To say that Glean.info is the new version of CyberAlert is the equivalent of saying that a Fitbit is just an upgraded watch.
The new management team at Glean.info have not only rebranded the old CyberAlert but completely re-engineered their entire offering. While their new dashboard continues to offer the robust media monitoring that first brought the company to my attention more than a decade ago, its new interface takes its functionality to a whole new level.
The new platform is designed to be hyper-customizable. If you’re working in a large global organization with multiple lines of business, you can easily create dashboards for specific brands, divisions, and geographies. If you’re monitoring a crisis, or just a campaign, you can create specific views, filters, and dashboards for managers. Click on the example below to see it bigger:
Of course my favorite feature is its ability to bring many different data sets into the dashboard. So I can get a single snapshot of how (or if) earned media or a social campaign is impacting conversions on a website. Like other dashboards (Qlik, Tableau, Watson Analytics) it doesn’t much care what the data looks like, as long as it is date-stamped so it can be displayed with, and correlated to, the media (social or traditional) analysis feed. Want to know the impact of media quality on conversions or engagement? The answer is just a couple of clicks away. And it continuously updates as new data becomes available.
While the old CyberAlert’s news alerts were comprehensive, they were pretty ugly compared to what the industry has come to expect. Glean.info’s new ones are just as customizable as the dashboard, thus they can be designed around your brand or organization’s graphic standards.
Of course all this elegance and customization doesn’t mean much if the data isn’t accurate and valid. That’s why the techies at Glean.info redesigned its entire back end filtering system to ensure that you’re not bringing in tons of junk, but are still getting the items you need.
Best of all, Glean.info is still a bargain compared to other integrated dashboard systems. Depending on how many data sources you need to monitor (traditional media, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, blogs, etc.), how complex your dashboard needs to be, and whether you need human coding or not, you can start gleaning info for under $1,000 a month.
In full disclosure, many of the trained analysts and human coders that worked for me at KDPaine & Partners are now working for Glean.info. Which means that, yes, I may be a little biased in my opinions. But it also means that you’re not dealing with neophytes to measurement, data, or the analysis process. They all have decades of experience in the industry, and are especially talented at screening, cleaning, filtering, and validating data. ∞
Note: This piece originally appeared as a free article in the late November 2016 edition of The Measurement Advisor newsletter. For complete access to all articles, click here for a free 30-day trial.
