ViralHeat – Warmer than cold, but not hot.

Filtering through all the social media analytics tools can be very daunting.  There’s a ton of feature overlap, faux-free access, and UI’s that are all over the board.  Enter ViralHeat.  ViralHeat is not the perfect tool, but it wins on a couple of different fronts. First, the interface is extremely simple and straightforward.  Where others are cluttered with fancy dashboards and real-time updates, ViralHeat keeps it clean by allowing you to focus on exactly what you want to see, be it updates from a single source or an analytics dashboard.  It’s a no-nonsense UI approach.  ViralHeat also has a very clean publishing interface to push content to all of your social media channels.  This feature would have been very useful to have at the beginning of this class!  Why is it warm and not hot then?  There were a couple of glitches setting up sources that required me to go into Facebook and remove and then add their app and it still didn’t work quite right.  Other sources worked perfectly but a glitch with Facebook is almost a non-starter.  They also charge $100 per month, and for a product that’s been paired down to basics, the price seems too high.  If ViralHeat modified their pricing to match the product and smoothed out some of the source acquisition issues, they’d definitely warrant the “heat” in their name.

Differentiated responses in a homogenous social media world.

Any company can setup a Facebook page or create a Twitter account to connect with customers.  But how do companies change their social media strategy to stay unique and differentiate themselves?  This article on FastCompany describes a few of the ways, but what REI did was really cool.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3004369/how-rei-put-bow-social-marketing-and-wowed-customers

REI has taken a very interesting approach here by translating their obsession with customer service to the digital world.  During the last holiday season, REI raised the bar on responding to Twitter posts by responding with personalized video responses to customer questions within one hour.  Not only did this surprise the customers, it created a buzz that drew even more traffic and attention to REI.  It will be very interesting to see how companies continue to alter their social media strategies in similar ways to differentiate themselves.