Title
Monitor and analyze global themes effectively with Netvibes
Link
Specifications
Netvibes provides white label dashboards that allow clients to monitor, engage, and measure content and conversations across blogs, news sites, and social media channels.
Features include automatic analysis of sentiment and tone, instant comparison charts, the ability to automatically create customized reports and email them to any users, on any schedule, or in response to custom alerts.
Cost
Starts at $499 per month per individual user. Team pricing available on request.
Ownership
Dassault Systèmes
User
Dean Russell, EMEA creative strategy director at Lewis PR Global, has been using Netvibes about two and a half years for the agency and for about five years overall.
How do you use it?
We log on and use the analysis tools around a particular client or account name and key words around that brand, such as crisis keywords, rapid response terms, or specific brand or product keywords. Results appear as you search.
The blessing of Netvibes is you can do anything, but it can be a curse, too. Unless you know what you want to analyze, you could spend a long time playing with all of the widgets and search queries.
Rather than set up a new dashboard of influencers for every client account, we’ve identified 4,000 to 5,000 key influencers globally within the industries and sectors we work in regularly for our clients. So the pool of analysis we use is based on influencers we rate.
For example, we have all the BBC journalists who are on Twitter as a feed within our master dashboard. We also have feeds for all CNN news journalists and production staff, as well as for specialist bloggers and other key influencers. That’s all set up as the backbone of how we use Netvibes.
When individuals within the agency want to search on a specific brand or account, it’s easy for them to set up search terms and add more specific influencers if need be.
Netvibes has a level of customer support that I’ve not seen in many other vendors. They’ve worked late in the evening to solve problems for me. I had an issue recently on a national holiday and they emailed me that day to find a solution.
How does it serve your business needs?
Being on top of the news agenda is key. The challenge we have, especially as a global agency, is to get that news as quickly as possible without having to hunt it down.
Netvibes is really powerful in helping us with everything from identifying news jacking opportunities to crisis alerts to the latest news around a brand or theme. Then we can effectively be on top of news for our clients.
The immediacy of it really serves the agency and our clients. We can set up alerts for topics we need to track daily or for opportunities, such as individual journalists or influencers asking for quotes or customer testimonials via Twitter.
Netvibes also gives us a sense of big trends. It’s brilliant at leading us to opportunities and to potential crises.
We are beginning to find Netvibes’ tagging tool really useful. For example, for one tech client, we tag all of the coverage we get for them. This allows us to compare coverage we’ve placed versus competitor activity. We can also tag coverage according to topic, coverage theme, sentiment, and so on.
We can also tag coverage according to topic, which team member got that coverage, sentiment, and so on.
You use the tagging tool within the browser. Data then appears in the results section of our dashboard so we can track not just things such as share of voice, which is important, but also whether we’re leading the news agenda, following it, or if we’re even in it. It also shows us which of the topics we’ve pitched are most successful and who is writing about particular topics.
We can pull all of this data out as different types of charts and also as a table of data that we can use to compare with other tagged content and wider content. This helps us get a real sense of where we’re focusing our energy and if we should be focusing on a different area.
All of this data can be focused on specific coverage we’ve gotten. It is a quite powerful tool to have for clients and account teams, especially in reporting.
Netvibes has a pushmail system you can set up to send variants of your master dashboard to people within the agency every morning. It can go to clients as well if needed.
We already use pushmail across several global clients, and we’ll soon roll it out agency-wide for all internal teams. Every morning we intend to track bigger news themes, and everyone in the agency will get an updated automatic email on the latest trends and hot industry topics impacting the news agenda. Globally, our teams will be able to sign up to a pushmail for a dashboard that looks at the most important trends that may affect our clients.
By using pushmail, the idea is the agency will become smarter and more aware of wider trends around key news. It will also ensure we’re more informed for our clients. For example, if a client wants to know who is talking about a particular topic or trend or how people feel about a topic, our team will know that because they’ll have seen it in their inbox every day or received an automated alert.
What are the main benefits?
– The ability to scale based on client needs or agency growth. There are no real limits to what you can in terms of scope.
– The ability to tailor the platform to our specific needs. It’s very beneficial to be able to set up your own tracking feeds.
– The depth of understanding and immediacy of the content it provides.
What are the main drawbacks?
Given the scalability and flexibility of the platform, unless you know what you want to get out of it, it can be hard to make the best use of it. The biggest challenge for any agency or company starting to use Netvibes is not to over do it with the tools. I recommend choosing one or two things to use it for at first.
When demonstrating it to clients and team members, be aware that it can seem complex because of its scalability and overwhelming because of its flexibility. Start small, prove the value and grow from there.
What would you like to see improved/added?
If anything, simplify the setup process for beginners. It’s a great user interface and it works very well, but the complexity when you first start using it probably puts a few people off. That said, if they never changed anything, I don’t think it would be a problem.
Competitors
Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio: a comprehensive suite of tools for social marketing that includes monitoring, content creation and management, engagement, advertising, automation and analytics.
Meltwater: Provides a social media marketing suite (Meltwater Buzz) which includes global media monitoring and analytics; a media contact database; and news distribution services (Meltwater News).
