Infegy Atlas is a social monitoring tool that moves beyond simple number counting to providing answers that help researchers better understand consumers through advanced automated analysis of social media.
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Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
Infegy Atlas works best when analyzing large datasets - this means it is ideal for large clients, or topics upon which there is a significant volume of discussion. For smaller clients or niche topics, it can be challenging to produce a quantity of data that makes Atlas' analysis valuable. This challenge is common to all monitoring/analysis platforms, however; it's not exclusive to Atlas.
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Sysomos Heartbeat: the proactive social media monitoring software. The dashboard was efficient and minimalist, and provided detailed reporting on where the social conversation was held for each individual hotel. The rich data and the simplicity of the dashboard made this tool particularly useful and easy to implement -- it was also easier to train new employees with the software.
Sysomos Heartbeat: We also used it to keep track of any crisis that arose. The tool made it easy to catch any spikes in conversation that would spread rapidly either across one channel or multiple channels.
Customer Service: Our hotels receive lots of inquiries, requests, payments, and reviews through various social channels. Sysomos helped keep track of them.
It's a little buggy sometimes, but 90% of the time it's great. This is an issue they're aware of and are working on.
The query interface is awesome except for past queries you've entered. Other tools, like NetBase, have a much better system for tagging and sorting past queries so you can save them for projects. Infegy is working on this as well, I'm told.
Like any space that is constantly changing, they are behind in a couple areas - such as minute-by-minute analysis (which Brandwatch can do), and integration with other major platforms that are non-US-centric, like Weibo (which Brandwatch has), and more sentiment-ready languages (Infegy has 6, NetBase has 9). But in every other factor they are far ahead.
Their influencer/klout score algorithm is worthless - it caps out at 10 so the New York Times and Jo Schmo gamer dude and Justin Bieber all have the same score.
The Boolean builder can be frustrating, it will tell you there is an error, but gives you no indication of where. In a complex string it can take forever to figure out what you messed up.
Twitter listening only goes back one year. If you ever need to compare something year over year, without anticipating the need in advance and downloading reports, you're screwed.
Atlas is reasonably-priced and provides excellent value compared to other enterprise tools in the same space. Moreover, we have an excellent relationship with the Infegy team and are consistently impressed with the high quality of support they provide.
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
The system is typically pretty fast and easily accesible. Due to contract restrictions, our team sometimes has issues with overlap in usage (we only have one login to share amongst the team).
Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
We did a deep, thorough survey of each of these tools. Some of my earlier answers have covered the distinction. I would rank the top 5: Infegy Atlas NetBase Synthesio Brandwatch DataRank Part of it is current capabilities, of course, but a big part of it is product direction. Some of these tools do not value Natural Language Processing NEARLY enough, and do not do real work to build NLP based on actual Linguistic Theory (which is surprisingly scientific, by the way), so they just do a little to monitor volume and pretty poor sentiment, call it social listening, and deliver it to enterprise clients. This is true of Radian6, Meltwater, Visible Technologies (which was acquired by Cision recently, hence its inclusion here). Of course, my list above is the enterprise level top 5. If you're looking for small biz solutions check out Mention (formerly social mention) or NUVI if you can scale to the bottom of their tiers.
Sysomos MAP is focused on listening (not management of social media accounts - features exist, but these are not the core purpose). It does a great job of measuring open networks, particularly Twitter, and a good job of monitoring mainstream press sites. For the most part it scales well, and the user-interface is relatively user-friendly, which allows us to decentralize use (important for a very large organization). Not the most expensive of the pack either.
