Monday, November 7, 2011

Socialmention Battle Arena: Battle of the CRMs

I came across this tool called socialmention and thought I would give it a bit of a plug. Essentially it is a free social analysis tool covering quite a wide range of sources. Here are the results of the vanity search:

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Most of it is pretty self-explanatory. The four measures in the top left are as follows:

  • Strength: Likelihood of keyword being mentioned socially (turns out I am not mentioned very much)
  • Sentiment: Ratio of positive to negative mentions (this is a pretty dodgy measure as it appears to use keyword matching to determine the sentiment of messages)
  • Passion: Measures how likely people are to repeatedly talk about the keyword. For example, if it is a small group of people that constantly mention ‘leontribe’ this will have a high passion score even if the relative Strength of the output is low.
  • Reach: A measure of influence

They also offer a service similar to Google Alerts, although I have not been able to get it working yet.

Battle of the CRMs

Using the CRM’s mentioned by Gartner we get the following results (I used all quadrants except the bottom left):

Salesforce.com Dynamics CRM Oracle CRM Siebel CRM SAP CRM SalesLogix
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The Winners

In terms of likelihood of being mentioned (Strength), SalesForce is the winner, closely followed by Dynamics CRM. Except for SAP CRM, the others are far behind.

For sentiment, SAP CRM can do no wrong but, as mentioned I am somewhat sceptical of this measure. Any system which gives Hitler and Osama Bin Laden a three positive to one negative ratio has got limitations.

For passion, look no further than SalesLogix. That small group of social networkers talk about SalesLogix the most frequently. Interestingly, SalesForce has the smallest passion score meaning the people mentioning it are not concentrated to a small group.

In terms of influence (reach), Siebel has the longest arms, closely followed by Oracle CRM and SalesForce. SalesLogix had the shortest arms so while the SalesLogix socialites talk often, they do not talk to a diverse group.

Review of the Keywords

The keywords of the different products also offer some insight. For SalesForce we see their focus on the cloud and for enterprise business to make use of social channels. We also see mention of Benioff, their CEO, speaking at the strong influence he has on their brand. They also mention Oracle, which may be because of the recent circus at OpenWorld.

For Dynamics CRM, the terms are a little more general but talk about office software and a customer focus.

The Oracle and Siebel keywords talk about business software with a strong salesforce automation and marketing focus.

The most interesting, in my opinion, are the SAP CRM keywords which are more about the people who work with the product and their career than about the product itself or the customer.

The rather strange keywords regarding SalesLogix are because of a recent press release put out by Sage regarding one of their customers.

Conclusions

If you are looking for a free social analysis tool, this is not a bad place to start and, while it is not as comprehensive as many of the non-free alternatives it is a good way to get an idea of what a brand is up to. If you are feeling bored, you can also play the Social Mention negative sentiment game where you (and as many of your friends as you like) try to find ANY keyword phrase which has a negative sentiment score i.e. more negative mentions than positive (it took a colleague and I about an hour to find one). If they are family-friendly rated, feel free to add them to the comments Winking smile

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