Since its launch in 2011, TrendSpottr has been trying to help companies, brands, and publications find trending content in their industry before it goes viral. The company’s algorithms identify trending content as it gains steam, with the goal of helping customers find and share topical content. Today Trendspottr is announcing the launch of its TrendSpottr Alerts service, a Google Alerts-style product that lets companies get notified about trending content in real-time.
TrendSpottr founder Mark Zohar said the new Alerts product, which has been in private beta testing with media companies and PR agencies, is aimed at executives and others in leadership positions who don’t have time to wade through social media sites to find content, whether related to their company or their industry.
“The whole thinking behind Alerts is that we’re in a world right now that is real-time, where there’s a lack of time and attention to follow social and follow what’s going on,” Zohar said in an interview. “We want to create a product and a process that engages executive leadership by turning this on its head – by moving from pull to push.”
The Alerts product comes on the heels of Trendspottr’s Widgets product, which launched in July 2012 and lets publications or bloggers add a block of trending topics to their website, a feature that was previously only available via Trendspottr’s back-end dashboard. Rather than target publishers, the new Alerts product is catered to marketers, PR agencies, and others looking to identify trends early in the hype curve.
Setting up a TrendSpottr Alert is similar to setting up a Google Alert – clients can enter a keyword or hashtag, and they will receive real-time emails as the service identifies trending content on Facebook and Twitter. Unlike Google Alerts, which notify users as soon as their keyword is mentioned, TrendSpottr only sends out an alert when it notices more activity, based on the company’s trend-identifying algorithms.
“The Alerts are sent not because the information is new, but because the information is exceptional, it’s out of the ordinary, it has predictive aspects to it,” Zohar said.
Customers can use the tool for free if they only want to receive one alert from the company’s list of 10 popular terms, or they can pay to set up custom alerts. The company is also opening up its API to third-party developers who want to build real-time trend alerts into their apps or platforms.
In addition to the new product, the company is also partnering with Moncton, NB-based startup Lymbix, a sentiment intelligence platform, to provide sentiment analysis on the trends it identifies. In the alert emails, users can see whether the alert is positive, neutral or negative based on Lymbix’s analysis, and click through to an analytics page to see more information on the trend and sentiment.
“My hope is that as the product gets out there and as we improve it and as we get feedback, that it becomes kind of the bat signal, that if you’re walking down the halls of your office…you stop and you say ‘holy cow, something important is happening, let me send it to my team.'”
TrendSpottr has been working to integrate with more social marketing services, recently through an integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. While the company seems to have carved out a space in the real-time trending content niche, it will be interesting to see whether executives see the need for the Alerts product, especially when they can use Google Alerts or social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite to unearth the same content.