Friday, 5 March, 2010
- |
By
5
Mar
Social media tools part 2: Alterian SM2
Before you start working on a social strategy it’s important to know what your target audience is saying about your brand and products before you engage them. As my colleague Carolien mentioned in her earlier blogpost is that we advice to listen first.
One of the listening tools we have been testing is Alterian SM2. In this post I will talk about the functionalities as well review the practicality of this tool.
Social media monitoring
Alterian SM2 is often mentioned as one of the better solutions for social media monitoring designed for public relations and marketing professionals. These mentions caught our attention and we went on to see if this tool can be useful for Green Orange.
A few elements I will be looking at during this review is:
- Search setup
- Analysis features
- Customization
- Usability
Features
The search setup is perhaps the hardest part of social listening, you have to define your search. Through the new search wizzard, Alterian SM2 made this step pretty straightforward. The wizzard includes keywords, excludes keywords, defines language filter and region filter. It is also possible to categorize your keywords for future analysis.
There is a wide range of analysis features available in Alterian SM2, these include:
- Daily volume
- Share of voice (shows media platforms such as blogs, microblogs, social networksites and video/photo sharing)
- Tone of voice (is a result positive or negative)
- Tagclouds
- Popularity of search results (reach)
- Demographics
All these analysis features pretty much speak for themselves. The tone of voice is divided in positive, neutral and negative. There are predefined dictionaries that help filter results into either of these categories. The tagcloud has to be setup seperately and can take a few hours to be ready. The popularity of results is simply the reach of the authors. The more followers an author has, the more popular his posts will be.
Customization and usability
There are several ways of customizing this tool. There is the option to add custom sources by adding an url or rss feed, but url’s can be blacklisted aswell. However before these results from blacklisted url’s are removed you will have to copy the profile without results to a new profile and redo the search. Which can take another few hours.
Alterian SM2 is pretty usability friendly. The menu is straightforward and the help option includes video tutorials. However some of the features can be pretty time consuming, such as redefining or finetuning a search.
This tool has shown us a great deal of possibilities and opportunities and with the experience we gained from testing this tool we will continue our search and compare other tools.
RSS
Bedankt voor de review Roy – zeker bruikbaar.
Gebruiken jullie het als 1 tool voor meerdere klanten, of is dit ook inzetbaar op small business niveau?
Bedankt voor de review Roy – zeker bruikbaar.
Gebruiken jullie het als 1 tool voor meerdere klanten, of is dit ook inzetbaar op small business niveau?
Roy,
Thank you for writing such a thorough review of Alterian SM2 for your readers. I agree with you that the ability to customize items like the sentiment analysis dictionary and custom sources are a key part of what makes SM2 special. Please let us know if you need any help from us for your social media monitoring research.
Elyse DeVries
Marketing Specialist
Alterian
@elyse_d
Roy,
Thank you for writing such a thorough review of Alterian SM2 for your readers. I agree with you that the ability to customize items like the sentiment analysis dictionary and custom sources are a key part of what makes SM2 special. Please let us know if you need any help from us for your social media monitoring research.
Elyse DeVries
Marketing Specialist
Alterian
@elyse_d
Han, mijn excuses voor de late reactie. Alterian SM2 kan als 1 tool voor meerdere klanten worden ingezet, omdat er met meerdere profielen gewerkt kan worden. Deze profielen kunnen gelijktijdig zoeken.
Han, mijn excuses voor de late reactie. Alterian SM2 kan als 1 tool voor meerdere klanten worden ingezet, omdat er met meerdere profielen gewerkt kan worden. Deze profielen kunnen gelijktijdig zoeken.
Hi Elyse, thanks for the kind words. Your reply on our blog proves your tool works! We have contacts at the Alterian office in the Netherlands and so far they’ve been very helpful with all of our queries, thanks.
Hi Elyse, thanks for the kind words. Your reply on our blog proves your tool works! We have contacts at the Alterian office in the Netherlands and so far they’ve been very helpful with all of our queries, thanks.
[...] Social media tools part #2: Alterian SM2 Social media tools part #1: Intro to research [...]
[...] Social media tools part #2: Alterian SM2 Social media tools part #1: Intro to research [...]