I've never met a marketing manager who didn't, at a certain point in time, want a dashboard to see how his/her brands were doing. And since "listen" is the number one step in engaging in social media, a brand vanity search on Google simply isn't enough any more. A short overview:- socialmention* realtime social media search and analysis. Free service that even allows you to create social media alerts ("Like Google Alerts but for social media"). I use it a lot but don't expect it to catch everything. But to find out on which social media sources people talk about your brand, or who the influentials are, socialmention* is a good start.
- Brands In Public: "a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands (...). Each dashboard organizes a hot list of what's being said about the brand around the web, via Twitter and blogs and YouTube and Google Trends and more." Brands in Public is an initiative of Seth Godin's Squidoo and costs $400 a month.
- Salesforce Service Cloud 2 with a.o. Salesforce for Twitter "Monitor tweets and find customers that need help, let customers create cases with tweets, and even share knowledge with the Twitter community." If you already use SalesForce: a great way to put the "care" back into "customer care" by listening in on what your customers say about you on Twitter.
- socialseek by sensidea monitors "press, blogs, tweets, videos, pics, and events on any topic, in your city or anywhere". The app has a pretty a wide reach and allows you to export results and charts.
- attentio helps you to keep track of your brands in social media. Their attentio Brand Dashboard is a listening platform that allows you to identify who's influential in social media. Not a free service, but it allows companies to visualize buzz trends, share of buzz, detect "bursting events", and breakdown by source, topic and country.
- PeopleBrowser: is currently experiencing issues so I'll check back on that one later.
- viralheat: "social media monitoring, analytics, and insights. Now with location filtering." Seven days free trial; plans rangeat $9.99 to $139.98 a month
- Microsoft LookingGlass: currently a proof-of-concept prototype business tool. I heard about it during Social Media Forum. According to this post on the Microsoft Advertising Blog it will enable companies to listen to, participate in, and analyze social media in order to "quickly and efficiently put social media to use as they create advertising".
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