The new Web offers great transparency if you are able to find what is being said on a topic in the maze of information. I recently commented on ten reputation management tools see – Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation. A few days ago, I spoke with Aaron Newman, CEO of Techrigy about their offering in this space.  As we started the conversation I realized I had his book, Enterprise 2.0 Implementations, on my desk. The review copy was given to me after I interviewed Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch, the book’s technical editor.  I have only read a few chapters so far but it looks like a great resource.

As we discussed, people are turning increasingly to the Web to help with decisions, including purchasing products.  Companies and individuals are also becoming more aware of the need to monitor what is being said about them on the Web and to take action to respond to both positive and negative mentions.  Techrigy is designed to address this need with a balance of comprehensive analytics, simplicity of use, and a modest price point.  From what I have seen they have accomplished all three goals with their SM2 product.

They are building a warehouse of online conversation, adding ten million a day and have reached the one billion mark. With each conversation, they have added up to 35 fields of associated meta-data including profile information, sentiment and tone, demographics, links and more. This storage allows for more rapid search results that have associated demographics.  I found it interesting that 800 million of these conversations come from blogs and 140 million come from Twitter feeds but they are not limited to these channels. 

The SM2 analytics sit on top of this warehouse. SM2 has 2 types of searches: Basic and Advanced. A basic search is the preferred method, but only supports the AND operator. For example: “Obama” and “President”. From time to there is a need for other operators such as OR, NOT, NEAR, etc.

The advanced search feature has the ability to support these searches. For example: “(Obama or Bush) and “President”.  SM2 searches also have the ability to exclude phrases from a search. Adding an exclude word will cause a result to not appear if it contains one or more of the phrases configured in the exclude phrases. “Obama” and “President” with an exclude word of “Inauguration” will exclude all postings with the word respectively.

SM2 produces a variety of reports and allows for extensive filtering of these reports. Below you can see a daily report with some of the possible filters indicated in the drop down menu. The left column also shows some of the many ways to look at the data by daily volume, themes, demographics, map overlay, sentiment, etc.

Sentiment was one of the views that caught my attention. You can see an example of the reports of positive and negative sentiment for brand below.  You can drill down on each mention to see what was said whom and their demographics and also change the computer generated rating to correct any incorrect assumptions (e.g. pain might be positive or negative for a mention of aspirin depending on what else is said). This way you can fine tune the results.

In addition to looking at the perceived expressions sentiment you can look at the overall tone of the mention on a five point scale as seen below.

You can also sort the mentions by their channel to see where the conversations are occurring. The screen shot below shows an example where Twitter leads the pack for this brand with 190 mentions.  Following are a number of blog tools (LiveJournal, Word Press, Blogger, Typepad that in aggregate total more than Twitter. Next in order are: Ning, Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. This gives you are idea of the variety of channels covered. You can also sort results by the demographics of the conversation author, such as age or gender, as well as by the relative popularity of the site where the mention occurred.

In addition to looking at the channels mentioned above and others you can set up a custom search to look at any website that contains an RSS feed can be added to Custom Sources. Upon configuration, SM2 will run a full archive and pull posts from the entire site. After the full index a daily retrieval will pull data from the RSS feed, searching from the last point of collection to the current search time.

When you set up a search, you can filter by language, country, time range, and other factors.  After the results come back you can mark unwanted sources as spam to avoid getting them again. You can also filter out results by key words that shown up a lot on false positives to more quickly clear out the irrelevant results. You can get email alerts on a daily basis or even a real time basis for especially sensitive monitoring.

There is a free version that allows you to play with Techrigy but it is limited to 1000 results that you can quickly use up. However, this version does serve as a nice introduction to the tool at no risk.  I set up a free account and explored it after talking with Aaron. While the free version has a reduced feature set, it does give you a good feel for the power and depth of SM2.  It is very addictive and it was hard for me to stop playing with tool to write this review. The Professional version provides the full power discussed here.

There is a Techrigy blog. Among other topics, it covers ways to use Techrigy. A recent post, Twitter lead generation workflow with SM2 Alerts, discussed how Techrigy, itself, uses use Twitter in conjunction with SM2’s Alerts function to generate interest, book demos and communicate with people in the social media marketing community. They are able to set up the SM2 search filters to only look at people who are likely to be interested and then get real time alerts. Techrigy finds that they are now booking many sales meetings daily via Twitter. This targeted marketing makes use of the transparency of the Web and is a good proof of concept for Techrigy.