With consumers venting opinions about vendors left and right on blogs, social networks, discussion forums and news sites, Jive Software has developed a tool to help companies monitor and analyze relevant online chatter.
Jive Market Engagement, announced on Tuesday, is designed to automate the tracking of specific topics and keywords on sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so that companies don’t have to set up myriad alerts and manually scan notifications and mentions.
For example, the product can monitor mentions of the name of a company and of its competitors in various social media sites and then aggregate and synthesize the findings in a central dashboard, where users can also drill down to details of specific “conversations.”
“Companies know their brands are being talked about in the social Web, so they set up alerts to monitor terms and names. They get a ton of references which they have to manually read to understand the intent and whether the arrow is pointing up or down,” said Ben Kiker, Jive’s chief marketing officer.
“That’s a very time-consuming model that you can’t scale, and it doesn’t work. With Jive Market Engagement, you can do that in a more automated fashion,” he added.
The product also provides collaboration capabilities so that workgroups can discuss and analyze the findings, generate reports and decide what actions to take.
Jive Market Engagement, which will be generally available in October, can be used as a stand-alone product, although it also works in an integrated fashion with the vendor’s Jive SBS (Social Business Software) enterprise collaboration suite.
The product, which uses monitoring technology from Radian6, is priced at US$25,000 and sold as an annual subscription.
That price includes the monitoring of a certain number of topics, the ability to share and collaborate on the findings with up to 50 end users, as well as consulting from Jive to configure the software.