Online Presence Monitor Infonitor Reviewed

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to find and count media content. With new technology coming out seemingly every day, there's always an opportunity to try something new. I'd recently heard about Infonitor (a free online presence monitor from Newbase) and I wanted to see if it was accurate and expansive enough to replace the current content providers we use to gather and count media mentions. So I compared it to Radian6, Factiva, Nexis and SocialMention. I found that, while Infonitor is free and offers unique data analysis charts, I'm not sure how good it currently would be for clip counts. 

First of all, if you are searching a popular name or topic, be prepared to wait literally hours for it to compute the data and give you the numbers. Long searches often stall out as well. Even fairly unusual proper names take three or four minutes to search. 

I did a number of searches where Radian6 found Twitter posts that Infonitor did not. Social Mention did not perform as well as Radian6 either (although Social Mention results seem to vary by subject; some more accurate than others). 

Infonitor does have a unique feature that I haven't seen anywhere else and that is the ability to do E-bay searches. The downside is that it only searches E-bay in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So if you want to see how well your brand is doing in the aftermarket, then it would be good for that. Being that it's only good in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland I imagine it would be most useful for tracking used David Hasselhoff CDs.

Conclusion: I can't think of any reason for Infonitor to replace Factiva, Nexis, or Radian6, other than the fact that it is free. It just isn't as accurate and it's incredibly slow on big searches (I guess that's the trade off for the cool charts). The ideal Infonitor user would be someone with no budget to work with, lots of time on their hands, and a whole lot of patience.

-- Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners

 

Comments

[Christian Heinisch]

First of all, thank you Chris for reviewing http://www.infonitor.com. I can basically agree to every statement in your review, however your test sessions fell into a phase of exceptionally high traffic as infonitor was monitoring thousands of candidates for the next general election in Germany, which consequently lead to longer production times. But you are certainly right: a typical analysis takes about 5 minutes. One reason being that during html-report production infonitor simultaneously creates a pdf containing links to drill down the hits up to the actual online articles. This way every report can be accessed anytime later again, thus serving as an archive.

One of the key features is infonitor's capability to monitor competitive relations as you can see in the following example report http://tinyurl.com/lgaa7e = ("david hasselhoff", "bruce springsteen") CD, on eBay Germany (Use the integrated Google Translator if necessary). Or check http://tinyurl.com/njt8r4 = "david hasselhoff" OR "bruce springsteen" in GoogleNews Germany and http://tinyurl.com/kw4589 = "david hasselhoff" OR "bruce springsteen" in GoogleNews USA, to compare both protagonists' presence. See also http://tinyurl.com/n82ud2 = "david hasselhoff" OR "bruce springsteen" on twitter in French, if anybody would care.

And do not forget to click on the [Data]-buttons or any blue number or word to drill down to the articles behind the charts and use the tag clouds to understand what the articles are about. You may also download the pdf belonging to every analysis to store or forward it.

So infonitor is not about replacing Factiva, Nexis, or Radian6, but about getting a free visual impression about the online presence of products, brands or persons.

Christian Heinisch, MD
www.newbase.de, www.infonitor.com