Meltwater Social (formerly Sysomos) is a social media management solution that is designed to deliver content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics in a single, easy-to-navigate screen. According to the vendor, it’s a platform that can manage social enterprises, no matter how large or complex. The solution aims to make content planning a snap with a simple drag-and-drop content calendar, and workflow that’s easy to track and review, across even the largest enterprises.…
Despite its shortcomings, IBM Watson Analytics does its job well. It's paired for any size organization, big or small – but realistically, if you're going to be analyzing user-data on a broad scale, it probably makes sense to use this program if you're working with a big company. Otherwise Facebook Analytics could probably do the work for you, for a cheaper price. Our social media manager has been using it to track data for a client of ours, and they have been enjoying it so far. It's a good system to determine user traffic.
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.
Documentation is really hard to search through and follow along with. Needs a lot more examples and guidance.
Pricing isn't clear a lot of the time. As a developer trying new stuff, I've been hit with charges and been unsure where the usage came from. Would be good for this to be easier to follow up. Had asked support staff and got no reply.
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
Every time I had a question, I received a fast detailed response and help when I needed it. If a feature was not currently available, it was often added to a list of features to be added at a later time or the team provided me with a workaround that worked almost as well..
Most commonly, if you're comparing it against other brands – my favorite being Google Analytics – this essentially does the same thing. It really just depends on what platform you're most comfortable working with. Google and IBM both have great software, and ease of use (assuming you know what you're doing when you get started). Although Google doesn't go as in-depth with their data analysis as IBM
We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
See previous notes. We decided, for good reason, not to pursue any real production applications with the Bluemix products because we, our management, and our customer and their management realized it would not work in a real-world, down and dirty production environment where company reputations, financial performance, and customer satisfaction were at stake!
