Marketwire/Sysomos: Social Communications & Analytics for 70% of the Fortune 50

After hearing about the hundreds (likely thousands) of social analytics tools out there, I began to wonder how larger companies make sense of all this chaos. Surely, Google and Microsoft aren’t manually piecing together reports from HootSuite and FollowerWonk, right? What are the big brands using?

The majority of them seem to be using a Toronto-based company called Sysomos (acquired in 2010 by private firm Marketwire, a press release distribution company who have re-branded themselves as  a “social communications company”). I reached this conclusion by comparing the client lists of companies like SimplyMeasured and CrowdBooster with those of Sysomos. Apparently, 70% of  Fortune 50 brands use Sysomos products:

According to Wikipedia, the company’s flagship product, Media Analysis Platform (MAP), “mines and analyzes content from social media or user-generated content. MAP is considered by many to be the most advanced social media analytics solution in the industry, specifically for text summarization and visualization features along with granular segmentation capabilities by geography and demographics.” This allows them to do some cool global analysis, like this image from one of their public blog posts showing where tweets about the French electronic music duo Daft Punk originate:

Also from Wikipedia: “The company also offers Sysomos Heartbeat which provides social media monitoring and engagement capabilities to communication professionals, brand managers and customer support groups. In 2013, Heartbeat was extended to add publishing components to deliver a holistic end-to-end social media marketing platform.” It seems that Marketwire intend to become a one-stop-shop for PR, social communications, and analytics. For those companies that can afford their services, it seems they’re the market leader. Obviously there’s a whole ecosystem of potential competitors in social media analytics, but it looks like Marketwire/Sysomos are a powerful pair who are trying to do it harder, better, faster, & stronger.