Manage, listen, engage and analyze real-time alerts about your brand, anywhere online

Mention help brands filter through all the noise online and keep up with the conversations that matter most to them. Mention helps with brand monitoring, social listening and reputation management for enterprises and agencies. From social media to PR mentions, user reviews to blog comments, leading brands choose Mention to track the most important conversations about their brand, competitors, and industry across the web.

Kevin William David interviewed Patrick Whatman, Head of Content at Mention to know more.

Hi Patrick, Let’s get started!

So tell us about Mention?

Mention is a media monitoring and social listening tool. Our goal is to make it easy for businesses to see what’s said about them and their competitors, anywhere online. We’re a web and mobile that lets you track important keywords all across the web. Like Google Alerts, but a whole lot more advanced.

We’ve also just launched a totally free tool — The Brand Grader. This is like a mini-Mention, to let people see how media monitoring works without signing up for a plan.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

Monitoring is increasingly important as more and more business communication is done online. Brands need to know what their customers think about them to create the best products and provide great services. PR pros need to track press coverage all over the web. Companies need to understand their online market to try to find new customers.

The world is digitizing, and businesses need to keep up. Mention helps them keep track of everything happening online.

How is Mention different from what already exists in the market?

The tool that everybody knows about is Google Alerts. Frankly, it’s getting pretty tired. If you’ve used it, the basic keyword listening is the same. You choose a brand name or product you want to monitor, and we tell you when it’s mentioned.

The difference is that Google Alerts doesn’t work in real time, doesn’t work on social media, and doesn’t provide any analytics tools to interpret your results. Mention does all of that, plus we’re a lot more accurate. (I didn’t make that up, we’ve tested it with customers who use both).

There are other listening tools that are advanced like ours, Cision and Talkwalker, for example. Cision NA is more of a PR tool — they focus a lot on press coverage. Talkwalker is similar to Mention, but aimed at much larger companies. We’ve built Mention for small-to-medium sized companies, and our price reflects this. We’re much cheaper than the two tools I just mentioned, we’re easier to use, and we get you up and running much faster.

I’d recommend Mention to businesses that want an easy, hands-on monitoring tool that’s also very accurate.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Mention?

Our biggest segment is agencies. They use us either on behalf of specific clients, or for the agency itself. A large part of what digital agencies do is track social and press coverage, and condense this into reports. Mention automates this process, saving them a huge amount of time.

Otherwise, our main customer base is midmarket businesses. These are often companies with a strong social media presence in several languages. Mention works in any language, and helps these companies identify their audiences wherever in the world they are.

We work with B2B and B2C businesses — this distinction doesn’t seem to be important.

Basically, if you need to know what people say about you online, Mention will help.

How are your customers using Mention? Could you share a few different use cases?

We have a few recurring use cases:

Brand monitoring — Most companies take a great interest in what people say about them online. This is sort of a baseline for us.

Competitive analysis — Just as you can monitor your own brand online, you can monitor your competitors. Mention has some great comparison tools built-in to help customers compare their share of voice, brand sentiment, social media reach, and more.

We’ve even had one client who monitored competitors’ clients, then reached out to the unhappy ones and signed them to his own business. That’s pretty cool.

Influencer marketing — We help a lot of companies discover powerful people already talking about them. Soylent does this with Mention, for example. If you collect comments about your brand, Mention then helps to rank these users based on influence, and gives you ways to reach them on social media.

Crisis and reputation management — This is a big one for agencies. They need to know whenever a bad review or negative statement occurs online, so they can show the clients and create a response plan.

This is also part of the reason we created The Brand Grader, to give people a quick snapshot of their reputation online and help them think about how to improve it.

Have there been unique use cases for Mention that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We have one brand, SEVENFRIDAY, that monitors Instagram for pictures of customers wearing their watches. They’ve then built an integration that collects these images and displays them in their web store, so that potential buyers can see other people wearing them. That was pretty unexpected for us.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Nothing groundbreaking. We’ve invested a lot of time and energy into content marketing, and it’s been very successful for us. We’ve done countless webinars — a great lead-gen tool — as well as blog posts, videos, and other forms of content

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Aircall — This is is our phone service for all customer service and sales calls.

HubSpot — Since we depend so heavily on inbound marketing, we spend a lot of time in HubSpot.

Wordpress — Our website is easily our biggest source of new business, and our blog is our chief communication tool. So without a good host like Wordpress, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

hull — This is our main database. We have nearly a million users now, so a strong database is essential.

Intercom — We can communicate directly with our users, either within Mention or on the website. This is a great tool!

The Help Scout Team — We have shared inboxes that all of the team can access. This is very important for customer support, marketing inquiries, etc.

Calendly — A small tool, but we book the majority of our meetings this way. It connects directly to each of our calendars, so customers can easily book time with us.

Mailjet — Mailjet is a great email automation tool. We use it mainly for notification emails sent from the Mention app.

Originally published at siftery.com.