Most marketers have figured out how to monitor social media comments, at the very least to protect their brand. Far fewer take action on the intelligence they gather, in large part because many “listening” tools don’t offer those features.
Canadian social analytics firm Sysomos, helmed by former Microsoft bigwig Lindsay Sparks, seeks to shake things up with an integrated marketing platform—one that pulls together several, previously separate social analytics services. The Sysomos account list boasts more than 1,400 brands including Boeing, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and Mondelez.
The new product, called Sysomos Everything Together, combines Sysomos’ monitoring applications. That means marketers can use a single application to identify trending topics and who is influencing conversations, and then optimize their own paid marketing campaigns accordingly.
“Managing a brand effectively requires knowing who is talking about you, who could potentially be talking about you, what they are saying, and knowing the right way to engage,” said Sparks, in a statement. “This platform is only the beginning of what we’re unlocking for companies and agencies in the future,” he added.
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Sysomos’ chief marketing officer Mark Young dodged questions about how much the combined platform costs, saying pricing for the service varies depending on how many people access the metrics dashboard as well as how many different topics or campaigns will be monitored. Companies can still buy Sysomos’ applications separately.
Centralized orchestration is something many marketing teams increasingly crave for their social media efforts, said Lyndsay Wise, an analyst with market research firm Enterprise Management Associates. That is inspiring consolidation among social analytics startups as they seek to broaden the breadth of their offerings.
“Organizations tend to build up their suite—so they will buy one module and expand their services as they see the need,” Wise said. “What companies really need is a starting point where they can build up a platform to monitor customer-related conversations and integrate that with information from wider sources and then apply text and other analytics to that data as opposed to looking at individual data sources only.”
Toronto-based Sysomos, which employs about 500 people, is spending $100 million to build its orchestration platform. It’s one of the select companies that has access to the Twitter firehouse, along with metrics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, WeChat, Weibo, and other services.
Traditionally speaking, Sysomos has competed mainly with the likes of Sprinklr or Hootsuite, which also offer social monitoring dashboards. It hopes to expand its reach significantly through its acquisition of Expion, which specialized in campaign management. (The Expion applications will be added to Sysomos Everything Together over time.) This expanded focus will place Sysomos in more direct competition with much larger marketing analytics and automation software companies including Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.