Great post. Thank you for mentioning Brandtology in your list of social media dashboards.

Beyond finding and responding to mentions of your company/brand, we think that companies should also monitor top-line sentiments over time to track the reactions to their campaigns/new products and/or their competitors new launches. Other metrics like tracking the spread of conversations across channels would be useful as well.

Also, companies need to be aware of the possibility of information overload when they do social media tracking, as a lot of irrelevant data may be retrieved. For Brandtology, we engage trained social media professionals who check the data retrieved by our proprietary information extraction tools to ensure high accuracy and relevancy, making the monitoring process extremely effecient for companies. Furthermore, we provide global coverage within a single dashboard as we can handle the multiple languages in Asia-Pacific.

Thanks once again for the insightful article!

Cheers,
Ashley
Social Media Consultant
Brandtology

I am not sure though why Radian6 and Netvibes escape from alphabetic order.
Chris.

Thanks for mentioning Sysomos. We’re really excited about the great traction that our two services, Heartbeat and MAP, are attracting these days. The growing interest is driven by demand for not only measurement and monitoring but information that lets companies engage and make changes in strategies and tactics.

Thanks much for including us in your list, and of course we’re on board with the notion that companies need to be paying attention to how not only their brand is being perceived and talked about online, but what their competitors are doing, how the industry as a whole is trending, and where their company fits into the mix.

And thanks for including some of the DIY tools as well; it’s critical that companies are incorporating listening and social media as a part of their overall business strategy, even if that means starting simply. Social media is something that should be woven into a much larger strategy for engaging and connecting with customers, and measuring the impact of that activity (as well as your outreach and communication through all the customer touchpoints in the company).

Thanks again for the shoutout.

Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra

I think that most mid sized companies really need to integrate social media into the rest of their marketing and business, not continue to keep it separate in a separate tool. Yes, monitoring, tracking and responding are interesting, but unless it drives leads and sales (and you can MEASURE that) the whole dashboard concept is not too useful (unless you are a big brand centric company like Coke or McDonalds). Most mid-sized companies don’t have the luxury of just investing in brand. They need to invest in programs that drive measurable leads and sales.

While we don’t have a “social media dashboard” in the HubSpot software (maybe we do, depending on definition), the software does monitor social media, enables easy participation in and publishing to social media, and most importantly measures the leads and customers you get from your social media efforts. Of course I am biased(!), but I think 2010 will be the year of integration where everyone realizes social media is just another tool (certainly a powerful one) that should be in their business marketing toolbox working along with all the other tools.