Tech Town, NC

I’ve been testing Argyle Social this past week as a social media (read: twitter) dashboard and thought I’d share my impressions. Right off the bat I’ll say this – as a professional results-driven tool, it’s among the most promising I’ve used. Think Google Analytics meets bit.ly.

Argyle Social is being developed by Eric Boggs and Adam Covati, both formerly of Bronto in Durham. Their hope is that Argyle will justify in dollars and cents why you should (or shouldn’t) invest in social media. The app bills itself as a “social media marketing platform that helps marketers measure and optimize the social channel” and in my testing, it delivers.

So what is Argyle good at?

• Integrated click tracking
• Managing multiple social media channels (Facebook & Twitter currently)
• Linking social media activity with website activity & business objectives

The last point is what sets Argyle apart from other services. If you are comfortable with Google Analytics, you will be comfortable with Argyle. It allows you to create tracking codes to insert into specific landing pages on your site and link those with tweets and facebook posts to track the results as a campaign. This is the feature that allows Argyle to answer “How effective are my social media efforts in this season’s ___ marketing campaign?” This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, where businesses can compare their social media results to their other efforts. I’ve provided some screenshots of my actual use in this post, but for a look at a true “power user” you can check out shots of Eric’s dashboard here and here.

Another very smart tool Argyle offers for advanced users is the ability to integrate their link shortener within Tweetdeck even though Tweetdeck doesn’t natively support their service. This is possible through a nice option Tweetdeck recently added, allowing you to access any shortening service that offers a configurable API endpoint. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. But if you DO, the you WILL want to use it. Most of my interaction with twitter (95%) is through tweetdeck and the only way I’m going to use Argyle is if it’s in tweetdeck. Thanks to this advanced feature, it is. Also, if you prefer to go the bookmarklet route, Argyle’s got you covered there as well.

But if you are not one of those advanced users I do worry that you may not know where to start. Argyle does a lot of things well and is a great fit for those in the SEO and social media community. However, I think there is a larger opportunity for someone to serve businesses who are unfamiliar with traditional analytics, but have started experimenting with social media (because it’s fun) and want to learn more. For those people it is likely too much to ask to install and setup Tweetedeck, open an Argyle account, create an API key, and paste that back into Tweetdeck.

At this point it should also be said what Argyle is not – It is not a twitter client or social browser like Hootsuite, Cotweet, or Seesmic. Or at least not yet. Another service that does seem somewhat similar is SAS Social Media Analytics. From what I’ve seen of the SAS service* it looks to be a bit more robust than Argyle, with sentiment analysis and forecasting features, but is really tailored more for large brands and is priced on an enterprise scale (*I have not tested the SAS service, but saw a demo & presentation on it at SAS campus).

Back to the non-advanced users. For those people, and there are many of them, Argyle might do well to offer a built-in twitter client that would be a baby-step toward more sophisticated social media use. Call it “Argyle lite,” perhaps. Users could later sync it with Facebook (and potentially LinkedIn or other networks) as they gained familiarity, just as with other clients. ** As I was writing this I noticed in a blog post Argyle previewed an Engagement Workflow feature that sounds much like an “Argyle Lite.” Looking forward to this, guys!

Finally, on a less nuts-and-bolts front, I saw Eric and Adam present at LaunchDays Durham, put on by Scott Kelly, and they clearly mean business. They presented to a serious panel of investors and experts and sounded confident and committed when responding to questions. Their emphasis on metrics and helping businesses meet specific marketing goals was clear in the presentation and is even clearer now that I’ve used the product. I’m going to keep tinkering with it and I look forward to seeing much more from Argyle in the near future.