HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

These look like more great upgrades Hootsuite! I love the user Insights panel!

I’m searching for and hoping you built a way to opt-out or delete available information. I have profiles listed for accounts that I thought I deleted. And I have accounts that I have for professional and personal use. Seeing them all together is not OK with me.

Please Hootsuite, be smart about this. Otherwise, I see this as the next Google Buzz/Facebook privacy debacle. Hootsuite has a smaller user base, but I still see lots of upset.

A Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 10:20 am

All the comments here have been addressed except for mine. Interesting. Yes, Insights is “amazing” but it’s a bad move if you don’t offer control.

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 10:48 am

Stand by, we’re just getting a Help Desk article post ready which explains the process to remove yourself. Alas, its either all info or no info at this point.

Rick Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

Good, will be waiting for for the info to remove this information.

Steve Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 1:52 pm

100% agree with A. My personal and professional online personalities should not be linked with control.

Steve Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 1:56 pm

*without.

A Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Great! I am happy to be without any info. It blows my mind that Hootsuite would release this feature without giving a warning. Or without simultaneously giving a Help Desk article on how to opt-out. My conclusion is that it was part of the strategy. Release it. Cause a bit of a convtrovery. Get new users who want to see what their profile says. Then tell them how to get out of it.

I’ve always thought of myself as savvy about privacy and separation of professional/personal. I’ve been careful to use my “fun” Twitter stream free of direct work references or too much revealing info. But I’ve also enjoyed the freedom of keeping it open to public. This was a good lesson for me in how that separation can be so quickly broken by careless tactics by companies.

I think in the interest of gaining back our trust, Hootsuite should provide more detail on what they used to comb for our data. And no, I don’t think that having a profile on match.com is considering public info. Nor is having registration info on several sites, such as costco.com.

I can see the benefits of the Insight tab for companies using Hootsuite, especially those paying a lot for the soon-to-be launched pro edition. And I really hope that going pro doesn’t mean they got to see the info of the people who opted out.

Declan Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 12:37 pm

Any news yet on the release of an opt out option for Follower Insights?

Dave Olson Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 4:32 pm

We will have an opt-out form in the next day or two — just waiting on a bit of info to compete the form and tool. Thanks for your patience, we are working diligently to effectuate this change.

Rick Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 12:01 pm

It has now been 24 hours and no help desk article has been posted yet. This is a very poorly implemented feature that has put a lot of people who try to have some separation between work and life in general and this “Feature” has violated just that.

Maybe it’s time to get EPIC and EFF involved in this.

Meucci Cam Reply:
July 15th, 2010 at 10:14 am

I completely agree. This is crazy to not have issued a warning to users.

laura Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 2:00 pm

I second that request, I’m very interested in learning how to remove some of these Insight associations as well. Don’t be another Facebook please. I’d be perfectly fine with a “Disable Insight” option, don’t need granular control or anything.

Apocalypso Facto Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 8:52 pm

“I’ve been careful to use my “fun” Twitter stream free of direct work references or too much revealing info. But I’ve also enjoyed the freedom of keeping it open to public. This was a good lesson for me in how that separation can be so quickly broken by careless tactics by companies.” —> +1
I’m really baffled to just having realized my employer’s name and occupation is out there for anyone to see… Twitter is not Linked.in!
Please, give us the option to opt out from this “insights” feature, at least until we get some control on it.

Hi there,

1. HootSuite will remain free for an estimated 95% of users based on current usage patterns. // Do you mean that you will charge Heavy users although it´s not a commercial account??

2. Follower Insights

Get to know your network with the knowledge behind the “Insights” tab. Learn where your contacts hang-out online including publicly available links to social profiles, a collection of images, even occupations and title — all in one view // How do you get these data? How is that for some of my followers I can see several social profiles + pictures + links to the company website where they work and I only see my FB profile as Insight in my account? Do you use APIs for these? Could you clarify?

BR

@edgar_sanchez

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:48 am

thanks Edgar,

1) We’ll pricing tiers will be based on factors like number of social networks, number of team members, number of RSS feeds and support needs regardless of commercial nature or not

2) This info is pulled via an API and we don’t control the data per se. The data displayed is the publicly available info pulled via this API so some people will have a lot of info, others will have little or none or even incomplete info.

I think this is great – I love hootsuite. I am confused, though… is this a paid plan?

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:18 am

HootSuite is still all-free but we are rolling out paid plans soon.

Is there a step by step guide to integrate Hootsuite and Zendesk? I’ve been digging around but can’t find anything obvious to link them up…?

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:45 am

We’re working on getting something posted. In the meantime, check out these articles:

https://support.zendesk.com/entries/213020-announcing-zendesk-s-integration-with-twitter

https://support.zendesk.com/entries/213023-zendesk-s-twitter-integration-limitations-and-dependencies

http://www.zendesk.com/blog/hoot-that-twicket-streamlining-support-for-increased-happiness

I love hootsuite… these new features look really cool. I want to know more about the Social CRM.

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:54 am

Stay tuned and we’ll provide more info on the blog in coming days.

I am an entrepreneur who has specialized in the hospitality industry. I’ve utilized websites to drive business since 2004!

HootSuite is GREAT! My success in any business venture has always been relationship based offer free services with passion of “what can I do for you?”
HootSuite now makes it even faster & easier for me to give more in 2010 with the same 24 hours we all had in 2004.
“No such thing as time-management, only events-management”
Thank you HootSuite and keep up the good development work and offerings.
Lori

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:53 am

Thanks for your kind words and enthusiasm Lori.

I’m new to hootsuite and love it. Thanks for the great free tool!

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:51 am

you are welcome Kelly

Can you clarify what you mean by “team members on social networks”?
Does this mean that team-managing Twitter will become a paid option?

Otherwise, I love the changes. Hootsuite has pretty much become Twitter for me. It’s a great service. Keep up the good work!

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:53 am

Hi Jesse, The number of team members will become tiered as part of premium packages. Glad you like the changes — keep on Hooting!

It clearly seems like an improvement for the best. However, I’m a bit concern on privacy issues.

Sure, the Insight tab gathers publicly available information, but I’d like to have some control (what sources, and if I want or not to be a part of it).

Is there any capacity built right now to adjust such measures?

Cool,
was already using hootsuite a lot… and as a community manager I understand the extras (advantages and prices) you’re offering… Thanks!

this all looks very good. im looking forward to downloading these updates, although im still trying to work out how to get the updates from before. help? Thanks

Cheryl

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 12:34 pm

Nothing to download Cheryl — all the new features are there already when you login to HootSuite.

Nice updates guys. I’d like to see the filter extended to provide a kill-list filter to drop tweets from constant spammers that appear in some of my search columns. This is on the feedback channel in a number of variants …

http://hootsuite.uservoice.com/forums/40182-hootsuite-com-web-dashboard/suggestions/498655-allow-me-to-create-a-block-list-for-users-on-all-c
http://feedback.hootsuite.com/forums/40182-hootsuite-com-web-dashboard/suggestions/753710-add-ability-to-filter-out-tweets-based-on-hashtags?ref=title
http://hootsuite.uservoice.com/forums/40182-hootsuite-com-web-dashboard/suggestions/484860-hide-tweets-for-a-while-feature-?ref=title

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 12:34 pm

Thanks Andy — I’ll merge a few of those tickets and we’ll consider how to implement in a future release.

As we move closer to legitimate social media CRM solutions, you guys are doing a fantastic job of pushing us there. Thank you for streamlining my work week.

Dave Olson Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

Thanks for the kind words — enjoy your increased leisure time!

I like the new filter by keyword functionality… but I also want the reverse (an “anti-filter”)… I monitor certain keywords, but want to remove the tweet that’s been RT’d by 500 people today because it went viral. I need to see the other stuff, but the noise sometimes gets in the way!

laura Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

Same here! List filters would be great, would’ve loved to have all the World Cup, iPhone 4, and Lebron James tweets removed from my streams last week.

The information on the Insight tab is wrong for me and contains dead or no longer active accounts that were deleted months (or years) ago in some cases. How do we go about contacting the people behind this “API” so we can get this information updated and/or removed. In some cases, the wrong information can be damaging to our reputation because we didn’t choose to have the information put there nor does the insight tab doesn’t mention the information may contain errors because it is automatically collected.

While I can see the idea behind the Insight tab being useful, it would be far more prudent to let us decide what information we’d like to include. Until this can be implemented I would like all the information on the Insight tab removed from my account and I’m sure others would concur.

Dave Olson Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 10:38 am

Submitted a ticket for you Hisham and we’ll give you some more info about this.

Very impressive drill-down capabilities. Love the “local option” Curios though – how wide is the net from my location? Can it be adjusted to cover a larger/smaller area? Great product.

Dave and the HootSuite team –

The new HootSuite rocks! Loving it, and am sold on what it means for me and my social media interactions.

I ran a featured post on HootSuite on Social Media Notebook this morning, talking about why I am raving about it.

Two things though –
1. I am not sure of what the premium and paid accounts will bring to the table when they come – and what they will take away from me.
2. I thought the $2.99 price point for the iPhone app was a bit surprising shift from the default 0.99$ pricing. I’m pretty sure the price delta isn’t contributing to revenue in a big way, but might definitely get in the way of adoption.

My first experience of the Insights tab, as I imagine most people’s will be – clicking on myself. Apparently I am no longer Rob Bell of Wakefield, England, I am now Abhishek Porwal from New Delhi, India with all his networks and information.

Can I suggest there might be a problem with Insight?

Rob Bell Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 10:29 am

trying out a few more ‘Insights’ on celebrities in my list, comedienne Sarah Silverman is now Eric Katowitz from California, director Kevin Smith is Amanda Campos, British comedian Russell Brand is now Natalie Johnstone.

It doesn’t seem very accurate… certainly not Gist!

Dave Olson Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 10:46 am

Ha — sounds fishy. We’re working with the data provider to sort out more options for these Insights.

Dave Olson Reply:
July 14th, 2010 at 10:47 am

Hello Abhishek err … Rob,

Yes you may suggest that .

filtering by a single company’s idea of “influence” seems dubious to me, possibly even offensive.

Any word on an opt out for the Insight tab yet?

Meucci Cam Reply:
July 15th, 2010 at 11:15 am

Actually I suppose I can just close out my HootSuite account since there is still no fix for this. Too bad it was a nice site while it lasted.

Apocalypso Facto Reply:
July 15th, 2010 at 8:16 pm

That’s an option I’m truly considering now… that “opt-out” solution hasn’t solved anything yet, I’m seeing my professional and Web2.0 info all mixed up in there.
Do I have to make my Twitter profile closed in order to prevent the Insights tab from showing my personal info? What a shame…

Any word on setting up an opt out for insights? Or at least control over what is shown?

I’m form the Eu, The Netehrlands to be precise. We have here a lot of activity with Xing, Ecademy and Hyves when do we have the opportunity to integrate them in our Hootsuite?Hope soon we love it here also. gr Jack