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
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Shoutlet (Discontinued)
Score 2.0 out of 10
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Shoutlet is a cloud-based social relationship platform that enables marketers to publish, engage and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+, and YouTube.
The product’s focus is on quantifying return on social, integrating social data into business and scaling social across the enterprise. Features include tools for social CRM, creative design, social listening, ads, workflow management, contest design…
While I cannot say any scenarios where Khoros wouldn't be useful (when it comes to social media moderation), I can say it is very well suited for clients who have time constraints on their work. With the speed Khoros can pull in new content, we see issues for the client almost immediately.
I think Shoutlet is an excellent tool for any mid-sized to larger company looking to improve their social strategy. While it does have some minor improvements that can be made, it's overall an impressive way to mass post to multiple networks and interact and engage with your followers in the social space. I feel at this time that a smaller company could probably benefit from a lesser in-depth version of this tool at this time
The ability to manage and publish to various social accounts from one platform. This feature helped us to have a cohesive social strategy and saved us a lot of time having to go back and forth between accounts.
The module that allowed us to build contests and custom landing pages was perhaps my favorite part. For the contests, it proved to be ultra convenient to be able to build, host and run social promotions through the same platform that housed our social accounts and lists. From a landing-page-design standpoint, it was also wonderful and time-effective for each individual department to be able to build professional and dynamic pages themselves rather than tasking it to our web designers who really didn't have the time.
I was also very pleased with the customer service we received from the Shoulet team. From the original demo, to the training sessions, all the way through to back-end service maintenance, everyone we dealt with was available, accommodating and friendly. Not entirely common in this day in age.
I would like to see Shoutlet improve the usability of their "Shoutlet Profiles" module. It has improved over time, but I would like to see more individual user metrics such as affinity, time spent engaged per user, and monthly interactions by user.
I would also like to see Shoutlet redesign their "manage urls" module and URL shortener. The shortener works well, but I would like the interface to be more user friendly, and be able to access it throughout the rest of the tool. Perhaps in a slide out drawer.
Unfortunately, Shoutlet does not offer a Pin scheduling tool at this time. This would be a HUGE asset for them to have.
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.
While I do not have direct control over the renewal of our contract, I am definitely lobbying to not only renew the contract, but expand our contract with Shoutlet to include more of our company's accounts in our Shoutlet account for the many reasons already stated. By pulling all of our accounts, pages and platforms into one media management tool, we'll be able to better serve our fans, members, patients and employees. It will cut down time it takes for us to post across our entire company's breadth of social media options while sharing more easily between locations and entities. For medium and large scale enterprises, Shoutlet is hard to beat.
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.
While some things do require a little training, a quick phone training session or reading an online guide usually suffices. I've never needed multiple training sessions for any part of Shoutlet. As someone with very little coding/programming background (read: absolutely none), I am always able to accomplish what is needed without feeling over my head or needing help.
• 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.
I feel that the level of support I get from Shoutlet is far beyond the level of support I've received from other companies in a variety of services. It would be nice to have a regular update from Tech Therapy that lists out any potential bugs they're working to fix for the various browsers they support. Sometimes I wonder if I'm experiencing an issue simply because I use Firefox vs. Chrome.
• 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.
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
Shoutlet is infinitely more advanced than SocialMadeSimple. It is a much more complex and in-depth platform. We actually changed to SocialMadeSimple after Shoutlet and I miss how easy to use and advanced it was in comparison. It was a money decision but if they were the same price, I would absolutely insist we go back
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.
Allows our small staff to provide our clients with world-class service and data.
Exponentially improved fan base expansion for our clients.
Rapid response for customer service issues for clients - allowing us to help our clients prevent their social media presence from becoming the Complaint Department, rather a true community of fans and supporters of a brand.
