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Too complex for our use case.
November 12, 2012

Too complex for our use case.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • Calendar tool was essential. Being able to schedule tweets in advance. (with TweetDeck, couldn’t do the same tweet multiple times). Khoros also lets you know if there is a send problem.
  • Established value of social with upper management via great analytics. Saved a lot of time by showing success to management. Analytics were cool. Dashboard view (with up to 50 widgets) and engagement analytics – much deeper breakdown – can be exported to Excel
  • Too much horsepower – too complex for just one person to use. Designed for teams.
  • Pricing. Rapid jump. Started at 275 / month or $10 year – jumped to $32k year. Wasn’t warranted by roadmap.
  • No examples or use case guides to help us use it. You were on your now.
  • Content calendar backfire: Web interface. After 2 trade shows and a webinar. Needed blog posts and social promotions to schedule. Sent some stuff out without meaning to. Multi-tabs were very confusing
  • Took time to learn how to use Khoros with Google Analytics effectively. No use cases from Khoros.
  • The biggest operational benefit by far was scheduling. Saved me time from doing back-end work. I could do months worth of social work in advance and then schedule it out. This allowed me to actually be social increased time spent in engagement with customers.
In looking at other tools, we though that Khoros was a sophisticated product (outside of the social inbox) with a professional orientation and a strong B2B focus. However, the lack of SFDC integration was an issue and we felt that some much cheaper tools like HootSuite had definite advantages. For example:
• Out of the box graphics charts and analytics were there and ready to go.
• iPhone and iPad app – synced up on HootSuite.
• Much cheaper

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

1 - I was the only person using the product.
  • We used Khoros primarily for publishing and engagement, marketing campaigns and analytics. Khoros has a very good analytics capability and we used extensively to gauge success of our marketing campaigns
• We actually didn’t renew. Main problem was price / value.
• Felt that we were being gouged a bit. No pricing transparency.
• Product roadmap – couldn’t produce 2011 roadmap to justify price increase. No information on what they were doing to improve product.
• Too much horsepower for what I needed.
• Switched to NightOwl – which is a Twitter client. We also used Pardot for creating social scoring of potential customers. Pardot allowed us to Track URLs with tracking code, trace them back to leads. It also allowed us to understand how many leads came from Google + Twitter etc. Although we had to dump all of this data into a spreadsheet and it was much clunkier, we could not justify the Khoros price increase for a company our size.

Evaluating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) and Competitors

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Implementation

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Training

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Support

• Response time was good. However, needed to leave issues open on social channels for them to diagnose. This was a huge problem. Good at initially responding to request for help, but very slow to diagnose problem.
• Best practices were not understood by the support team, nor were they escalated For example, how to make it work with Google Analytics.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

• Color was oppressive. Not possible to re-skin.
• Scheduler was hard to use.
• Analytics: Lots of stuff all in one place. Quite difficult to understand. Also, some of the metrics tracked were not that useful – vanity metrics.
• Social inbox had some UI issues. Slow to load. When you login, there is very narrow display space. Expanding to full-screen meant that you could lose browser.

Integrating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • We monitored the following social channels: Twitter /FB / WordPress / Slideshare / YouTube/ Flikr /
  • Integrated with: Google Analytics / Omniture / Crimson Hexagon

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Reliability