Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

Apoorv Durga

Follow Apoorv on Twitter @apoorv

Jive Software Offers Social Media Monitoring with Fathom

23-Dec-2011

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content and Experience Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Social Media Marketing & Monitoring, Jive Social Business Software

Social software vendor Jive Software recently announced a new module called Fathom for Social Media Monitoring. Fathom comes as a free add-on to an existing Jive 5 setup. It provides basic capabilities for monitoring content across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs and other sources. Fathom Pro, a paid upgrade to the free version, adds some advanced analytics and intelligence capabilities to the free module.

Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence is an important tool in a digital marketer's arsenal. Of course, digital marketers also require tools for Lead Management, Campaigns (using email, social media, and mobiles), Landing Page Management, and so forth. We club all such capabilities under the umbrella of "Digital Marketing."

If you are a web or a digital marketer, you can source these capabilities in many ways. For example:

• You can consider a standalone Lead Management or Social Media Monitoring tool. There are a huge number of such tools - mostly SaaS based - in the market and this marketplace is seeing a rapid evolution
• Your existing Collaboration, Portal or Web Content Management product provides these. Jive is an example of this (we review Jive in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report)
• You already use a CRM platform that also provides some such capabilities. Salesforce.com, for example, has started offering Social Media Monitoring capabilities via its acquisition of Radian6

There are many other ways too and whether you  use an existing platform or a standalone tool depends on many factors. This is an emerging marketplace and there are not too many best practices out there. We will provide detailed guidance in a subsequent advisory for subscribers but in the mean time, remember to evaluate such tools with the same rigor as you would any other enterprise tool selection.  Most of these sevices promise quick setup and time-to-market, but you should still take the time to follow vendor selection best practices.