Item: Quid
Rating: 9
Author: Scott Thompson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Netbase for measuring and analysing online mentions & conversations around client brands, industry categories and key events, and also to investigate the impact of marketing activities. It is primarily used by the Research team, often alongside traditional research methodologies, and also by the Content marketing team.

Pros and Cons

Natural Language Processing: If the point of social media analysis is to understand large volumes of text that you can't read yourself, then the automated analysis is key to this. Netbase is the best that we have seen in the market, and this is the cornerstone of the product for us.
Dashboard design: Past tools we have used have involved pulling data from the tool, analysing and charting in (typically) Excel, then putting together into a Powerpoint presentation to share with clients & colleagues. Netbase's dashboard tools enable reports to be templated and generated as PDFs. Cutting out large chunks of manual administrative work means that more reports can be delivered more frequently with no added time/cost at our and.
Customer support - although we are UK-based and the Netbase support staff are primarily US-based, we have found their support staff to be fast, responsive and very helpful.

Dashboards can only currently be exported as PDFs. It would be helpful to have a more read/writable format (eg. PPT) that enables us to combine Netbase's outputs with other sources, or to make them more consistent with our own branding (colours, fonts etc.)
The business model revolves around a limited number of login seats. I would like to be able to roll out the tool to make it available/accessible to more people in the business, but the pricing model makes this impractical/uneconomical.
Logging out users after a period of inactivity can be frustrating when multitasking/task switching and unsaved work is lost.
While Netbase's focus on language processing is its key strength, additional functionality around social analysis (eg. people who follow a brand account, users who talk about X are also likely to talk about Y) is somewhat limited.

Users and Roles

7 - Research, Content marketing, paid social

Return on Investment

Faster turnaround of social media tracking projects
Reduction in number of hours needed to produce reports (the cost of analysis time usually outweighs the cost of the software when it comes to pricing reports.)

Alternatives Considered

Sysomos, Radian6, Gnip, Whitevector and Crimson Hexagon

Superior NLP technology

Likelihood to Renew

Very happy with the product, regular software updates and a clear product roadmap, and good customer support/service.

Likelihood to Recommend

Best suited to processing large volumes of social media mentions. As with any social analysis tool, a degree of expertise and understanding of social media platforms, audience trends etc. is important to get the most out of the tool, so an "expert user" approach should be prioritised over making it accessible to lots of people with minimal training. The pricing model is particularly suitable for a small number of users who are likely to be looking at a large number of brands/topics.

Product Configurability

Support Rating

Account managers and analyst support are all very responsive, helpful, knowledgeable and friendly. When the first line of support can't immediately resolve a problem, they manage expectations and effectively communicate what is being done and estimated timelines.

Quid Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Not Available - "Regular" support covers everything we need

Bug Resolution

Usability

Very simple to use, quick to pick up on the key principles, and a task-centric design (ie. Topics to set up what you want to analyze, Analysis to do the exploration/analysis, and Dashboards to pull results and findings together to generate reports.) All intuitive, drag & drop etc.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Building Topics
Creating topic segments based on relevant keyword sets
Building dashboards for templated reports
Exploring key events
Complex topics going beyond simple keyword mentions (eg. by particular users, or on particular websites)

Difficult Tasks

Editing dashboards where you need to move several widgets around at once. (Dashboards have an auto-layout functionality which kicks in as soon as you move a single widget - which isn't always helpful when you need to move several around a page.)

Netbase's language processing technology makes it a winner for social media intelligence

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with NetBase