1. Home
  2. Social Media Monitoring Tools
  3. Sysomos, now part of Meltwater Reviews
  4. User Review of Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Very comprehensive data, but influencer ID weak.
November 12, 2012

Very comprehensive data, but influencer ID weak.

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

Software Version

Sysomos Map (legacy)

Overall Satisfaction with Sysomos MAP

  • The user interface was very intuitive. This was important for us as we let others use the product without much training.
  • Comprehensiveness of data was also excellent. The system caught a large number of blog posts, etc. This was augmented by the full Twitter fire hose.
  • Sysomos also generated decent visuals. We did not have to export the data to Excel to get acceptable looking charts and graphs. The system generated graphs that we could re-use.directly with clients.
  • Influencer identification. Influencer functionality is designed to tell us ho are the most influential people on a given topic. Sysomos was not great at this. It looked at someone's social graph and could tell us who a specific Twitter user is connected with, and how often they interact with these people. But it was not stellar it identifying who were the true influencers rather than those, for example, who just re-tweeted content from someone influential.
  • This is an immature area. These tools are typically good at counting re-tweets, but not at identifying who the re-tweeters are. Influencer ID was a nice to have for us, rather than a strong requirement so we could live with this weakness.
  • Ability to research and guide strategy. This was the number one thing in our case. A lot of PR is guided by soft factors / qualitative metrics. This data is not invalid, but to be able to look back at what actually happened and and back up the strategy with data is great. We were able to do things like, for a given client, present them with their competitor's playbooks We could demonstrate what are people actually talking about versus what we might think they are talking about.
  • We could make more data for clients on reporting side. We could give a solid picture of how they performed on Twitter.
  • The tool was quite powerful and gave us a lot of confidence that the data we were reporting to clients was accurate and reliable.
Radian 6
Visible Technologies
Meltwater Buzz
Nielsen Buzzmetrics

We ultimately picked Sysomos because it had a great UI and we felt that it would be easy for non-specialists to use effectively. It also seemed to have the horsepower we needed in terms of comprehensiveness.

Using Sysomos MAP

12 - Main users of the product were social media analysts - 4 people.

However, other people throughout the agency used the product for smaller scale projects like monthly activity reports - 8 people

This tool was open to anyone within the agency. Anyone could use it and ask us for specific expertise if needed.
1 - The product didn't really require much internal support, but I was the main product person at the agency.
  • We use Sysomos for two primary purposes: Measurement and Strategy.
  • Measurement: we build quarterly reports for clients which clearly show the buzz that was generated over the last period. we correlate that social media buzz with press hits which are monitored in our custom tool. The correlation between mainstream media mentions and social media comments gives us a complete picture of the defectiveness of marketing campaigns.
  • Strategy. Sysomos Map is a great tool for working on strategy. Because it allows us to look back to social media activity over a 2-year period, its's a great way to research, for example, competitive activity: What are a client's competitors doing in the social space and how is that helping to drive revenue. It's a great tool to work on strategy with clients on new engagements. we can do things like look at a specific industry and understand what's generating buss , what's trending. We can also start to look at who are the influencers that do not show up on standard media lists.
We felt that Sysomos was a great product overall.

Evaluating Sysomos MAP and Competitors

We had been using Lithium Social Media Monitoring.

Sysomos MAP Implementation

Sysomos MAP Training

  • Online training
We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.

Sysomos MAP Support

We had an account manager and he was great. Really though, we didn't use him for support that much. He was very responsive and thoughtful whenever we did need help.
Not Sure

Using Sysomos MAP

Like all software products, Sysomos has a learning curve. However, the UI is significantly better than some of the other tools we looked at. Even without training, a competent person could jump in and do the basics.

Sysomos MAP Reliability

100%. Never saw any down time.
Intense queries sometimes took a minute or so, but generally the performance was great.

Integrating Sysomos MAP

  • We thought about integration with our home-grown too media tracking tool, but we decided it wasn't worth it in the end. we were fine using both tools independently, and then correlating the data manually.
  • They have APIs for sentiment, charting, etc, and the product can be integrated with other platforms quite easily. We just never did so.

Relationship with Sysomos

The buying process was fairly standard and transparent - not a big negotiation. They offered bulk discounts and some pricing flexibility.