I don't often write about social media software and companies. This is mainly because there are so many of them out there that do one or two things well, but nothing really extraordinary. But when Neil Crist, CEO of Valuevine, reached out to me recently to chat about their new location-based analytics platform, Valuevine Connect, I was intrigued. After Neil walked me through their approach and dashboard, I had to write about it.
Valuevine provides social media marketing software for multi-location franchises and retailers. Since launching in 2009, they have focused on helping multi-location companies publish and manage social media content from a single dashboard. For example, if you oversee marketing for a chain of hardware stores across 10 states, Valuevine's platform would make it easier for you to work with local store owners to ensure that the overall brand message is consistent and to execute social media promotions at the local level.
From talking to clients, Valuevine realized that these businesses wanted a little more. They wanted more information the level of activity and reviews around each store on third-party local review sites, such as Yelp, MerchantCircle and Foursquare. Many people use reviews in the decision-making process for where to go/shop/eat. Business owners also may want to look at how marketing campaigns and social media efforts affect these reviews. For example, maybe you're doing a promotion across 40 stores and want to see how this has affected the number of reviews people are leaving on these sites and the sentiment of these reviews. It can be difficult to monitor all these sites, and many social media analytics platforms overlook them.
If you're interested in this kind of information, keeping track of everything is about to get a lot easier. Valuevine Connect (launching today) helps multi-location companies drill down into location-based analytics and keep up with the social footprint of each store across multiple sites. The platform lets companies add their store locations and see activity as a whole and for each location. Click on the thumbnail below to see the screenshot of the main Valuevine Connect dashboard and continue reading to see some of the features I found interesting.
The Valuevine Connect Dashboard
I really like the look/feel of the overall dashboard. A drop down menu at the top lets you see location-based activity by location, ownership or region. The dashboard includes charts for most active channels, overall positive and negative sentiment trends, location-based trend charts, and information on fans, critics and most vocal people.
Sentiment Trending
The dashboard has charts to show overall sentiment trends, as well as sentiment by individual location. You can also see the locations with the highest and lowest sentiment and the locations with the largest recent sentiment change. While no sentiment-tracking system is perfect, this is still valuable information.
Actionable Data
The thing I like most about Valuevine Connect is that it gives businesses access to actionable data. This data can be used to proactively identify staffing and/or operational issues, and maybe help understand why a certain store is performing better or worse than others. Is one store location suddenly receiving a lot more negative complaints than usual? You can easily drill down to see what's going on. Maybe it's because the fries are always cold. Or maybe it's because one waitress is very unfriendly. Instead of only looking at sales as an indicator of local success, you can use this activity-based data to quickly identify problems and successes.
The other actionable data businesses have access to is the ability to easily identify their biggest fans, critics and most vocal reviewers. You may want to reach out and thank or reward people who are your biggest advocates. Or you may want to reach out to your critics to let them know that you're listening and will do your best to give them a better experience next time. Or you may even find information that shows you probably shouldn't reach out to someone (for example, if he/she is a troll and giving everyone terrible reviews).
Pricing
Pricing for Valuevine Connect starts at $299 per month for unlimited users and locations. Very reasonable, if you ask me. If you're interested in this stuff, you can get a free location-based social footprint report at socialfootprintreport.com
The Bottom Line
As you can probably tell, I'm pretty psyched about this platform and looking forward to seeing what businesses do with this kind of data. It's going to be interesting to have a better understanding of this stuff in evaluating the success/failures of specific locations and crafting local programs that can be tailored to each location. For example, if sentiment is low around one location, you may want to run a different promotion/campaign than if you were just trying to raise awareness about that location.
Also, I'm hoping to do some digging to look at location-based activity and sentiment around some pro sports arenas and venues. It would be interesting to compare the data to things like win-loss records and fan attendance.
What do you think about location-based analytics and its future in business?