I have been looking at, off and on, Heardable.com as a brand monitoring platform, which has become more popular, of late, and while this is not a full review – and I have a lot more to do on Heardable.com, to try out, I wanted to get some initial thoughts down as we go into Thanksgiving.

Here’s a report I set up for my blog, WebMetricsGuru.com (this blog); I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the information, and that’s my caveat.  Perhaps what I want is something, some arrangement, some dashboard, that’s unique to how I want to look at the world, and perhaps I can do it in Heardable – but still haven’t figured out what Heardable will provide fully, and what that dashboard might look like – if I had it.  Probably 99% of the stakeholders out there are in the same boat, and 1% will look at Heardable, out of the box, know what to do with it, like the definitions it gives, and go with it.

The rest will be puzzled, and try to figure out how to change them or just show the one’s they want, and get some that are missing – but what else is new?  Isn’t that the story of all these technologies?  Isn’t that what everyone ends up complaining about in just about every case.

Heardable is no different here, it has good stuff, but people scratch their heads figuring out what to do with it.

Heardable seems to be good at creating dashboards from collectable metadata on several million sites – take a look at questions such as which location is the most popular on FourSquare (check-ins), I believe this was a custom report I ran a few days back that popped up when I logged back in to my full access account.

According to Heardable, the top location is the Met Museum, today, followed by MOMA (no surprise), because a lot of people are probably at the MET or MOMA today, and in fact, I would have been one of them, but I didn’t end up going.

You can click on “Metropolitan Museum” in Chrome and in Firefox, and get different results, I liked the Chrome results are better (in terms of verbatim – recently republish and recently originated – from Klout, that don’t seem to be showing up in Firefox, not sure why, but it shows that you might want to use Heardable in Chrome rather than Firefox right now, to reap the full benefits of what it offers).  I think that highlights that there are technology issues that augment or prevent the full uses of emerging technologies like this one, which is the viewpoint I put forward in Social Media Analytics – if you don’t fully understand these issues, informed decisions are almost impossible to make – I know that’s something your average stakeholder doesn’t want to hear or deal with, but it’s true, and that’s why I wrote the book and this blog, as well as my own practice.

And clearly, the brand dashboard of the Metropolitan Museum (hey, I’m visiting the MET today, perhaps, not in person, but via Heardable – Ha!) can give a marketing manager or a community manager the information they need to decide who to target, or what’s not working for them and sign up for the more custom analysis that Heardable can provide (see  note below from the Heardable Dashboard of the MET Museum):

What This Score Means: Metropolitan Museum’s Heardable Score of 610 out of a possible 1000 points means this brand is considered a category-leading national brand by Heardable. This brand is ranked in the top 1% of all brands analyzed by Heardable, worldwide, and ranks #7 out of 1,767 competitors in the category Museums, and #1 of 46 brands based in New York, NY 10028.

Recommended Actions: With 390 points still available to Metropolitan Museum, including critical subscore areas such as Searchable and Sociable, brand managers, owners and agencies may wish to consider the free analysis and recommendations available in the subscore modules (i.e. ‘Sociable’) below – or sign up to access Heardable Pro custom lists, brand monitoring, and brand-enhancement tools

However, lets consider something, in looking deeper into Heardable.

- If your going to get the most out of Heardable, you will have to highly customize it, which i think anyone seriously using it for brand and competitor monitoring, would take the time to do.   However, bear in mind many of the brand rankings are based on defaults that, were they customized to the values that really exist for each brand would be 1) a lot of work and 2) change the rankings significantly.  Nevertheless – like anything else, what you get out of Heardable, or any other platform is a function of what your willing to put into it.

Heardable’s approach is to aggregate various social platform signals/metrics, yet the aggregation is based upon  ‘default’ brand search or domain values with all the other platforms being scraped based upon that naming convention / string.  That will give null results for a lot of the brand signals that Heardable is using to calculate the scores.

It just may be that Heardable needs some of it’s kinks to be fully worked-out, but what platform doesn’t have a bunch of kinks?  I don’t any that don’t have something they’re still working out.

-  Heardable  has been called a ” HubSpot / Grader.com” solution but for social media platforms – perhaps, with some better infographics” by some.  I then to more or less agree, with the caveat that the devil is in the details -Heardable provides a lot more information and categorization than Grader.com, so it might be the tool someone in Brand Marketing does want to use (but only IF, an only IF they are willing to put the work into configuring it properly).

- For example, if you really want “accurate scoring” you’ll need to edit each brand in a ranked list for various adjustments that include, for example, the actual Facebook page names, Twitter acct name (when they differ from the default, which they often do), Youtube channel name, LinkedIn company page name, etc.

- When you edit each  brand in a list, you need to  allow time for the adjustments to be applied (perhaps a day or two) though you can initiate updates to a brand immediately.  The problem comes when your comparing a several brands – you’ll need to do a bit to update them and then look at the entire ranked list.

Now, Heardable does let you do custom reports (which will benefit fully if you’ve put in the time to do the customization I alluded to above).

….

…

The gem of the platform is the custom research that is preformed, and something I’d like to see expanded on, quite a bit.

….

…

For example, the Web Analytics and Video Embed reports look at Platforms, but not actual content – nice for EMarketer, but not for Content Producers, who want to know how their content is doing, or what’s hot.

Now, Heardable can be made to do all those things – clearly, and it fact, is, for Politics - but there’s no easy way to get at that without having Heardable do it for you, which opens up the door to custom configurations and custom reporting that will get quite involved – nothing wrong with that, but just know that’s the pathway here and realize there is NO EASY PATH to figure out how to get this view of the data – more likely a report you want, the one you show your CEO, will look something like this – not that dashboard that comes out of the box with Heardable.

…

….

Now, Heardable is a platform you can do this kind of report on – it has the data, it has the capabilities, but what is lacking, is TIME and PATIENCE from the very people who’s aimed at.

Take this example – last week I was on the phone with a good friend of mine who has a platform (I’ll leave out details for privacy sake) – his platform is excellent – but the problem is the MARCOM agencies it’s aimed at, or internal company stakeholders are rushing around all day with 15 minute here and 20 minutes there, no attention span, most of the staff is interns (because those are the only people who haven’t been burnt out yet with rediculas management and client demands).

What is that kind of person or that kind of environment going to  be able to do with Heardable?   If they want to sell this to an agency, they need to figure out how to make it dummy proof – and remember, agencies want billings – they want to make money, they want billable hours – so if they can argue that Heardable will create the dashboard they need, with added billable hours, maybe some have a shot getting it funded for a client here or a client there.

But what about the rest of the people – who is going have the time to configure Heardable the way it needs to be?  That is the million dollar question that Heardable needs to answer.

I’ll continue to work with Heardable and try to figure out how to make do something like SocialStrawPoll.com, but for things I’m interested in.  If the team at Heardable can make that much easier, I think Heardable will have passed a hurdle – Ha!

More information on Heardable:

I have two upcoming Webinars (no urls for them yet) brewing, one with Recorded Future, on December 21st (afternoon) and another with Semphonic on January 11, 2012 (afternoon), which Gary Angel mentions in his recent post on Heading into the Home-Stretch of 2011 (see below)

“….. On my own personal front, I have some upcoming webinars and white papers I wanted to mention. Scott Wilder and I are going to be doing another of our Social Measurement Webinars in early January. We’re planning on tackling Social Media Tools in early January and we’re going to be joined by my friend Marshall Sponder. Our plan is to cover a whole of tools, talk about our real-world experiences using them, and try to figure out what features really matter when it comes to Social Media measurement. With three total tool junkies, it should be a lot of fun!

I’m also in the final stages of finishing up a white paper on building a real-time data collection infrastructure for the warehouse. I think it’s one of the best white papers I’ve written and I’m going to be devoting at least one full post to it in the weeks after Thanksgiving when it gets released. I’ll probably be putting together a webinar around that as well.”

TO SIGNUP for the SEMPHONIC Webinar I’ll be on – Jan 11th, 2012 – click on this link.

Really looking forward to this webinar, as well as the one from Recorded Future, which, to my thinking, will focus on financial events around the new year (I’m also thinking WEF, but we’re still working on the topic). Also looking forward to reading the next whitepaper Gary mentions in his post on  real-time data collection infrastructure for the warehouse  which lends itself to Social Analytics, as the data is streaming in, often, in real time, and Gary has given a lot of attention to Social Media Measurement lately, esp in his recent set of posts on the subject.

A couple of years back, when I was at the WAA Board, Social Media was still pretty new (I founded a committee on Social Media, the largest the WAA had, as it turned out), at that time, Social Analytics was an “interesting” if boutique offering that most Web Analytics platforms didn’t really do much with, or know how to collect (or weather it was even worth collection).   And look how far we’ve come in 3 or 4 years – as Web Analytics and Social Analytics have, to a large extent, merged, and while  you can talk about monitoring social media without site analytics, it’s hard to talk about site Analytics without measuring social media – because a lot of the audience is Social Media generated – guess what – and will be even more so, as time goes on.

And a lot more of that traffic is going to be mobile – tablet or smartphone driven, which is a whole different post that I’ll write about sometime soon.

Finally, one more announcement - I have written a chapter on Social Media Analytics for Public Relations, Branding, Advertising and Sales that is part of a new book titled “Public Interest and Private Rights in Social Media” Edited by Cornelis Reiman, Reiman and Co., Australia,  that will be published sometime next year by Chandos Publishing,  an Oxford, UK imprint of Woodhead Publishing.   The book probably won’t be available for several months, at earliest – but keep an eye out for it, and the good folks at www.chandospublishing.com.

The idea for this chapter came from an original chapter from Social Media Analytics that wasn’t published, due to space concerns, I reworked it quite a bit, added some SMROI information and put a new perspective on all of it.

Looking forward to seeing my contribution as part of  publication that is an offshoot of Oxford University (as I understand it).

Finally, I gave a webinar yesterday for Social Media Club Mexico that was hosted along with McGraw-Hill; it was the first time for Social Media Club Mexico and McGraw-Hill to work together in this way – and it was exciting to reach out to new people, who are interested in hearing more about Social Media Analytics.

Happy to see that I post I wrote a little while back finally got published How to Identify Foursquare Influencers using Check-in data, over at OurSocialTimes.com today.

But what really got my attention was something that, I admit, might be old news for industry insiders in SEM, but not typical knowledge, that American Express is now offering Search Engine Marketing Services.  That’s big news.

It says to me, that Search has gone totally mainstream, and now … American Express had decided to throw their hat into the ring to help businesses grow their visibility (and I suppose, measure their campaigns and ROI from Search) via it’s own services.

I suppose, it’s a few steps down the line when the do Social Media Analytics too – maybe just monitor the brand mentions, then do sentiment, then before you know it – offering an entire brand monitoring solution.

I wonder if this is a sign of a growing trend in 2012.   I’ll have more to say about it next month when I write my predictions for 2012 along with how I did with my 2011 predictions.