I’m currently evaluating ViralHeat and trying to make up my mind on how it fits into the Social Media Monitoring space, I had an free account for close to a week and was made aware of ViralHeat’s relaunch by Jason Falls who I saw two weeks ago at Event Camp here in NYC.  Jason wrote a post last week on Viralheat Plants Stake As Affordable Social Media Monitoring Solution.

Note to myself: This week I was thinking a lot about  what it takes to effectively work with and use a social media monitoring platform and decided it takes a bit of time and working out on practical applications to get a real sense of how useful it would be to own it or what the full limitations are. To be fair I had that opportunity with Radian6 and Sysomos and not so much with Viralheat.

However, Raj and Vishal who started Viralheat.com have given me another month to evaluate their platform and I will put it through it’s paces, but also talk about what I actually see and think of it.

Given Viralheat is a lot less expensive than any of the other Social Media Monitoring platforms I’ve reviewed- almost anything they come up with makes them a better value for the money than the others if price were the main issue – but it’s not as simple as that, not a black or white situation.

For example, Google Alerts is free, and essentially provides the same functionality as  ViralHeat (minus the dashboards, historical data once the profile is running and community sharing) but replicating the dashboard feature manually with Google Alerts would be  lot of work and time is money.

Still, if it were all about 29.00 per month for 20 profiles/keyword searches vs. several hundred per month  for one topic profile per month (Radian6/Alterian/BrandWatch, etc) no one would buy anything – since it’s all free – and there is a lot of added value the platforms I just listed.

And then there’s Google, the eight hundred pound Gorilla and big Pink Elephant in the room  – I bet you anything  some smart programmer at Google is creating the PR Dashboard of the future in a Mountain View office right now, using their 20% free time, plugging in using Google Alerts with a nice charting application – and it’s all ready to drop into public view just as soon as Google Corporate decides to release it - and it will be totally free and will have alerts, have charting – have Google Analytics, forecasting and trending and draw upon Google’s Industry Segmentation information (in Google Analytics now) – and be better than many of the platforms on the market now.  I said as much in the article I cowrote with Cecilia Pinada Feret  at MyCustomer.com a few weeks ago and republished on my blog “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com.

On the face of it, this dashboard looks good.  Digging in deeper I examined  the details of the profile I set up (yes, it’s a Cuban restaurant) I didn’t see anything on the Facebook page for the restaurant  (Radian6 would have shown me this) and I could add the Facebook page as a source, which I can’t do in Viralheat.  A quick question to Viralheat’s Customer Service, Raj Kadam, CEO of Viralheat – replied within 30 minutes of my request told me what I needed to know:

Hi,

Can you give us the link to the Facebook page? By the way, why are you not using Facebook Insights for your metrics? The sole purpose of Facebook Pages in Viralheat is for you to discover new pages or posts where you can engage audiences and give you a general lay of the land. For example, if you are running a cuban restaurant, you can put “cuban food” and then discovery influential places on facebook where people hang out talking about cuban food. That gives you a chance to engage those audiences and drive more business.

Let me know your thoughts?

Regards,

Raj Kadam

CEO, Viralheat Inc.

Viralheat is not going to try to replicate Sysomos which can get at the Facebook Fan pages you administer (via Sysomos HeartBeat) or Radian6, which can get the public postings off the same page – they assumed if you care about your Facebook metrics, and it’s your page – you have access to Facebook Insights and can get the data for your self.  Rather – Viralheat is focused on helping you uncover content where you as the the content creator, can reach out to and grow your brand presence online.

But then, Viralheat doesn’t offer you any CRM, Workflow administration and tracking that a more expensive system might offer – but since this is a very low priced, inexpensive platform – perhaps having workflow and CRM modules is not as important to the audience who would use it.   And, you can still share a social media mention with a friend via email and contact the author of a social mention in Twitter or Blog, etc – but that’s not Social CRM (still, it’s pretty darn good for the money).

And in that sense, Viralheat is a good deal – it’s cheap and it does what it was designed to do – it’s just not the same exact thing that some of the more expensive platforms do – but that’s maybe that’s ok if your getting started and don’t have the budget for more.

I found one area ViralHeat is superior to the other platforms  – they freely open their API to anyone who wants to pull data from it -  ViralHeat is much like Compete.com – in the sharing of it’s data with several application vendors – and this feature has proven to be very popular and drive api calls to Compete.com and links back from the services using it (I know Ask.com used Compete.com for stats a while back, but several others have since).

In fact, I’ll go on record -  Compete.com should approach Viralheat and ask them if they can use the Viralheat.com API to pull in Social Media data to complement Compete.com.

I know Compete is owned by TNS – which could have done the same thing for Compete – except, by doing so they’d be undercutting their paid intelligence whereas using ViralHeat, they would not have that same problem.

I’ve discussed this idea of merging a buzz monitoring platform with Compete  before with them (but with a different vendor in mind) but I have no idea if they plan to implement it – but it would be great if they did.

Viralheat is also monitoring Google Buzz, as is Radian6 and several others – here’s a video of the features of Viralheat:

There are Influencer lists, which it strikes me is really the same thing as what Radian6 River of News and collecting the follower/following count and other statistic (from Compete.com, ironically) where you can rank influence -and in the Influencer Widget that Radian6 provides.

Also, there is sentiment analysis – but upon closer examination – it has the same problems most of the other platforms I’ve looked at have – and Viralheat is careful to phase negative sentiment as “potentially negative sentiment” – they won’t come out and declare it since they know they will be wrong a good deal of the time – and so it is  – look at the results below for negative sentiment and cuban food – how many of them are really negative about cuban food?

I can’t really say any of the tweets above are negative – in fact, most of them are just the reverse- maybe what we should be measuring (since we can’t do sentiment well on these platforms) is intensity of emotion - that kinda can be done -and at least you can decide to look at “intense opinions” and decide what you want to do with them, if your so inclined.

Noticed you can also get details on what the system considers to be influencers.

The Viralheat influencer list is probably not any better than what anyone else can come with but – again, if cost is your main consideration – than it’s good enough.   And at the lower price of 29 dollars per month I can see my data on a weekly basis only – I have to upgrade to get a monthly view.

I also noticed I could add other public profiles to my own – and the data is updated quickly and I’m noting again how much more of a community platform this is than, say Radian6, Sysomos or Biz360 (though BrandWatch does appear to have a community aspect built in as most of the queries are public).

But then again, there is no definitions or standards  around what Viralheat is publishing as metrics – and this could be a problem.

For example, what is the “weekly impact”?  How is it calculated – is this the total amount of content that Viralheat monitored over a week’s time with my keywords in it?  If so, how does that help me – what can I do with that information?

Jason Falls weighs in:

The sexy metric I noticed that isn’t as easy to find, though is probably available in other services, is the “Total Impact” which seems to essentially be an eyeball count. While that metric alone is flawed and not something you should focus on, the C-level folks like telling their chums over lobster bisque, “Our Tweeter presence reached 14.5 million people last month.” (Which is what Dell’s “impact” was according to the charts I saw during my demo.)

But then, Viralheat would be playing into the the problems we’re trying to escape from – of viewing Social Media as a broadcast medium and counting impressions and eyeballs – they’re offering you this flawed metric in case you want it.

Since I can’t  compare my brand with someone elses in this platform unless I export my brand and my competitors into Excel and spend a few hours mashing up all the comparisons myself  (you get what you pay for, essentially) - how would i benefit by knowing how much of the total mentions of my keywords are from me - esp if I’m a small business that can’t afford to spend more than 29 bucks a month, or a little more for the deluxe version?

And because small businesses that would buy a Viralheat probably aren’t into spending a lot of time messaging the data – the good stuff it could provide probably won’t be accessed – since anyone that buy this platform will probably not be willing to hire an analyst to get insight from it – the same thing that happened with Google Analytics, by the way.

When we get to the point where a platform costs next to 0 dollars, with data as a commodity, there is no incentive to drive deep analysis from it – no desire to staff up for it – no investment in the process – essentially Google fueled that trend by making all it’s tools appear to be free.

By we know, as my friend Avinash Kaushik pointed out many times before, that it’s the analyst that creates value and meaning in the data – but what kind of value and meaning will anyone want to put on cheap data that costs nothing but which you must put a lot of work into to get much meaningful – in the context of your business?  Nothing – that’s right – 0.  If you buy Viralheat, you don’t care about investment – you just want charts and alerts for next to nothing – intelligence …. well …. maybe in version 2.

Unique authors might be more helpful – except I’m getting all the authors about cuban food, though I suppose I could have written my query to include the brand name (in fact, I did, but it’s still updating the data – I’m thinking it might take a day to reflect the changes).

And while Viralheat says they are covering Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Videos, in practice, I’m not seeing all that data coming in yet – and my profile for the cuban restaurant was running for almost a week – and with alerts too (which I can setup).  Mind you, my query was quite simple and should have picked up something – the other platforms did – I have  a similar one running on Radian6 for the last year.

So at the end of the day – how useful is a platform like Viralheat?

I think, today, I would not use this platform if I cared about the accuracy of the results or the dependability or getting all the information out there – it’s a good first attempt at reaching out into the territory of the other platforms I reviewed, but it needs another 6 months to a year to mature.

Also, I don’t want to close without talking about Geo-location.  In my profile I can select the nearness to a certain location I want to see results on.

First, I don’t know how well this works – and second – changing the radius doesn’t update the results in real time .. again, I got what I paid for.

In other words, I can’t do any serious analysis on the data – and qet questions answered in real time – because I’m paying for el cheapo package – which hampers my analytics “what if” skills and abilities.

So this platform isn’t really for me – it’s too basic, too rigid in it’s ability to recast the data in any kind of real time so I can work through some ideas – and  unsuitable, at this time, for serious analysis work.

But, if you don’t need to do alot of analysis – maybe this platform is OK.