Trackur Shakes Up the Social Media Monitoring Space with a Free Plan
I’m not sure if you know the back story of why I decided to launch social media monitoring tool Trackur.
After completing Radically Transparent, I felt like there was a huge void between those that had outgrown Google Alerts and the monitoring tools available at that time. You had Google Alerts (free) then you had services that started at thousands of dollars.
Fast forward a couple of years–yes, Trackur is two years old this month–and Trackur has grown to be one of the most popular monitoring tools on the web. So popular in fact, that we’re racking up many agency clients–attracted by our quick, easy, and affordable tools.
I digress. No really, I digressed. While we were serving the big agencies, we kind of neglected those that I wanted to help the most: those that had outgrown the limitations of Google Alerts. So, today I’m delighted rectify that by announcing Trackur Free.
Trackur Free comes with all of the great functionality we offer in our Personal and Corporate plans, but without the price tag! You get unlimited search results, anyone can share your login, you get reports, CSV export, RSS and email alerts. Just about everything we offer. The only restriction is that you can only save one search on Trackur Free. For individuals or small businesses, that may be all you ever need!
We’re making Trackur Free retroactive, so if you’ve previously taken our 14-day free trial, you’ll find that your login has been automatically rolled over to the free account.
We hope you’ll make the switch to Trackur Free. It’s a great way to take Trackur for a spin without any time pressures and, when you’re ready, you can upgrade to any of our paid plans. Remember, even our sophisticated Agency plan is just $297–about half the price you’ll pay for many companies’ entry-level offering!
(TechCrunch also has coverage of Trackur Free)
The 10 Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Posts of 2009
I trust you had a great Christmas!
As our minds dream of how fantastic 2010 will be, it’s time to look back at the hot topics of 2009. Here are Marketing Pilgrim’s top ten most read posts in 2009.
- Bing.com; Is it Worth Switching from Google? – A home run for Microsoft? While Bing certainly deserves credit for being the first serious challenger to Google, it didn’t hurt that 2009 was the year that Microsoft stepped-up its media outreach to us.
- Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – This post was written in 2007 and has been in our top five for the past 3 years!
- Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – A great guest article by Jon Rognerud and it still stands-up as a great primer for social media marketing.
- 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – A smart blogger knows not to simply update a popular post. Instead, you think of ways to expand on it–with a new post! This post from December 2008, added 8 more great monitoring tools for reputation monitoring.
- 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter – Back before there Twitter Lists were just a twinkle in the eye of Twitter’s founders, Brian Chappell authored the definitive list of marketers on Twitter. If we hadn’t introduced a policy to close comments on older posts, I believe this one would have easily broken 1,000 comments by now!
- 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – Just a little over a year ago, I spilled the beans on the plugins that power Marketing Pilgrim. Look for a new, updated list, in the New Year!
- Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch – How in the world did this benign looking post from 2007 make it into our top ten list of 2009? Good keywords!
- The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing – My good friend Ben Wills authored this post in 2006–which at the time was groundbreaking. In fact, I blatantly–with his permission–used it to frame an entire chapter of Radically Transparent!
- Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results – Do you get the feeling that we have a good grasp of reputation management issues? This post is over 2 years old, but, aside from the Google Pages reference, is still remarkably relevant.
- Facebook Really Does Make Money – When it comes to Facebook, I tend to defer to Jordan’s critical eye. She never fails to deliver!
Some observations:
- As of today, Marketing Pilgrim consists of 6,792 (make that 6,793 with this one) posts and more than 45,000 comments! That’s a lot of words!
- Traffic was up 17.54% in 2009 compared to 2008. Not a bad growth rate!
- Referrals from Twitter were up 120%!!!
- Referrals from Yahoo were down 13%.
- Our own URL shortener–Gri.ms–let us track the origination of around 10,000 visitors! We know where you live!
Want to see previous years’ top posts? Check out 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Hey Agencies! Want Your Own Online Reputation Monitoring Service?
When we first launched Trackur, my target audience was the person that had outgrown Google Alerts, but didn’t have the budget for the existing–expensive–online reputation monitoring tools.
Well, fast forward 18 months–and almost 13,000 registered accounts–and it turns out that Trackur is extremely popular among PR and marketing firms. You see, if they want to manage dozens of client accounts, they don’t want to have to blow their budget in the process.
That’s why we built the Trackur Agency plan. We’ve been quietly adding all kinds of great features:
- Unlimited client profiles
- Unlimited saved searches
- Direct client logins
- No contracts
- White-labeling
The white-labeling is the one that we’ve worked hard on and now we make it even easier to put your brand in front of Trackur–instead of ours. When you sign-up for an Agency plan, we’ll register a domain name on your behalf, upload your logo, and give you your very own social media monitoring solution!
You can keep close control over your client’s monitoring, or give each client their own unique monitoring dashboard. All for around $300 a month!
Actually, $297 a month is the pricing we’re offering until the end of the year. So, if you want to offer monitoring of any kind of news media to your clients, now’s the time to get your Trackur Agency plan. 
Yipee! Microsoft Enters the Social Media Monitoring Space
Microsoft is building a social media monitoring tool called Looking Glass.
Now, at this point, you’re probably thinking that I’m panicking. After all, isn’t that what my own company, Trackur, does? Aren’t I scared stiff that Microsoft will hurt my business?
Nope. In fact, when I spoke to Microsoft executives in 2008, I asked them why they didn’t already have a tool like this? If I can build Trackur, shame on Microsoft for not having its own offering.
Am I insane? Possibly, but for different reasons. Let’s explore this announcement.
The idea is to connect social-media-monitoring tools to the rest of a marketer’s organization — customer databases, work orders, customer-service centers and sales data. Looking Glass will pull in a variety of feeds from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr and work with third-party data sources as well (the folks behind it have already talked to some firms such as Meteor Solutions and Telligent). All of the data collected will connect into Microsoft’s enterprise platforms, such as Outlook and Sharepoint.
If you read the entire Ad Age article, it becomes clear that Looking Glass will be tightly integrated with other Microsoft products–a feature that will delight some and completely repel others. In addition, there’s no news on how much Microsoft will charge for Looking Glass–will it be free or come with a hefty licensing fee.
Either way, I’m actually excited that Microsoft is getting into this space. They have many more dollars to throw into advertising and awareness campaigns. Let them spend the millions of dollars that are needed to convince businesses they need to monitor the web. Not all of those potential customers will feel comfortable with Microsoft, its platform, or its pricing, and so they’ll likely compare Trackur as an alternative. What is it they say about a rising tide? 
In fact, Visible Technologies has more to lose than Trackur–Microsoft currently pays them a hefty fee to use their social media measuring technology. I suspect, we’ll see that relationship come to an end at some point.
OK, but Andy. What if Microsoft offers Looking Glass for free?
So what? When Google rolled out Google Analytics for free, many suspected it would be the death knell for other analytics firms that charge for their product. There are 1.8 billion reasons why those fears didn’t materialize.
Personally, I expect Microsoft’s entry to the space to be a wake up call for its mid-size competitors. Do they build a competing social media measurement product or acquire existing technology? If it’s the latter, they know where to find me! 
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