FORRESTER RESEARCH — More news in the Social Intelligence world today, as Nielsen and McKinsey launched a joint partnership to compete deeper in social media. Through "NM Incite", Nielsen combines its Buzzmetrics listening platform technology with McKinsey's management consultants, to offer a broad range of social consulting influenced by social media data and analytics. I spoke to the team earlier and learned that this venture is both a response to growing customer demand for social business consulting and a proactive step in building up offerings that will meet enterprises' future needs, as social media spreads inside and outside the business...

FRESHNETWORKS BLOG — Over the last few months we’ve been conducting an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research. We’ve compared how Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360,Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations and have written about the following topics...

FRESHNETWORKS BLOG — Our sixth post from the social media monitoring review 2010 series will look at the issue of data latency. While most tools prioritise key websites to ensure the fastest possible upload of conversations, we found that some tools can take several days before the  conversation that’s being held online is available in the tool. This delay is known as data latency...

JEFF ESPOSITO.COM — Over the past month, I tasked myself with improving my employer’s monitoring and management of social media results and metrics. For the past year, we were with Radian6 and were happy, however we wanted more. The metrics that we were producing on our overall sentiment and equated net promoter score were great, problem was that they were in a vacuum. There was no benchmark against our competition and if we were going to expand our reports we’d have a number of hurdles to climb. The biggest of these hurdles was adding a sentiment to the competitors was adding a sentiment to the posts. With Radian6, adding sentiment to posts, Tweets, videos, etc. is a very manual process that took a combined 10+ hours a week to do for monitoring our brand...

NO MAN'S BLOG — Well, they suck. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time now and while I’m 2 days behind deadline to give one of my clients another monthly report I have to take a break and spit it off my chest. Over the past 8 months I tried and tested practically all of the key players in ’social media monitoring services’: Radian6, BuzzMetrics, Brandwatch, Attentio, Techrigy (SM2) etc. And I have very few good words to say about them. The few good words will be in relation to the people who work at these companies - these are usually nice people. But the software and service is verging on epic fail - very problematic and clunky solutions wrapped in a big bold shiny (but rather hollow) promises...