Helixa Discovery, from Helixa in New York, is the company's core analytics engine that equips users with the tools to understand what’s distinctive about any audience and what they care about.
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Khoros Marketing
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) is a social media management platform. Key features include: Plan and Organize Social Campaigns, Manage Real-Time Engagement, and Learn and Prove Social Impact
Users have to be upfront with clients on where Helixa is pulling data from or they could get the wrong idea about the insights. Helixa pulls from a number of sources to gain insight but may not specifically be from the owned channel social audience. By using total social view, you can potentially get the audience data for your Twitter channel which can add specificity to your insights but they can differ from the overall consumer audience. Helixa is best used as a starting point, a place to get ideas and pull supporting data to understand patterns in behavior about an audience. I would not necessarily take its word as gospel, just one piece of a larger insight. My favorite section are the opinions as they show what is most important to the specific audience and can really help get the wheels turning. My least favorite section are the influencer categories. From my experience with Helixa, the influencers tend to skew political and mainstream which is not necessarily what clients are looking for when trying to understand what kind of people are influencing audiences. I also mind that Helixa pulls in a lot of unnecessary social apps like Flickr or Foursquare which are hardly used anymore.
The best it could be used for is running campaigns. Be it a product launch or be it any new event that you are hosting. If you need to quickly grab attention, then this might be your choice. Also the report given after the campaign is a good insight for improving your next campaign.
There is no product like Khoros. Our company lives and dies by the analytics, and to date, we have not seen a more comprehensive analytics structure for any social media management tool. Khoros support is also fantastic, responding and resolving any and all questions, ideas, or complaints, usually in 24 hours.
Khoros Marketing is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The calendar visibility is the view I use most so I can see all posts going out on all of our channels. It allows us to time posts in a proper cadence so we don't overlap with other pressing content.
• We still experience a bit of downtime and slowness here but things have drastically improved in the last year with their feature updates and reconfigured hosting.
Khoros has greatly improved the performance of its SaaS products in the last 5 years. Their applications, including Conversations, Intelligence, and Experiences, all load quickly with real-time data. This performance is critical to provide meaningful, social customer support, and marketing. The performance maintains integrity even when you deploy powerful integrations like Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager.
Overall, support does a great job and is timely in their responses and efforts. We have had to contact support many times due to the Capture app. Some tickets have remained open for months, while others get resolved quickly. I understand this is not always up to support and they often have to wait for their engineering team to fix issues that we identified, but it's difficult to deal with issues that are affecting our workflow, especially for extended amounts of time.
• As a very early customer, we did not undergo formal training but worked closely with the team to get the system set up to do what we wanted. However, online training resources are now available with many blog posts / video lessons and tutorials.
it is important to note that my perspective is not necessarily common - I'm a geek/nerd/poweruser in general, so I found the online resources to be more than adequate (and often very aesthetically pleasing, too). That said, a less "geeky" person might struggle a bit.
The implementation team from Khoros were great - they worked hard to understand our somewhat complex organization, and were with us all the way through face to face meetings, user training, and technical training. We had a clearly defined account manager and implementation manager, who worked really effectively together and with us.
Helixa is just a completely different beast entirely. Where other consumer research boils down their insights into reports, Helixa allows you to go through audience data with a fine tooth comb, also providing the opportunity for direct comparison across different brands or demographic groups. While we did pick Helixa, I can’t emphasize the need for making Helixa one tool in a tool box. While Mintel was a tool we considered that was similar-ish, we also use Mintel now to help complement Helixas insights
On some accounts that I am on, I use Asana in place of Khoros marketing but I much prefer Khoros Marketing. I prefer Khoros Marketing over Asana because I can post directly (and schedule posts) on Khoros but not on Asana. Also, I can moderate directly on Khoros but not Asana
Khoros seems to struggle a little past a certain level of scale. More than 30 separate per day makes it difficult to view all content in the weekly calendar view, which is frustrating and could cause issues. However, the ability to schedule one post across multiple channels is hugely valuable and cuts down on a lot of duplicative work.
