Launching Recon.io (my side project) out of beta
recon.io
recon.io
Most of the people we interviewed were using some sort of dashboard (netvibes at the time) paired with RSS feeds of the search terms they were using.
The two angles that worked out best were finding larger organisations which wanted to deliver this kind of "cut through the noise" information to consumers (e.g. picking out reviews), and delivering broader "market intelligence" (e.g. showing what's being tweeted about car buying in a certain area for a car dealership, vs. just monitoring that dealership's name/accounts). Good luck.
big brands at executive level care about reports more than anything.
1) Most individuals here who want to monitor just 1 campaign don't have a strong brand. So there's very little value added with your app. They'll search for their brand on Twitter once a week to see the handful of mentions they get.
2) The BIG brand names already are using a platform like Hootsuite or SproutSocial to take care of everything social-media related. Which allows them to monitor their brand throughout the entire web(not just Twitter). As well as view analytics on their followers. And schedule messages.
IMO, your app is simply automates the process of searching for a brand name on Twitter. The categorization of the mentions into support questions, complaints, etc is not a huge value add, as most users will want to view all of their mentions, and don't care what bucket they fall under.
I agree that there's a specific size of brand that would find Recon useful - huge brands will have a big social media team working (almost) around the clock, and small companies might not get many mentions, but I do strongly think there's a huge number of companies that fit right in the middle that Recon is perfect for. Have a look at how 37signals have been thinking about this problem, for example: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3317-behind-the-scenes-twitte...
That 37signals post also highlights a problem with companies of that size that Recon solves - there's so much noise. You could manually search for your brand name throughout the day, or set up an alert that sends you everything that mentions you - but you'd waste so much of your time just sifting through information.
Thanks again for the feedback though - I do appreciate hearing it.
Love the design of the landing page and the easy access to the demo. Very cool.
I would love to see a 'conversion post' on how you did at that price point on the front page. Well done on launching!
Good luck with LivelyStocks, if you need a beta tester - give me a shout: dave@recon.io.
For those that don't know (unlikely!) patio11, read more on his blog: http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/
As far as the pricing goes, how is a "campaign" counted? Does that correspond 1:1 with Twitter accounts? I bet you could charge way more for established brands, even if they only want to monitor a single account... maybe you could price by number of mentions or something similar?
Working out how to charge was actually a pretty interesting issue - I did originally think about splitting it down by number of mentions, but I couldn't find an elegant way to do it. The problem is, most people won't know how many times their brand is mentioned in a month, which could make it awkward as a customer. I quite like the simplicity of the campaigns method - it'll be interesting to see what the customer feedback is like.
Is there an 'agency' option available where we can monitor more than 8 campaigns? Or even rebrand/white-label it?