Vocus Launches New Social Media Monitoring Tool

All PR professionals are aware that while social media is a great way to promote products and services, the time and effort invested into it are nothing without a proper strategy targeting the right channels and people and without a thorough analysis of impact and results. The importance of measuring online PR efforts and getting relevant data to further observe and to then plan future campaigns is recognized worldwide.

But as there are millions of people online and active on social media sites, manually monitoring every channel and everything said in only a day, for example, might be a little overwhelming for a PR person, team or even agency, as knowing who’s who in the online world, what’s happening 24×7 takes a lot of time, especially when they also need to concentrate on capitalizing what they find out and joining the conversation in a productive manner.

Vocus chose a right time to jump on the social media monitoring horse with a new and improved version of their software. As they also state in their PR, more people are turning their attention to social media as a nifty business tool.

“In a survey of 1,800 PR professionals late last fall, 80 percent said they would focus more on social media in 2010” said Bill Wagner, CMO at Vocus. The new tool brings in new features to enhance the existing software Vocus was providing free of charge to existing customers. It also comes with a summery name, the Summer ’10 edition.

What does the software do? Offer extensive social media monitoring, in what they claim is near-real time, keeping an eye on everything from forums and blogs to Twitter and LinkedIn. They identify the key influencers, namely those individuals activating in a network that can influence the most people through what they post online, with an added module to help PRs manage their relationship with these important figures of the online. Add content filtering to it, to sort through the clutter of irrelevant information the Internet can sometimes be and world cloud analysis and you get a rather complex tool. The price tag they put on it according to the official release is 3000 USD.

The product seems to be offering what a smart and competitive piece of software for social media monitoring, measuring and engaging should be. Vocus is not new at creating on demand software and they have had a year of live testing of their previous application on a customer base of 1,800 companies.