At Kilgannon, we’ve made the decision to use Social Radar as our new social media monitoring tool.

We did not take this decision lightly. We also scoured the blogs and websites. We also asked partner organizations which tools they were using and then decided on what criteria we’d use to evaluate the tools. Then spent several months looking at various tools – some we demoed and others we looked via webinar.

The tools we looked at included:

Radian6

Sysmos

BuzzMetrics

Visible

ScoutLabs

eCairn

Webtrends Social Measurement

Collective Intellect

Honestly, we gave all of them serious consideration. And many of them also would have been excellent selections. What it came down to was the before mentioned criteria. These are the main criteria we focused on:

Features: What the tool can do that will benefit our customers.

Training and support: Interestingly, some require more of this than others – as all tools do not allow you to create your own queries.

Cost structure: Notice I said cost structure and not cost.

Much of the discussion among bloggers has been about the wizbang features that these tools have and not the business case for choosing one over the other.

And some of these these tools make more sense for in-house marketing departments than agencies, which we are.

When talking to software providers IN GENERAL (this means not just social media monitoring folks)  I’ve found a reluctance to create a model that works for smaller companies, smaller agencies, and even mid-sized b2b companies. It seems they’re mostly interested in the big fish. That means, just like in media land, they’re catering to the non-niche, consumer audience. There is no reason that a b2b software provider should pay the same for the service as a consumer goods company – they simply do not require the same kinda of band width that Coke or Apple do.

I plan a follow up article with more detail about what I learned in the selection process that should be helpful to anyone looking for monitoring tools.

Update: Follow up here.