As more and more consumers start using social media to talk about companies, it becomes even more important for those companies to try to keep track of what is being said. Social media has increased the use of the web in terms of having real-time conversations (which used to happen mostly via instant messaging). Now customers can start talking about something immediately and companies often need to respond quickly to preserve their brand. Sency provides a window into the real time web and what is being said.
In keeping with the same minimalist design used by Google, Sency’s homepage has a search box, a list of “what’s going on right now” and a list of “what’s going on lately”. The two lists of what’s going on seem to be pulled right from Twitter’s trending topics list. Using Sency to search for “sazbean” returns two types of results – What’s being said about sazbean and Today’s popular sazbean links. The first lists any mentions of sazbean – very similar to any Twitter search. It only seems to include results from Twitter – I didn’t see anything included directly from my blog or other types of social media. The second result – Today’s popular sazbean links is nice because it shows which links I’ve tweeted have been retweeted – although I believe you can get this information in the original “what’s being said about sazbean” search, it’s still nice that it’s broken out. Overall, Sency’s real time search seems very comparable to Twitter’s search (or Bing’s Twitter search). Although the breakout of the links is nice and I could see that as being useful in some circumstances.
Where Sency differentiates itself (at least for now), is in providing widgets with real-time search results based on a keyword. So, for example, I could create a widget with a search for the keyword “social media” and place it on my blog. Now, anything that’s said with that keyword will show up on the widget on my blog. This could also be useful to provide real-time comments on a product or service (if you’re brave enough) – but you’d have to be wary of placing anything real-time on your blog since people could easily abuse it (by tweeting with the keyword to show up on your blog). I think the service may be more useful as a tool for monitoring many different products and keywords – say on an Intranet or other internal-corporate site.
Another widget that Sency provides is popular links based on a keyword. This is probably much more useful (and safe) as content to add to a blog or website. I can create a links widget for the keyword “social media” and the widget will show today’s popular links which include that keyword.
In terms of a real-time monitoring and search tool, Sency only seems to provide Twitter results. I’d like to see them incorporate results from other sources in order to stay competitive. There’s also an opportunity to improve on the widgets by incorporating knowledge about language – meaning that the links widget provides links related to a subject of the “social media” keyword, so it knows that it probably should include links which include things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Have you tried Sency? If not, give it a try. What do you think?
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Technorati tags: social media, sency, marketing, real-time search, business