Synthesio, an Ipsos company (acquired 2019) offers social monitoring and engagement tools. Synthesio competes with major listening vendors like Radian6 and Sysomos.
A point of differentiation is that Synthesio offers a mix of technology and human analysis. In their view, human analysis is required to validate and interpret the data.
Customers are large, particularly French, brands.
$1,200
per month
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
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.
Synthesio works well in delivering analytics. Logging in and viewing data is easy. When reporting to upper management, the tool is not the best. I think it could have real-time updates to displays. We are solving this by paying for the API access and exporting to our own dashboard solution.c
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 really works well. It provides an overall marketing solution like other tools in the market.
Cost should be a little bit decreased as it is a big pain point for brand managers to go with a tool with high costs.
Synthesio has a lot of potentials but the sales reps were not good at selling it. I think it only happened to me, maybe others may have not faced this problem.
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.
Ben Farkas was the representative that worked with us on this project, while we have been very excited with the work he provided, especially the customer service, we just did not have enough time with the product hands on to be comfortable giving it the 10 we think it deserves. As the Data tracking was done beyond our expectations and the finished product (infographic) were all excellent, we used this service to fill our need in being shorthanded to cover the data ourselves. Synthesio provided outstanding customer service, their data tracking and materials where top notch, just we lacked the hands on experience to speak to everyday use.
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).
Everything we needed was handled, in many cases during the first time we used Synthesio the representative made adjustments and explained them to us, some things we did not even consider when setting up the service.
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."
I think all the tools that are offering social media analysis, community management, and listening activities are quite the same. Synthesio is good because it has a fast and modern user interface which is one of the main reasons in terms of selecting a social media management tool.
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.
