Very strong analytics. Not ideal for competitor tracking.
Updated October 16, 2014

Very strong analytics. Not ideal for competitor tracking.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • Ease of onboarding new accounts. Once everything has been set up, adding new social accounts is very simple.
  • Analytics are very strong. Not everything is tracked, but Khoros is very good at tracking accounts, campaigns, conversions, etc.
  • Scheduled publishing is a breeze. Most issues we have encountered are a result of some issues with the Twitter API, and not Khoros.
  • The company is extremely easy to work with. We have made many product suggestions and they have frequently listened to us and made changes that we suggested.
  • There are some minor issues in exporting data. Depending on which channels are supported for a given brand, when we export data, the rows and columns do not always match up perfectly.
  • Competitor data (our competitors) is not built-in. For example, account growth for our competitors are is not easy to track. We actually use a competitive product (Wildfire) to do this.
  • Main operational benefit is time savings. It’s now possible for us to schedule posts across multiple channels simultaneously. The time this saves the team can be spent on higher-order work such as actually being social: interacting with customers!
Comparing Khoros with Wildfire:

Wildfire advantages:
Very flashy capabilities around application building (Facebook tabs/contests, etc.). This is more of a weakness for Khoros which they are now trying to backfill. Khoros advantages: Khoros is a true CRM platform tool. Wildfire does not have the robust CRM/platform management capabilities of Khoros.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

30 - Most users are marketing people who do a variety of this across our many different brands:
i. Monitoring brand mentions
ii. Scheduling content and watching for interactions
iii. My role is more internal consulting, strategy, and analytics. I put out a monthly global dashboard that consolidates all activity into a management report. This report pulls data from Khoros, and also Omniture, Google Analytics, FB Insights, and Pinterest Analytics (some of these additional tools are used for competitive brand insights which are not currently handled by Khoros). The consolidated report is actually built by the BI team in Tableau.
1 - I am the primary support person across the organization.
  • Outbound marketing campaigns / brand management
  • (By March 2010) Management of disparate Facebook and Twitter corporate accounts with message scheduling / monitoring and rolled-up analytics.
  • We monitor the following social media properties:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • RSS Feeds
  • YourTube
  • Flickr
  • Blogs
• Khoros has become an integral part of our operations.

Evaluating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) and Competitors

• We were using a number of different point tools: HootSuite / TweedDeck, etc.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Implementation

We worked directly with the early team to get the software up and running

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Training

  • In-person training
• 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.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Support

No - Not necessary. As an early customer, we get excellent service from the company.
• We do not have any kind of premium support. However, the support team is very responsive. They always follow up quickly when we submit a ticket and they do a good job with getting bugs fixed. The bigger roadmap items / feature requests are a bit more problematic, but these are product management rather than support issues.
• There is an excellent support community

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

• UI has improved quite a lot over time (we were a very early customer) and it is certainly a lot easier to use than it used to be.
• The analytics UI, in particular, is not great. It’s functional, but not easy to grab the right data and build a report within the product. We have to export data to something else to create visually attractive charts and graphs. The current output is not as eye catching as we’d like when presenting data to senior management. We would really prefer something more plug-and-play. (They have hired an analytics PM to focus on this problem, so we are confident that it will get better).
• The UIs for Publishing and Monitoring have been completely re-designed and are much better now.

Integrating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • Currently integrated with Omniture and Google for web analytics.
Not difficult.
  • we are looking at integrating with SFDC (primarily for customer service) but have not done so yet.
Yes.

Relationship with Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

As an early customer, we likely got preferential pricing.

Pricing model has changed recently:

• Initially, pricing was by “initiative” which is analogous to brand. We have 13 total initiatives.
• They have recently switched to a set-based model

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Reliability

• About 95-98% uptime. This used to be problematic in the early days, but the SaaS infrastructure has been dramatically upgraded recently and there is virtually no issue today.