General Sentiment (discontinued) vs. uberVu (discontinued)

Determine what your research question or customer relations needs are to pick a tool that is a good match.

I liked uberVU a lot, and thought I was lucky to have found them (they actually responded to my tweet when I was vendor-searching, which was good to know as they were doing just what we were planning to use the software for). They are relatively small, which allows to have a great personal relationship and we felt very valued as a client. They provided great value - some of their competitors allow for more features (which explains their higher price), but there was no way to opt out of the unnecessary features to lower the price - uberVU didn't have any of that, it was just what we needed and in our price range

• Using volume and association metrics to assess and predict trends and emerging topics
• Use the articles metric to drill down into specific posts, such as tweets, Facebook, blog comments, news articles
• General Sentiment has the ability to access password protected sites to access information that may not normally show up in standard internet searches

• Easy to see what people are saying on social media about clients.
• Creates reports that can be limited to certain time frames.
• Able to see the reach of users so you can breakdown by influencers.

• The application does take time to start gathering data on a specific topic. As such, its important to include as many keyword search topics as possible, and also be sure to refine them as you gather data.
• The user interface isn't particularly intuitive, there is some work that could be done to streamline its use.

• The lists on the side bar are hard to keep track of if you have a lot of clients.

Social media tools are constantly evolving. I would want to be sure that my research question was complimented by the metrics and options presented by the social media tool. General Sentiment is very useful and innovative and their customer service was excellent. Their sales and customer service team was very helpful in onboarding our staff and being flexible with our needs.

I find it a great tool in the digital strategy world to see what people are saying across social platforms. It's much more efficient that doing a search on the platform itself and provides a lot of information extremely quickly

All the users found the product intuitive and easy to use.

A couple of times it was a little slow, but this didn't result in any negative impact for us. There was no downtime as I could recall or notice.

Every time we needed help, the support was great. We had no issues, mostly needed usability walkthroughs and had questions about features.

I got the training while I was evaluating and in the trial period. Then I trained the others myself

Not applicable since it is SAAS - all we needed was to sign up, which was easy

Radian6 and Brandwatch were on the short list. We picked uberVU for its combination of price and features. It did not have extra features we didn't need, they were customizable and flexible enough to meet all of our needs

• Social media analytics can accelerate the speed with which researchers can investigate a topic of interest, at a lower cost.
• Due to the low barrier to entry (e.g., most social media sites and blogs are free), data collection burden, as traditionally defined, is significantly reduced or eliminated. The absence of direct interactions between researchers and the study population may do more to mitigate sources of bias compared to other more intrusive forms of data collection (i.e., interviews, focus groups).
• Used to to gather unstructured data and feedback from Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, advocates, and other stakeholders to identify systemic issues that beneficiaries encounter.

• Easier to handle crisis.
• Ability to find out statistics to quantify and qualify what you're doing for customers.