Free High Precision News Alerting and News/Social Media Viewer
- High Precision News Alerts
- Social Media Viewing (Blogs & Video Uploads) and Filtering
- Funding Data
- Special Alerts for M&A, Executive Changes, and Funding Events
Cons
- They should broaden the social media viewing to include Twitter and LinkedIn
- Only offer three event triggers
- Company profiles should be built out with more depth
- Lack of executive data
- Add alerting on a broader set of content categories particularly social media
- Improved company tracking via alerts
- Quick review of company blogs, press releases, and video uploads
- Free service with a quick setup. Thus, the cost is simply your setup time and time spent reviewing alerts. As the alerts have high precision, there is an almost immediate return on investment.
Owler is a free service so its primary direct competitors would be Google Alerts (it has much higher precision and a unified daily alert), and the freemium InsideView which supports three alerts.
I view it as a complement to fully featured subscription sales intelligence services (e.g. InsideView, Avention, and Hoover's) as it has a few features not available in the other services (e.g. multi-platform social media and news viewing, polls, and funding data) and provides strong precision in their news alerts which captures a few items missed by the other services.
- Company Tracking
- Company Research
- Looking up Funding History
- Quick Company Profile Lookup via Mobile
- Event Tracking (M&A, Exec Change, Funding)
- Quick way to lookup funding information
- Tracking blogs and video posts
- Broader social media tracking once they include LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook
- Setting up shared alerts (e.g. competitor lists) for co-workers
- Current awareness from within SFDC
- Context based alerts based upon my calendar (SFDC and InsideView are working on such features)
- Price
- Product Features
- Implemented in-house
- They do not display much company data in their pick lists when searching for companies. This can make it difficult to select the appropriate company when names are generic or there are multiple locations.
- The list grouping feature has an awkward design and is under featured (this functionality was just added prior to this review)
- Limited online help tools as they just exited beta
- Self-taught
The product is straightforward to use so there is little need for training.
Owler should add inline tips, a three minute setup demo, and a two minute features demo.
Setup the web version first for ten companies and let them run for a week. Avoid public companies with heavy news coverage unless you are a named account rep only serving a few firms. The brilliance of this service is it brings in blogs, press releases, and videos so alerting on companies with limited news coverage using Owler may be more important than being deluged with news on public companies which are available through many outlets.
Once you have gotten a feel for the service, add additional companies, adjust your filters, and install the Owler App (which uses the companies selected from the web tool).
- Viewing and Filtering Company News
- Setting up Alerts
- Discover Dashboard -- Recent M&A, Funding, and Exec Change Events
- Manage Companies -- a feature for grouping companies into categories.
- Advanced Search -- List Building with few screening variables and no downloading
Owler is pulling its mobile app at the end of June. They will continue support it, but it will not longer be available to new users and will become a legacy offering for current users. The app worked well.
They are recommending users access via the mobile browser. I have not tested Safari browser access.
- Salesforce.com