment analysis and many more are included in our featured list. Try us out we do have a FREE account as well. Thx! http://www.actionly.com
Jeremiah, Thanks for this list! Do you think these are really "management systems?" I keep looking at social media tools and see them as awesome tools for OPERATING your social media plan more effectively, but don't see any that help you build strategy around the madness. Do you agree?
EricaMcClenny, Always looking for cool new tools to help businesses grow and build value with consumers. My personal challenge is to smush the spam machines!
Julie, that is a really great point. Management without improvement or optimization gets you no where! Have you looked at Expion? We have several modules that lean towards improving engagement and benchmarking success for future messages.
timbursch, Community, Connections, Social Business and lots of coffee. Manager Social Media Marketing @gagegroup
Great overview of the current platforms. I think we will see more consolidation this year (i.e., Lithium + ScoutLabs) to integrate the solution sets. What do you think about Involver's AMP?
Lithium and Scoutlabs may be a different use case than I'm suggesting here. I need to catch up with the Involver folks, it's really hard to track this space, although I've dedicated my career to it and have a team of researchers.
timbursch, Community, Connections, Social Business and lots of coffee. Manager Social Media Marketing @gagegroup
I see what you're saying about Lithium and ScoutLabs. Not necessarily a full SMMS. My point was more around consolidation...integration of monitoring, management, and analytics. Agree?
Here's another SocialCRM tool that might be of interest. We're using semantic tools to build a structured database of the 1 global users of social media. http://thesocialcv.com
Prasanna
Great post. One more addition to this great collection of tools. Factualz that we have in the company been looking at. It provides excellent and intuitive interface to track all about our brand for a low cost. In addition it is helping us to keep a tab on our competitors too. I would recommend Factualz.Have a look at http://www.factualz.com
Imaginativepro
Jeremiah, Thanks for compiling this great listing of social media management systems. Your blog posts are all excellent.
I feel like this is an area that MSFT CRM could fight back and regain marketshare. There are so many fragmented vendors trying to keep track of brand call outs on social media channels, that no one has dominated this space.
They are using a CRM Social Media Accelerator, that we haven't even been able to get working. http://bit.ly/bD4VAQ
I'm seriously considering SAS and Radian6 for enterprise level management. they both look to have superior listening, team management tools, integration with web analytics, and well-organised response management. am i wrong in this take on them? anyone used them? the campaign test modeling offered by SAS seems pretty slick too...
Swapnil
Thanks for posting this list and keeping it uptodate. I am learning CRM in management school and seriously felt the need of something to do the same with Social Medium. Although I dont find any big brothers in SMMS, I feel that they are to come ...
I'm interested in the crossover between management systems and contact centre systems. My clients want to integrate social media responsiveness into their existing customer care programme, using contact centre agents to pick up and respond to enquiries in social spaces.
They currently manage customer enquiries on the phone and by email using Right Now, who have been developing an integrated listening and response dashboard: http://www.rightnow.com/cx-sui...
I'd be interested to know if anyone has any feedback on this system - and also if if fits into your SMMS classification? Using it would enable the same workflow and measurement to be applied to social media responses as those from traditional channels.
We've also decided to trial Radian 6's engagement console http://www.radian6.com/product... With some bespoke tweaks to the call centre interface this might just cover all the bases.
michellegreer
Where is Jive Software on this list? Jive does social media monitoring a management but also integrates with your intranet. It's too common that the people on the outside cannot communicate what's going on to the people on the inside, which is why it's such a compelling product.
Jive is an enterprise class "Community Platform" or "Collaboration" tool, which is not this class of products. For a full understanding of this space, see the Social Business Stack. http://www.web-strategist.com/...
It pulls Facebook posts, Twitter @replies to you and searches, and any mentions of your brand and/or keywords across the web INTO the intranet, where you can assign certain employees to respond. This is all real-time. It also does sentiment analysis and will pull this information into reports.
The cost of this tool is comparable to Radian6, but the intuitive UI/integration with your intranet makes it more compelling.
My client saw how convenient it was to have one control panel for all their monitoring and decided to buy it as soon as they saw a demo.
Upandown44
Some of these links are no longer active. Has there been an update to this list?
Insightful post with useful information. Only problem is, even though it's less than 6-months old the information is already way out of date. I use a combination of Hootsuite and Tweetspinner, which you didn't mention and I'm curious why that is. Oversight, or would you put Tweetspinner in a different category?
It's an inherent issue with putting these lists together --let alone doing real analysis. I've been doing this for years --same thing, only 10% of vendors will ever really matter to enterprise.
pheffring
Thanks for adding Expion. We are excited about being part of the SMMS space and see tremendous growth opportunities for Enterprises who want to go local.
EricaMcClenny, Always looking for cool new tools to help businesses grow and build value with consumers. My personal challenge is to smush the spam machines!
Jeremiah, this space has been heating up since your article was written. Thank you for updating as time passes. My company, Expion was just featured as a SMMS tool that helps companies optimize local social media over multiple location management. We'd be honored to show you a quick overview and addition to your list of tools.
There is a big shift happening between monitoring and actual conversation management from one interface. I'm looking forward to action tools that notify businesses to do something vs. just being aware that it exists.
I've found a lot of Social Media monitoring tools listed, just like this. Some list have more Saas features than others, though they all seem to suffer the same shortcoming - analytics. 30Million forums, 5 Million blogs, 30,000 accredidated new sites, tracking sentiment is great, reporting is great, being able to export it to a CSV or XLS format is great, love the work flow tracking that some also have (SMM by PR Newswire), but they all lack the next step - how to systematically breakdown the information. Without being able to tell what the overwhelming amount of data means, it becomes a manual task to dig through the info.
Is anyone dumping the data into a SAS package or other marketing/statistics db to analyze?
Thanks for writing this post, I found the SpredFast system interesting. Anyone here using any of the tools above?
Niacavagnaro
I use TweetDeck combined with Constant Contact's Nutshell Mail. I have NM send at 7am and 2pm then I respond through TweetDeck to Facebook, twitter, linkedin and google buzz, which are updated all at once. It has dramatically increased my efficiency and decreased the time spent in what can be a black hole of social media. I also throughout the day see updates pop up on my upper right hand corner of the screen and it just takes a second to see if there is something I can respond to or retweet.
Hi there, just found your posting while looking for a way to get "linkshortener" integrated into netvibes or another rss-aggregator like igoogle or pageflakes. Besides collaboration and so, those are pretty handy tools to monitor social media activities around the web. But still, I'm missing the opportunity to handle user-management a proper way.
Well, thanks for the huge list. Hootsuite and CoTweet was well known, bud didn't know there were so many SMMS.
by the way SMMS is a great abbreviation - Alike ;)
Tace care, Tobias from Germany
Norma
Would SMMS be considered a component of Enterprise Social Software or are the words synonymous?
Ed Bisquera, Social Media Instructor & Ambassador - hire me to create your Social Media Marketing Plan and get you more fans for your social media properties.
Have you seen or reviewed Sendible.com yet? Their service seems very promising and also MediaFunnel.com is another I'm reviewing and using at the moment. I like aspects of Postling.com too, for the ability to follow comments and threads on Facebook pages, within the Postling.com dashboard application. Lots of potential with all of these services, just have to determine which meets the needs of myself and clients the best...
shoutlet
Great post, especially the section about SMMS as part of a developed social strategy.
Shoutlet (shoutlet.com) should be on this list as well. It combines video, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook account updating, RSS, podcasts, SMS, social bookmarking tools, widgets, and more. Plus, it tracks it all in-platform. Enterprise features help companies with multiple brands manage/track social as well. Too much to mention here; contact us for a walk-through.
Thanks! Kara Martens @Shoutlet
Patrick, Marketing, media, gadget & craft beer enthusiast with a Met fan problem.
Would love to see Zeitgeist & Coffee on this list and would be happy to take you through it in greater detail.
StrongMail's Social Studio is a suite of SMMS. There are 3 tools: StrongMail Influencer (viral marketing platform that tracks the multi-stage sharing activity of the campaign all the way to conversion), Social Direct (a social media campaign management tool that provides analysis on reach, sharing activity, CT's, feedback on Facebook fan page wall posts (sharing, comments, likes) as well as tracking conversions) and Social Notes, a multi-channel sharing widget that includes the same tracking capabilities as StrongMail Influencer and Social Direct. www.strongmail.com
Gareth
You should check out the Involver platform – they have some really cool tools for managing various social networks. My digital marketing team at Levi's has been leveraging the service for the last 3 months and have been impressed with their capabilities.
I've reviewed Inolver, it's not clear from their website that the features I'm seeking are present. Can you help me understand if I'm missing something? I'm listening.
Diana
Hi Jeremiah,
Here at Cisco, I am using Involver platform. Involver got everything the brand needs to grow starting from managing campaigns, tracking searches, filtering, monitoring and more. I think you can add it to your list.
Anyway, I started using Sprinklr because it offers all the features same as Involver but for FREE. My vote goes to Sprinklr, and I advise everyone to start using it.
Hey Jeremiah! Great post, this topic is near and dear to my heart. I have tested several of these products at MTV, feel free to contact me offline if you ever want to discuss.
Last week at SXSW, I noticed that the management sessions were all full. There is definitely a shift toward management, work flow and accountability as social media continues to scale. My rule of thumb is to stick with what works until it doesn't, then find a solution for whatever specific problem you are encountering. Thanks for a new list of potential tools.
You may want to check out www.mindz.com , international platform from Dutch company of which I am the co-owner
bostonmike
Jeremiah,
As always, great interpretation of the marketplace. (Full disclosure to those reading - I am VP of marketing @ Awareness)
The message from Awareness is "stay tuned" - we have a bunch of surprises in store in the coming months. We typically have gone to market with community at the center of the social universe and the Hub is a big shift for us. We listened to our customers and the market and realized that most organizations view community as a tactic as opposed to "the" channel. This gave us the ability to tie in our enterprise features - security, control, moderation, etc - to the broader social web. Our philosophy now is that while community is an important channel, it's not the only channel enterprise marketers should use when going to market. The brands we are working with to develop this product - Sony, USA Today, Best Buy, Kayak, Progressive, etc - have all had input in the product road map, development and pricing and we believe we are positioned to meet the needs of marketers at the largest brands. The Hub is just the tip of the iceberg for Awareness. In the coming months we intend to continue to push the envelope in the social media space and continue innovating.
Thanks, I added them. I LOLed over social applets "sapplets" too funny.
Meg@Syncapse, PR Manager at Syncapse - full service social technology company, creator of SocialTALK social media management/measurement software
Hi Jeremiah,
Thanks for including SocialTALK in your SMMS list. Mike Lee, to address your comment, SocialTALK does include metrics reporting and an integrated analytics dashboard to assist marketers in measuring their campaigns. I'd love to show you an example if you are interested - feel free to contact me directly m.sinclair (at) syncapse.com
Wayne Smallman, My name's Wayne Smallman and I sell ideas that change the way companies do business, usually in the form of novel web applications.
There appears to be a mad dash towards the enterprise (a noble venture, assuming they have the time time and money to stick out the sales process through the myriad departments they'll have to navigate), with hardly a look over the shoulder at the vastly more populous SMEs / SMBs who would be serviced and served just as well.
Nudge Digital will be releasing a new social media management app in the next few months and it should blow the socks off the current apps. Though I must admit to a hint of bias
