Are your ears burning? Here’s a list of Canadian-made tools to help you listen to what your customers say about you online

It has been said that in business, good listeners get the best advice on how to move forward. In the emerging world of social media, this has never been more true. Many tools have been developed to listen to what your customers are saying about your brand and your industry online.  If one of your company’s 2011 new year’s resolutions is to listen to your customers more, then you’re in luck.  Canada is a hotbed for creating online tools to listen and engage with your customers online.

A few weeks ago, TechVibes reported that Radian6, a Canadian social media monitoring company in New Brunswick, was finishing the year as a market leader by tripling their revenue in 2010 from 2009.  They weren’t the only Canadian social media monitoring tool/platform to make a huge impact on the Internet in 2010.  Here is a list of some of the top Canadian web-based platforms for listening and engaging with your customers online:

• Radian6 – based in Fredericton, New Brunswick
  Radian6 is a web-based platform which aggregates all of the relevant conversations that are happening online regarding your brand and products into one simple dashboard in real-time.  The company was named by Forrester Research, Inc. as a “leader” in online listening platforms in Q3, 2010.

• Sysomos – based in Toronto, Ontario
  Acquired in July 2010 by MarketWire, Sysomos has also achieved leadership status in the social media monitoring space.  Sysomos sets themselves apart via their automated sentiment tool which analyzes billions of conversations online via blogs, social media, video and more to provide insight into consumer sentiment – segmented by gender, age and location.

• Syncapse – based in Toronto, Ontario
  Syncapse Corp. also had a momentous year in 2010 – being named company of the year at the Canadian New Media Awards. Syncapse is now a global company and provides a platform for managing and monitoring all of your social media initiatives on one platform.  The Syncapse platform also allows you to glean insights to help optimize your efforts, identify your key influencers and measure your ROI.

• HootSuite – based in Vancouver, British Columbia
  HootSuite was the first social media dashboard chosen by Twitter in 2010 to exclusively test out their new in-stream ads.  They also hit their
  one Millionth user mark at the end of 2010. The HootSuite dashboard enables teams to manage multiple Twitter and other social media accounts, track specific keywords that are relevant to your brand, assign Tweets to multiple editors on your team and more.

If you know of other notable Canadian social media monitoring and/or customer listening tools, please post a comment on this blog.

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