Social Media Crisis Monitoring Tool Reviewed: CrisisVu (Paid Tool)

I recently had the opportunity to test out a new Twitter monitoring tool called CrisisVu.

As the name suggests, CrisisVu was developed with the aim of helping companies better monitor the discussions around their brand in a crisis. This web-based tool gives you real-time insights and a live view of what is being tweeted and retweeted about your brand and the targeted keywords you’ve specified it to monitor. The tool really focuses on the important real-time aspect, giving you a “vu” of what’s happening on Twitter within a 40 minute time period.

Using the keyword “McDonalds” and many more keywords that involve the McD’s brand, here is a glance of the CrisisVu’s “vu”:

The Twitter stream

On the left of the tool’s “vu”, you see each and every tweet that mentions one or more of your monitored keywords. What’s cool about this is that you can pause and play the Twitter stream, in order to not get overwhelmed with a crazy influx of tweets. This allows you to read each tweet and reply to those that you want to reply to, straight from the tool.

The Vu

The Vu was designed to give you a good understanding of what’s being said about your brand on Twitter in a crisis, at a single glance. Let me give you the lo-down on what you’re looking at:

• Size: The large circles contain more tweets of a specific word, mention and/or keyword than the smaller circles
• Lines: The circles that are joined by lines indicate that there’s a connection of some sort
• Color: Trending tweets and new topics are bright red (when trending, the small red circles will gradually become larger)
• Trending: As topics stop trending, the red fades to brown, then to green before it disappears when it has completely stopped

Additional features:

• You’re able to move around the Vu, zoom in and zoom out
• The Vu is adaptable for color blind people. The color palette helps you activate this function
• You can change the colors within the vu to match those of your brand

Who CrisisVu is for

CrisisVu was designed to be for agencies and brands alike. One good aspect of their service is that, since you don’t need the tool all the time (it’s really developed to help you navigate through an online crisis), you can keep CrisisVu on retainer for “crisis-mode”, where you can simply and quickly active your account when the need arises. You can also choose to only use the tool when faced with an online crisis situation, and with an interface that is extremely easy to use and get the hang of, not more than a few minutes is needed to get brushed up on the monitoring tool’s functions.

Benefits for brands:

• Clearly see what is going on on Twitter in a crisis, at a single glance
• Manage the overwhelming influx of tweets in a crisis
• It can provide you with a way of spotting issues before they escalate

Options and benefits for agencies:

• Can be used to monitor all clients and spot crises / issues in real-time
• Can be integrated with existing platforms
• Option to white-label the tool for clients
• They offer commission and reseller opportunities

My notes and comments after trying out the tool

It’s certainly an interesting tool that’s worth taking a 30 day trial and testing out. What I did notice, however, is that unless you’re a brand with lots of online mentions in a crisis situation, the tool may not be beneficial to you. It really benefits those who have an influx of tweets at the same time. For this, the tool is great. It helps you manage the incoming tweets while keeping a birds-eye-view on the overall mentions and chatter around your brand, including what’s new and what’s trending.

However, for the smaller online issues and crises that may get a bunch of tweets over a week’s period, for example, rather than within 24 hours, it won’t be useful to you since the tool is really real-time focused (which is excellent), and deletes tweets older than approximately 40 minutes. For these situations, a tool like Hootsuite would be better suited.

The downside: At the moment, you need to have a person/monitoring team monitoring the Vu, as alerts have not yet been integrated into the platform. Apparently, this is something that they’re working on.

The upside: As CrisisVu is a new company, they’re open to feedback, suggestions, comments and criticism, and they take it all very openly with the aim of perfecting their tool for their clients. The fact that they’re still a start-up is also on your side at the moment in terms of price-point.

All in all, if you have the need, I definitely recommend giving CrisisVu a test-run.

What about you? Have you used this monitoring tool before? If so, please share your feedback with us below in the comments section!