Shoutlet an Excellent, Well-supported Tool for Larger Orgs
February 06, 2014
Shoutlet an Excellent, Well-supported Tool for Larger Orgs
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Shoutlet 6.0
Overall Satisfaction
Shoutlet was used by one department in the city, the Health Department, and was purchased to help manage and grow social engagement with people it served in the city.
Pros
- Excellent support staff, based in Madison - a real person always answered the phone!
- Deep, robust system that can handle a lot of the details of social media management while making sense of it for you.
- Reps assigned to each account are very friendly and ready to help with social campaign ideas and ways to integrate Shoutlet into communication plans.
Cons
- The user interface for developing Shoutlet content has become less user friendly over the years. It used to have a node-style editor that was easy to pick up and use without much training, making it simple to create the widgets I needed at the time. The new 'Canvas' tool is less intuitive, and there were items I was trying to create with it that failed to come to fruition, even after calling the support line and getting help with it.
- I never remember it being easy to access my Shoutlet files, with it usually requiring 3 to 5 clicks to get to them.
- Buyer beware - this is not a tool for a small, understaffed communications / IT departments. It is a very robust social media management tool, and priced that way. You will likely need to have at least one staff person dedicated to social media in order to get your money's worth with Shoutlet.
- Negative: It was sold to our organization 5 years ago as a tool that multiple people, including folks with little web design/web tool experience, could use to set up social internet tools. That turned out not to be the case, and already over-utilized web design resources did not have the capacity to absorb all of the work that was needed to get the most out of the license.
- Positive: Gave us a quick and easy way to store and present the large amount of video we wanted to make available on our web site at the time. We did not have the storage or capability to build the same video widget in-house.
- Positive: It gave us one tool to manage all social accounts we had at the time, increasing efficiency when multiple media had to be used for communications.
Shoutlet was more robust than TweetDeck, and of course could handle multiple types of social accounts, while TweetDeck only handled our Twitter accounts at the time. But I continued to use TweetDeck for it's language translation capabilities. While not perfect translations by any means, they worked in a pinch when we had to release information fast and could not bring a translator into the mix.
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