Oracle Social Cloud (legacy) vs. Sysomos, now part of Meltwater

It's well suited if you are in a situation where you need control of the content that is published out to your channels. It provides complete trackability for every action taken by each member of staff when working with the system so you can always know who was overall responsible for any decision that was made. It's less suited to small businesses that have limited social media presence. It is very slow on being kept up to date with the native platform and the lack of ability to schedule the same post multiple times is frustrating

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Ease of reporting. Allows us to pull reports by network or by campaign quickly. This used to be a manual process that would take upwards of 8 hours per month.
• Real-time social media monitoring, with virtually no spam. Other providers struggle to remove spam content from their social monitoring results which makes sifting through mentions cumbersome.
• Integration into other tools. Being able to integrate other Oracle products like Eloqua and web analytics like Omniture helps us see social media content as part of our larger pipeline now.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tabs tool could be much more user friendly, i.e. completely "drag and drop". It was pretty easy to get something functional built, but if you didn't know how to code CSS then you were pretty much hopeless when it came to making the tab look "professional".
• Their bulk uploading/scheduling feature for posts was always having issues, it was something I always wanted to take advantage of and was bummed that it didn't really work well enough to make it efficient.
• When I was using the tool, it was a very janky user experience when you needed to go and locate a post or comment that had been automatically removed due to keyword filters. And there was no simple way to just view a stream of what's being said on/to your accounts.

• 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.

Incentivized

Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.

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.

Within a few hours you should be able to get up to speed to do the basics. I find it very intuitive

Incentivized

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).

If searching over longer time frame, it can take a while to return results. SOmetimes as long as two to three minutes.

The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies

Incentivized

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."

Incentivized

Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.

We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.

Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!

Incentivized

We started our social marketing journey by just using the free version of Hootsuite. It had good listening but was limited in other areas, especially as it related to campaign tracking and some analytics. Even looking at the Enterprise versions, we didn't feel it had the breadth of functionality as Oracle SRM.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
• Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
• Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.

Incentivized

• Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work
• We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics
• Competition tracking was never easier

Incentivized