NetBase Review
July 30, 2015
NetBase Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with NetBase
Officially, we use NetBase to provide social media reports to several clients. However, we are in the process of rolling it out to our entire organization to use as a market research tool (audience insights, affinities, etc), as well as a media planning tool. It’s a pretty standard practice to build a target profile using survey response data from Simmons. But when you’re trying to understand a group of PEOPLE, scientific data can only go so far. It’s missing natural, honest opinions expressed in real consumer language, and it’s limited by it’s very definition - if a question wasn’t asked, the data won’t provide the answer. NetBase enables us to humanize our Simmons target (or our media plan, or our measurement strategy, or our creative/content) with real-time, unsolicited conversations between people that express emotion, imply (or directly state) a preference, surface unexpected associations, and reveal new insight into people and culture. When you understand what your customers care about and the reasons behind their actions and attitudes you can translate these insights into hyper relevant strategic opportunities.
- Data quality - once you know how to use it, pretty much every piece of data it surfaces is relevant / useful.
- Depth of analysis - it's super easy to do quantitative AND qualitative analyses on a deeper level than just the brand. NetBase's ability to surface category, brand-neutral insights is unsurpassed.
- Customer support - the NetBase team is extremely attentive.
- Out-of-the-box usage: in order to get the most out of the tool, there's a bit of a learning curve.
- If you don't know the feature exists, you'll probably never find it. The feature set is SO robust that a lot of people are probably missing a ton.
- Dashboard building - it's not fun. Granted, you don't need a dashboard because of the wide variety of on-the-fly analysis widgets, but for clients that are still using training wheels, dashboard reports are a must and it takes forever to build great ones.
- Automated reports cannot be sent to users who do not have NetBase logins.
3 - The head of our media team is trained on it, as well as the paid social/social media strategist, and me (technically analyst, but more focused on consumer research)
- Increased media relevancy
- Diversity in reporting
- Better understanding of the target consumer
- Crimson Hexagon ForSight,Brandwatch,Sysomos Heartbeat,Sysomos MAP,Radian6,Lithium Social Web,NUVI,Infegy Atlas,Argyle Social,Tracx,Visible Intelligence,Adobe Social,Simply Measured,ZuumSocial
At a previous agency we used Sysomos Heartbeat and MAP, but switched to NetBase because Sysomos has pretty mediocre source coverage and a very high presence of spam. I've done extensive comparisons of all the leading social listening tools and the only ones that come close are Crimson Hexagon and Brandwatch. Brandwatch is better suited for brands or single clients. I almost picked Crimson, but when it comes down to TIME, you can probably do 5 reports in the time it takes to build one opinion monitor.
Quid Feature Ratings
Using NetBase
- Brand insights
- Category research
- Increased relevancy w/in target