Mention answers the most important question of the moment: “what’s a good alternative to Google Alerts?” There are a bunch of possibilities here, but I’d now add Mention to the short-list. During my tour of Startup Alley yesterday I met with Mention’s Eduardo de La Jonquiere, Co-Founder and CEO, who immediately described his software to me as Google Alert on steriods. But that’s such an 80’s metaphor. After downloading and trialing it, I say it’s closer to Google Alerts on Adderall.
Similar to Alerts, Mention’s queries are built from simple boolean expressions. Unlike Google, you won’t have to remember some silly syntax: a wizard guides you through alert creation. More importantly, Mention accesses Twitter and Facebook’s walled garden, along with searching regular web content. Added bonus: Mention is also multi-lingual.
As a test, I gave it an actual query that I needed answered for my marketing work. In organizing search results, Mention is closer in spirit to TweetDeck: it places more timely web content–social as well as static — at the head of the queue and even adds a time stamp. Nice touch!
The other point to make about Mention is that it recognizes that people besides marketers and analysts are searching the web and social media. There are additional functions to create simple workflows so that an alert can be forwarded to others on a team– think customer service or sales types as potential Mention users. By the way, Mention is also available on IOS and Android, which makes it even more attractive to roving sales and support engineers
Mention has a freemium model: the free part gives you three alerts and 5000 mentions; for $19.99/month, you’ll receive unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions, and access to statistics.