Top 20 Apps For Managing Social Media

For large enterprises tapping into the overwhelming flood of social chatter, ListenLogic claims its new Social CRM offering will deliver a filtered stream of the best sales leads and most important cases for customer service.

ListenLogic founder and CEO Mark Langsfeld said this is a high end mix of software and services for which the subscription starts at about $250,000 a year--with $1 million a year likely to be more typical for large enterprise customers. What they get in return is a chance at making the challenge and opportunity of social media more manageable, without requiring a large staff to spend countless hours combing through a sea of tweets and blog posts looking for the ones that are truly relevant.

"Every call you get is relevant," Langsfeld said in an interview. "The problem out on the web is most of what you get is not relevant." The challenge is to narrow down all the conversations to find the ones from "the truly irate customer" who needs to be contacted by customer service before he does more damage to the brand. You also want to find the person who is posting questions about your product and might welcome a friendly contact from sales. But while small-to-midsize businesses may be able to accomplish that with keyword tracking and sentiment analysis tools that feed them a collection of messages for further review, large enterprises can easily be overwhelmed by gathering too much data, he said.

"When we talk to large enterprises, in almost all cases we see they're missing close to 75% of what looking for," Langsfeld said. They wind up with 10 or 20 times the volume of information as they have time to go through, and they can't afford to put 20 times as many people on the task. "With what we offer, they can keep their 10 people but make them 10 times more efficient," he said.

ListenLogic delivers a higher level of filtering partly with supercomputing power - including a proprietary "massively parallel systolic pipeline" architecture, Langsfeld said. Each batch of data also gets a quick quality control review by ListenLogic employees before it is shipped to the customers "so we're not sending them a bunch of crap," Langsfeld said. That means human judgment is also applied to the question of which messages should be marked high priority and routed directly to a marketing director, rather than placed in a queue for routine review.

Because of the way it incorporates and learns from human input, ListenLogic's approach is more similar to that of Converseon and Crimson Hexagon than social media monitoring solutions focused solely on automation, he said. The software is also custom configured for each ListenLogic customer. "For example, one of our clients is Red Bull, and another of our clients is Subaru," Langsfeld said, and the language used to talk about energy drinks versus automobiles is entirely different.

ListenLogic's existing enterprise customers are mostly using the platform for social media monitoring or market research, although Langsfeld said he does have one enterprise customer that began using the Social CRM product prior to its general release.