Poor UI, good analytics.
October 29, 2012

Poor UI, good analytics.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Pros

  • Has really good analytics – so if that’s high on your priority it does it well.

Cons

  • The product was buggy. It is new product.
  • The interface was atrocious, but did get better with upgrades. I was in the tool all the time, and a few others log in once /week so it was really hard for them to figure out how do I navigate this. There was nothing intuitive about it. I spent a lot of time explaining to others. It was a barrier to getting work done. In contrast, Hootsuite has such a great interface and does so many things as well.
  • We were able to do a lot more tracking to understand where leads came from because of good analytics
  • It gave us the ability to integrate with demand generation better.
  • I could assign content to others, e.g. support, i.e. has basic collaboration capabilities.
  • There were a few costs imposed: It was a staff time drain as I was continually educating other members of staff how to use it. It had sentiment scoring, but you couldn’t adjust it yourself. There were no weights. You cannot take into account sarcasm. For example, our company name is the bomb gave negative score! This meant that the sentiment was worthless. With Twitter, you couldn’t add someone to a twitter list. You needed to login to Twitter. I wanted to do everything from within one tool.
There’s no one tool that does it all. I have found that with all products, there are inconsistencies between click throughs and Google Analytics and Twitter native analytics. I have no idea what’s going on. Google Analytics is consistently lower.

After switching from Khoros to Social Hub, did see a different baseline. Khoros’s numbers were more conservative. Khoros used Bitly, Social Hub have their own URL shortener. We end up using Google analytics for a lot of reporting and social reporting tool for slicing dicing and trend analysis.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • Marketing primarily – engagement with prospects and clients – 2 way back and forth, lead generation
  • Support as secondary
  • We were not trying to do sentiment analysis. Khoros wasn’t built for it, and that wasn’t really our need. We didn’t have the volume for something like Radian6.
We have switched to SocialHub by Awareness.

User interface is the biggest difference. It's so much better in Social Hub.

Also, Social Hub allows more flexibility in reporting though not necessarily different analytics. You can slice and dice in more ways.

Social Hub has a CRM type feature which creates history of that person’s interactions.

Social Hub has an elaborate tagging system. You can associate tags with channel, individual pieces of content. When sending out pieces of content you could tag North America, mid-market, lead gen and then slice and dice by channel tag, content tag. You can get really granular, e.g. X click-throughs via twitter on this campaign. This granularity is very helpful. Helps me have help the program marketers make argument for more spend. Khoros were more timely in support responsiveness but it took same time to get issue resolved. Khoros is a little better on team collaboration i.e. assigning content to someone else to answer. Khoros marks content as color coded as addressed. SocialHub doesn’t do this. This feature helps avoid duplicate efforts. I have requested feature upgrade from Social Hub.

Evaluating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) and Competitors

No - Khoros was our first social media campaigns tool.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Training

  • In-person training
So much left undone – very cursory.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Support

Always prompt and polite. I was a frequent flier to say the least. Actually getting things resolved and staying fixed was an issue. That's less a reflection on the support team but more the product itself. We kept getting the same issues reoccurs due to bugs. They were bad at bug fixes. They provided band-aids not legitimate fixes. When I first got on the tool, there wasn’t a dedicated support line/email. It just went through my account manager. They later moved to a traditional support model.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

See above comments. The additional functionality you got wasn’t so good to make up for the poor interface. However, once you learned it, you could figure it out

Relationship with Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

The fee was based upon the number of campaigns. Everything we did worked within one campaign. A campaign is effectively an “instance” - i.e. how you slice your metrics. One campaign = one reporting view with limited slicing/dicing. The pricing model worked ok for us.

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