There are a number of firms that offer social media monitoring and I have reviewed several of them on this blog. Vocus in focused on serving the public relations industry and provides this capability as part of their comprehensive public relations management suite. I recently spoke with Kye Strance, the Vocus Director of Product Management and Frank Strong the Vocus Director of Public Relations.

Founded in 1991, Vocus began providing database services for PR professionals in 1997. They went public in 2005. Their clients are mainly PR people within organizations but they have some agency clients. They added functionality over the years beginning with CRM capabilities, then collaboration, and now social media monitoring to go with their traditional media monitoring.

The Vocus suite now provides all the tools to help an internal PR person carry out their job. Tabs on the home page include media contacts, media outlets, distribution, news, projects, analysis and administration. The dashboard can be customized with drag and drop capabilities to add and arrange components. As we went through a demo it became clear than a lot of the value comes from their content, as well as the software features. For example, they offer 270,000 US media contacts and 500,000 on a global basis. Vocus has a research team of about 75 people constantly updating their PR content.  Individual users can also update these resources and chose to share them with other users. Vocus then validates any of these additions. There is also an opportunities database for awards, events, etc. for the year with more than 12,500 entries covering 194 countries and 365 days

The social Web opens up new opportunities for analytics and Vocus has stepped up to this opening.  Research by others has shown that ROI is big concern for marketing professionals. Kye gave the example, of an internal PR person who used Vocus analytics to look at the relationship of media coverage for her firm and their competitors. In each case there was a positive correlation between media coverage and sales. These results enabled her to get a larger PR budget from senior management.

Vocus added its social media monitoring capabilities in 2009 in time for the early adopters. Key said that many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media in 2009, using some of the free tools. Now in 2010 it has become real and I would agree. Their own research found that 80% of respondants would focus more on social media in 2010.  Their monitoring goes against a wide number of targets including 52,000 traditional media outlets and 100 million blogs.  They choose the top 100 million blogs by a combination of several raking systems including Technorati.  Individual users can also add their own targets through the targets RSS feed.

I asked how they keep current with the changing landscape in traditional media. Kye agreed on the dynamic nature of this space and mentioned they saw 293 closures in their traditional media outlets. To stay current Vocus does a monthly check on the top tier sources, a 3 to 6 month check on the tier two sources, and a yearly check on the smaller tier three sources.  They provide a Twitter feed, InVocus to convey the changes they discover. Customers can edit the media profiles and Vocus will verify the new information if the customer chooses to share the update.  This way they are crowd-sourcing part of the update process.  Vocus also uses social media to monitor changes in their media contacts to continue to filter the information for their clients. You can see why I saw the great value in their content, as well as their software.

We looked at some of the sample reports and visualizations offered by their social media monitoring component and I was impressed. We used the cruise line industry for the samples. The first screen shot shows a share of the positive voice for a number of cruise lines. You could also get a share of negative voice as well as a share of total voice.

The next screen shot shows the key topics related to cruise lines over a several weeks. You can see peaks that were related to events at the time.

The third screen shot shows a social media by type chart for a specific cruise line over a two week period. There are many others.

Here is an interesting and amusing post that Frank wrote, Blogs, Twitter and Traditional Media All Still Matter at the North Pole and Beyond: What Santa Claus Can Teach PR About Media Monitoring. It shows how often Santa is mentioned in blogs, social media and traditional media and the sentiment conveyed. For example, “Old St. Nick was referenced more than 120,000 times in social media outlets over the same period. As with blogs, just over 10 percent was toned negative, although about 19 percent was positive and 73 percent was neutral. Unsurprisingly, 85 percent of those mentions occurred on Twitter, while the next largest percentage occurred in YouTube—just over eight percent.”

Frank went on to add, “At some points, Santa Claus was earning more than 10,000 Tweets a week. It’s simply not feasible to be able to read and respond to each Twitter post. However, by applying automated toning, you can isolate the negative posts, analyze them and respond accordingly. For example, as rumors of “Claustrophobia”—the fear of Santa Claus—circulated on Twitter, Santa’s marketing team could respond accordingly. Few things could ruin Christmas more than if people actually feared Santa.” There is much more. It is a great post, both humorous and insightful.