That was pretty fast. Within a few hours of Dan posting his mention of VibeMetrix we got a very nice review from Agency3, a local Web development company. Actually, local is an understatement. Their address is two blocks away from my house. What I appreciate most is that they got to the heart of VibeMetrix:
“VibeMetrix also allows you to track notes related to the conversations you are monitoring online and it allows you to create and track “follow up†actions. This is great is you are tracking a large number of online conversations.”
Our goal is to move beyond simple blog monitoring, and help people manage social media marketing by initiating and maintaining conversations with key influencers. This takes a lot of record keeping, and VibeMetrix is designed to automate this process.
The major complaint they had with the product was a lack of “filtering”:
“VibeMetrix does not allow you to filter the results you receive. When we entered “Agency3″ as a keyword we received a lot of results that had nothing to do with our company and the system does not allow us to filter out the results that don’t apply to our company. You can delete the results once they appear, but you can’t filter the results so that the incorrect results don’t appear again in the future.”
This is a valid point that we are aware of. Our search engine is a little too aggressive, so we need to give people ways of restricting their search. The most obvious approach is the use of negative keywords, as is done in Google Adwords. I like this path, because we want to move VibeMetrix as close as possible to Adwords. There are a lot of parallels between the two, since they are both based on lists of keyword phrases, and they are used by people trying to accomplish similar tasks of increasing targeted traffic to their sites.
Since Agency3 is literally down the street, I’m going to see about a personal demo to learn more about how they want us to filter results. I also plan on taking a closer look at Trackur, a competing product that focuses more exclsuively on the monitoring side of this space. The Agency3 review used Trackur as a model of the type of filtering we should be doing.
Considering that this review appeared the same day we released our first version of VibeMetrix, we’re very pleased with the fair and detailed comments it received. Thanks, Agency3, I’ll be contacting you about getting together to discuss ways we can improve the product. How about lunch at Border Cafe in Burlington?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Welcome guys!
For the monitoring purists, filtering is a big deal–part of the reason we built Trackur.
Good luck with your efforts–seriously. The industry needs more of us, so we can all spread the good word about the importance of buzz monitoring.
Hey, Andy. I had a feeling that mention would bring you by.
Good to know some of the neighbors are friendly.
Hi Adam. We are always up for a good lunch and learn. I frequent the border cafe, so shoot me an email with some times and we will make it happen.
I’ve been in many competitive industries. If ever it gets to the point that I’m slinging mud at my rivals, then it’s probably because I’ve already lost the battle.