Another Social Media Inbox? Source Metrics Says This One’s All About ‘Actionable Mentions’ And Breaking Down Data Silos

Startup Source Metrics is announcing a new feature to its social marketing tools today, which it’s calling the Social Media Inbox.

The idea of a new social network listening tool may not set anyone’s heart aflutter, but CEO Scott Lake said the real selling point is the fact that the inbox is integrated with Source Metrics’ other services. Many companies use a product like Radian6 to monitor social media, HootSuite to publish content, and Bitly to track different campaigns, creating “three data silos,” Lake said. Source Metrics offers all of those capabilities in one suite of products.

For example, Lake said that the siloed approach creates a “campaign attribution problem,” where a company may be running a number of different campaigns, each associated with a different set of links, but it can be a pain for the person who’s monitoring all the mentions in Radian6 to copy all those links from Bitly. In Source Metrics, you can just open the “Listening” tab, then whenever you respond to a social media mention, you can associate your response to a given campaign, and the correct links are automatically included.

“The technology is not revolutionary, but it makes the implementation a bit more elegant,” Lake said.

Source Metrics also emphasizes the idea of “actionable” data — instead of flooding you with a list of every single mention, it focuses on users with large social media followings, and on comments that are strongly positive or negative. It also offers data about which posts are getting the best response, so that you can tailor future campaigns accordingly. It also tracks a brand’s activity over time, so that for a given period, you can see that you were mentioned in X number of posts and responded Y times.

You also might know Source Metrics under its previous name Swix.