Get rich business intelligence with Spiral16

• Community intelligence surrounding the category, issue, or brand
• Brand identity monitoring, including competitive intelligence
• Community discovery identifying influencers, issues, and engagement opportunities

These and other forms of BI are often accessible through social media monitoring tools, most of which have been reviewed and compared/contrasted across the interwebs. Undoubtedly you’re familiar with a few of the tools, whether freely accessible or available via subscription.

A Kansas City, MO internet monitoring company named Spiral16 seems to be performing the routine discover-and-report service you’re familiar with, plus a whole lot more.

Spiral16 built a proprietary web crawler that discovers relevant posts, pages, and sites determined by keyword criteria. Whereas many social media monitoring tools can uncover Twitter mentions, hash tag use, or Facebook status updates, Spiral16 scours the entire web including corporate and reference sites like Wikis, forums, blogs, and social media. The data pool is much larger, designed to be more comprehensive in nature to surface opportunities that might otherwise go undiscovered.

View of the sample project dashboard

Spiral16 marketing and communications manager Eric Melin spent the better part of two hours walking me through the dashboard to demonstrate the power of the platform and the user interface. At an extremely high level, the process may look like this:

1. Client consultation with project representative and the data analytics team to discuss goals and objectives.
2. Identify important, known keywords relevant to the brand and/or category.
3. Search strings assembled and queries run.
4. Human filtering of initial results to reach optimal first-run results. The first pool of results includes pages with high text counts for semantic evaluation. Based on the results deemed valuable, the system assigns a percentage-based correlation score.
5. Subsequent query results are determined by the relevancy correlation between new findings and previous ones filtered and parsed by humans.
6. Ongoing refinement based on results. Fees are based per query, not by result. Adjustments may be made at no additional cost.

A few key differences between Spiral16 and its competition:

• The web crawler examines unstructured data to identify content authors. A future version will roll in value-added information like email addresses and twitter handles to assist with influencer outreach and other strategies.
• Identifies exceptions, like spam pages and sites, so that clients don’t get bogged down with the kind of irrelevant results that may obscure gems and trends.
• The highly configurable system allows clients to set their own thresholds for results, meaning while client A accepts results with a 47% or higher correlation score, client B may only wish to see results with a 60% or higher correlation score. Organize and categorize results with custom data tags.

I’m intentionally omitting a ton of details that will fascinate the data geek in you because without direct access to sample data, I think it’s difficult to truly grasp the details and imagine the possibilities. Suffice to say, if you get a chance to use Spiral16, you’ll have a powerful resource at your disposal.

The fine print

Results are downloadable in several graphic formats including PNG, JPG, and others. While the system doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics per se, someone familiar with GA’s UI will have a relatively easy time pulling findings together from the two platforms. So if you’re pulling results from disparate systems, the information extracted from Spiral16 and GA could be presented without much fuss.

Pricing starts at $500 for five queries (separate search strings) with a six month contract. The company offers a 90-day satisfaction guarantee. The package includes setup, tech help, and as many users (with their own custom dashboards!) as you like. In addition to the system-initiated scan, clients can identify known URLs or RSS feeds to include in the process (handy if there are some sites you’d just like to outright monitor).

Have you used Spiral 16? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments!

Author’s note:  I first published this post, titled “Monitor more with Spiral16,” on the Oneforty blog June 21, 2011 as a contributing author. I’m cross-posting here so that Insights & Ingenuity readers might also learn and enjoy.