A few days ago I posted about the seeming lack of mid-level social media monitoring tools that span the divide between standard searches and the big boys of social monitoring. To their credit, one of the first to respond to my post, and associated tweets, was MeltWaterBuzz, the monitoring service provided by MeltWater group, a large Norwegian provider of search engine, cloud computing, and biometric solutions. Janet Yu from MeltWaterBuzz sent me a tweet (how else) and offered to run me through their solution.
MeltWaterBuzz serves up a dashboard view of social media mentions for a preset profile (a profile being some key phrases or words). This view is similar to other monitoring solutions allowing users to filter, set a specific date range and gather both a visual and numerical report of volume;
Drilling down further into the detail, clicking on a particular day’s result returns a detailed list of each mention including a body excerpt, a URL and some publication details. Each mention can then be edited (to ensure more accurate aggregate tracking) deleted or assigned to a user (more on that later on). As well as that users can obtain some metrics about the originating site in order to assess the level of influence and hence what priority should be given responding to the particular mention;
Even more granular detail is available to give publication times, author details, gender, age and language (when known);
Moving back to driving some analysis from that data, MeltWaterBuzz has several options. Users can assign a mention to an operative;
As well as that MeltWaterBuzz runs a host of analysis allowing users to gauge sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) all generated using natural language and smart algorithms. MaeltWaterBuzz also gives demographic reports (age, language, gender) and geographic spread;
All in all MeltWaterBuzz seems to do what it does well. However… much of the value of social media monitoring is the ability to integrate with other services. I’d love, for example to be able to assign a negative comment over to a helpdesk application. Or a development suggestion through to a project management or issue tracker application. As far as Janet was aware, MeltWaterBuzz does not have an API and, as such, is much of a lone, and ringfenced, island.
MeltWaterBuzz is priced at USD9000 per annum for five keyword profiles spread across five users and 150000 returns. While this is cheaper than some of the top shelf offerings, it’s still plenty pricey, especially given the lack of integratability with other offerings.
