Last month, I e-mailed my entire family and suggested they setup Google Alerts on their name. When a week later someone created a malicious Facebook group slandering my sister (very uncool), I was reminded of the importance of knowing what people are publicly saying about you and your products.
When I first began working on TechCrunch, I immediately looked for a tool to alert me whenever people wrote about CrunchBase online. After demo’ing several products, I landed on SM2 by Techrigy.
Techrigy announced last week that their index of online conversations just broke the 1 billion mark. And two days ago, they announced real-time alerts, fixing my biggest complaint with the service–results previously took a day or two to appear.
Like most website analytics packages, these conversation monitoring tools face a delicate balance between simple interface and powerful statistics. Much like a scientific calculator is very powerful, but a little confusing.
Many of the products I tried were too simple–for a product like CrunchBase, which is mentioned multiple times per hour–the ability to extract trends from mounds of data is far more important than seeing individual comments.
Products mentioned less often will place more value on real-time alerts for individual mentions. I know one of CrunchBase’s competitors left a comment hyping their product on any blog that mentioned CrunchBase.
The service is clearly targeted at larger businesses. While they offer a free version for up to five search phrases, the next plan costs $500 a month.
Very useful, hope they’ve implemented well. Just signed up to check it out. Nice, easy-to-use site/interface. Will have to see how well it works.
Yeah I’m signing up as well. It looks like some pretty powerful, but hopefully it won’t turn into another place where people sit all day. ; )
The steroid metaphor is getting old
It’s like Google Alerts on steroids…on acid. To the extreme! 2.0.
Sorry.
It is a LOT better than Google alerts–like real-time alerts, plus Google Analytics for your site, except the analytics are for a few keywords across the entire web.
I was going to write the same thing. It’s a very lazy statement. Made next time try one of these…
1.) Think Google Alerts On Crack
2.) Think Google Alerts On Meth
3.) Think Google Alerts with double overhead cams
4.) If Google Alerts was a virgin Techrigy would have taken on the whole Pittsburgh Steelers team at once.
5.) On a scale from one to a hundred, I would give Google Alerts a 5 and Techrigy… a million.
6.) Comparing Techrigy to Google alerts is like comparing Twitter to anything.
Very neat – very useful as well. Will be using this in the future.
Techrigy is interesting from a social media perspective. I have been using another product from Axonize (axonize.com). It covers both web 1.0 and web 2.0 (social) media. It gave me alerts like Techrigy but also helped me improve the online visibility of my product line. Our web traffic doubled in 3 months and our search engine ranking on keywords that mattered the most rose significantly.
Best of all, pricing started at 100 bucks a month. So I could charge it to my card and check out if the product worked before proposing it to my entire team. I am at the 1000 per month level now but it has been worth it.
Website needs a little polish, but the product is very good.
Yes, I like their product too. Have used it for quite sometime and the conversation alerts etc are very timely and relevant. I am still at the $100 level as we are a small organization, however the ROI has been good so far. I would definitely recommend them.
As an addition to Google Alerts, on WikiWorldBook, a free online address book, you can also set up a Search Alert, which emails you immediarely someone has Googled your name and clicked on your profile (your profile should rank high up in the Google results unless you have a very common name or are famous). It provides you with information on the Searcher’s IP address and plots their approximate geographical location on a map.
If they have Googled you from a business, you might even get their business name – as businesses tend to use fixed (and therefore named) IP’s rather than domestic IP’s which rotate.
I was personally Googled by Google itself last December, which makes for interesting thoughts!
Wow, thanks for the info on the tools, I will defintely start using this.
It’s like Google Alerts on steroids…on acid. To the extreme! 2.0.
FAIL
I signed up to an account – its very poorly written software, says my “search is running” and its not appearing, cant re-run.
Very clunky interface…. and whats with the try-hard Google Analytics rip-off look?
Jason,
Can you email me. I can look at your account and see if you’ve had any issues with your account account with regards to your search running.
Jim Reynolds
Director Of Sales
Techrigy, Inc
Twitter.com/jimmyrey
same here, doesn’t seem to work….when I click on a job to run, it says something else is running; when I check on “running jobs” it doesn’t show anything. Big question mark.
Gonzalo,
If you can shoot me a quick email, I’d be happy to take a peek at your account.
Jim Reynolds
Director Of Sales
Techrigy, Inc
Folks, please be patient with us! This isn’t intended to be a consumer product and getting a great post like this on Techcrunch is a little overwhelming. Searches in SM2 take awhile to run because they are searching the entire database for historical results first then pulling new stuff. It’s not a Google search- we pull down a lot of data for each mention of your keyword(s) and then do analysis on it.
Going to be an interesting day!
Martin Edic Director of Marketing, Techrigy, Inc,
Can anyone get it to work? I tried their “Renew America” demo profile and when I click on stuff it just brings me back to the home page over & over. so far… fail!
Thanks everyone so far for checking out SM2!
If you do have trouble let us know – we are listening on Twitter and your blogs for your feedback. If your jobs aren’t running, it’s ok – they are backed up and will run later tonight. Its designed to find and analysis what you are looking for – so please don’t expect the results it to come back immediately. You’ll start getting your emails with the analysis shortly.
Let us know your feedback!
Regards,
Aaron
_______________________________
Aaron C. Newman
President/Founder
Techrigy, Inc.
cell: 646-280-5168
http://www.techrigy.com
http://twitter.com/aaronnewman
- Providing visibility into Social Media -
Hi Giovani & all,
This article resulted in a huge number of signups. Please have patience. We’ll have you connected in a bit.
Email me at connie@techrigy.com
Connie
Community Strategist
Techrigy
I see now it takes a while (at least at the moment) to run. Still, it should show that something is running I guess…but at least I got some results now.
We have the Director of Sales, Director of Marketing, the Community Strategist from Techrigy replying…
Where is the Director of Software Development?
FAIL.
Good point – you’d think the Director of Software Development would reply. But he’s at the data center keeping the system running today. He’s got his hands full ;)
Excellent! Keep the techies in the back room. I don’t like them either : ) Just kidding!
Good luck.
Hi sky – we have the Software guys all locked up in the back room, how do you think we got this thing built so quickly? We throw them some pizza and soda every so often….seems to be working. ;)
Jim Schwab
VP Sales & Marketing
Techrigy
@jim, no actually it doesn’t seem to be working.
Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server. The status code returned from the server was: 0
Hi Giovani,
Can you shoot me an email? I’d like to see where this error occurred.
Jim
Awesome! This tool rocks!
Jimmy,
Way to go man! that rocks…very psyched for all your cats at Techrigy! Nice to see such great minds coming out of Rochester!
Rochester is the east coast silicon valley on “steroids”!! Didn’t you know that?
FAIL! to all the people still using FAIL!
Stop it. It’s about as original and catchy as saying, ” ‘X’ is ‘Y’ on steroids!”
FAIL FAIL FAIL
The whole site seems to just time out for me at the moment… Seems like a neat tool but I can’t get in to use it.
Ah, the good and the bad of a tech crunch post about your company!
People can’t wait to try your product…but the overwhelming traffic slows the site down.
Once the first wave ebbs, I’ll check it out!
Jesse & Kats,
We will be putting setting up a webinar for early next week. Be sure to sign up for a Freemium account and you’ll receive an invite.
Also thank you both for understanding the wave that Techcrunch causes. You’ll be able to test your accounts very soon.
Jim Reynolds
Director of Sales
Techrigy, Inc
1 billion? My head spins at the logistics of organizing that.
This sounds like a useful service. I’m gonna sign up.
We ShoppingNotes.com also offers an alert service for watching the price of any product from any on-line store. Just go to ShoppingNotes.com to enter the product page URLs you want to watch and your email address. Then we will watch them for you and notify you by email when their prices change.
Give it a try!
I love the concept, but I am quiet disappointed with the results. At first glance, the reports look very nice, but when you dig down, you realize that the sentiment being expressed in a particular result is actually being expressed towards a different topic. So there are many false positives and false negatives. In fact, I noticed that often my “topic” was not even mentioned on the page; it was in the URL. I’m not sure this product/service is ready for “prime time”, but I will check it again at some stage down the line because I think it would be useful it you could trust the results.
Hi Connor,
Most of our competitors don’t offer automated sentiment. We offer both sentiment & tone.
But it is intended to be considered as a high level overview. Each result is being compared against a lexicon dictionary. A machine is making the decisions based on the given dictionary. Of course the ideal situation would be a human doing it so they can take sarcasm & innuendo into account. Our customers are using the results as a starting point & then using the human perspective to refine them. We have also found that words have various meanings depending on the industry, so we now offer the customer the ability to personalize it to their needs.
As I mentioned we have sentiment & tone. I’m not sure which you were looking at. The sentiment is in reference to the topic. The tone references use of the human language.
I’d be glad to answer other questions or concerns.
Connie
Community Strategist
Techrigy
First time I heard of if and would definitely check it out.
Brilliant offering that has corporate implications, as well as fo rthe home user who is nervous about other peoples opinions.
Thanks Sarah! And yes, the Freemium offers the home user a complete monitoring solution to help them build brand. It would work for small businesses too.
And the professional tool is a great tool for agencies & the corporate level
Let me know if you have questions,
Connie
Community Strategist @Techrigy
support@techrigy.com
Techrigy’s SM2 is an AWESOME product!!! We have been using the product in our service offerings for over a year.
Businesses can gain a great deal of value from the product. Businesses need to understand how to use the tool, what the data means and how to act on it.
ManoByte is an authorized reseller of the SM2 product and work very closely with our partner Techrigy and our clients to successfully establish a Social Media Analytics initiative.
Kevin Dean
ManoByte
http://www.manobyte.com/blog
I just came across Techrigy. To be honest i have not seen the software in action but because i read the comments above i feel that much work has to be done. From my experience on Text Mining the average success rate in sentiment analysis is around 63% . Using synonyms raises that by around 4%. But to achieve an accuracy of more than 75% takes much more work and “tricks of the trade”
Themos,
That’s veru consistent with our own testing. We test our Scout Labs sentiment algorithms against human scored documents frequently, and we are consistently in the 72-75% agreement with humans (all entity-specific sentiment detection). Here is more about how we do sentiment and how accurate it is: http://www.scoutlabs.com/2009/02/26/how-does-sentiment-work-and-how-accurate-is-it-anyway/. I’d like to see more DATA DISCUSSION in our space!
There are lots of ways to bulk up your Google Alerts without resorting to artificial additives like steroids. If you take the time to learn more about the Google Alerts syntax, you’ll be amazed at what you can find. Special operators like source: and location: can target Google News Alerts. Searching within page with intext: and intitle: will let you build customized page parsing code to find things like Twitter users with specific words in their bio. I’ve collected a lot of these Google Alerts tricks in my free tutorial:
http://www.alertrank.com/google-alerts-tutorial.html
Contact me directly on Twitter (@MrGoogleAlerts) if you want to avoid steroids and learn how to bulk up the old-fashioned way.