Sysomos: Pro Tools for Social Media Measurement

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Jun 19, 2009 Comments

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Pro Tools for Social Media Monitoring and Analysis: Sysomos Launches MAP and Heartbeatg While most companies are frantically scrambling around, trying their hardest to throw together something—anything— that will squeeze a fortune out of the social media phenomenon, there are a select few that’ve quietly been working in the background for awhile. Sysomos, a company based in Toronto, is one example.

Sysomos’ two social media analytics tools, Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat, were released earlier this month after being under the hood for a whopping 3+ years. MAP is a feature-heavy tool for analyzing media conversations, and Heartbeat is like the no-frills, less expensive version for those who crave only the essentials.

"Everything Together"

Sysomos means "everything together" in Greek. Accordingly, the company’s two new tools cover a lot of ground in terms of data collection. This makes sense, as they spent a considerable amount of time brewing. Obviously proud of their work, the team states on the Sysomos blog, “We’re confident MAP and Heartbeat are going to shake up the social media analytics market by providing customers with the real-time insight and intelligence that hasn’t been available before.”

Considering the number of analytics tools now on the market (we’ve got them coming out of our ears), a ground-breaking solution at this point is a pretty tall order. Of course, quantity does not equal quality; a sentiment Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ CEO, echoed in a recent statement: "We realized there was demand for better social media analytics tools. In many respects, we depended on what potential customers wanted to guide our development.”

Aww, they’re listeners. “The most important step is to understand the reasons behind why people are talking, being able to quantify sentiment, [and uncovering] granular [information about] geography, specific demographics, and segment opinions,” added Koudas. Do Sysomos’ products reflect a new kind of understanding? Let’s see…

Mapping It

MAP is for all the feature lovers out there. The tool lets customers analyze and understand social and traditional media conversations, including those taking place in blogs, news articles, social networks, forums, video sites and micro-blogs.

MAP brings real-time results to the table, in addition to geo-demographic and key influencer information, collaboration tools, and value-added information. The entire bundle of info is reportedly delivered one neat and (very) detailed report at a time.

"Of all the social media monitoring tools we took for a test drive, Sysomos MAP was the most immediately productive," said Casian Moscovici, vice president, research, with NATIONAL Public Relations. "We were able to get speedy and relevant results from its uniquely comprehensive and constantly updated archive."

The archive Moscovici is referring to is Sysomos’ database, which features a multi-terrabyte archive of data collected from blogs, forums, micro-blogging services, video services, wikis, social networks and major news sources since 2006. Results are available in real-time, which means Sysomos is constantly adding new conversations.

The Heart of the Matter

MAP offers up a virtual ton of information. Coming from a much lighter angle is Heartbeat, which is also a real-time monitoring and measurement service.

Heartbeat focuses specifically on information contained within new blog posts and tweets (the two most popular media outlets on the Web), and delivers it on a much simpler scale. The reports still consist of constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations, but rather than in one dense report, the snapshots are delivered by way of user-friendly and intuitive graphics.