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Surfing The Forrester Wave Listening Platforms, Q3 2010

Surfing The Forrester Wave Listening Platforms, Q3 2010: "

I wrote about the  Forrester Wave™: Social Media Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 a year ago and just found out today a new wave has been released from a friend - The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 - Converseon, Nielsen, And Radian6 Lead A Fragmented Market by Zach Hofer-Shall with Suresh Vittal (who I saw most recently at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in NYC a few months ago), Emily Murphy, Michael J. Grant.

Nine vendors were included in this Wave – Alterian, Collective Intellect, Converseon, Cymfony, evolve24, Dow Jones, Nielsen, Radian6 and Visible Technologies.  Criteria for being included in this Forrester Wave included

1. Products that scale to several business functions.


2. Proprietary Dashboards, Analytics and In-House Consultancies


3. Large Presence in Enterprise Market (either clients with more than 1 billion in revenue or vendors that had 85% Enterprise customers or more than 200 such customers).

Thanks to Rob Key and the good folks at Converseon, I have a copy of  The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 in my hands and can write about it (though I do not yet have permission to reproduce the Wave Diagram on page 6 of the report.  I surfed over this Wave this afternoon and here’s what I think.

First, this Forrester Wave establishes Converseon as one of the leaders in Social Listening Platforms – and last time, in January 2009, they weren’t even on the map – impressive!  Converseon‘s gain may have come at the expense of Biz360 and J.D. Powers, which dropped off the Wave this time (perhaps it was due to Biz360′s recent acquisition by Attensity – don’t know about J.D. Powers  – heard it’s a white labeled solution from another vendor – I’ve never used it so I can’t say for sure).

The Forrester Wave for Listening Platforms, Q3 study is based on the premise technology and infrastructure to mine social media data and make meaning out of it has become essential to many businesses though platforms are still very immature and social media use cases are evolving faster than the platforms’  ability to adapt  (stress was put on the “enterprise” type business, suggesting Forrester did not take a position on small/medium sized businesses need this service, or don’t need it.  Besides, these systems are too expensive for many businesses to purchase and run today and widespread adoption is a mute point at this time).

Remember that saying – whenever Google enters an industry it’s good as it legitimizes it (even if it puts half the industry out of business)?  The same could be said about software giants like IBM. Microsoft and SAS that got involved with Social Media Monitoring over the last year – they’d not have made that move if they did not think there was money to be made, a market or several markets to sell to and a need for better systems than had already appeared.

These Listening Systems haven’t yet fully delivered, some have tried to specialize in one or two functions while others are trying to fill many needs – but they are now expected to provide insight.

The Forrester Wave asserts that

” … Nielsen, Radian6, and Converseon lead the market. Nielsen, Radian6, and Converseon sit as Leaders because they combine the best current offering and go-to-market strategy. But the three vendors differ from each other based on their balance of technology and services. “

The remaining vendors are all strong contenders, but like the leading three, have some strengths and some weaknesses (which I won’t go into here – otherwise, I’d have to cite half of the study).

In The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 it’s noted Nielsen just launched a joint venture with McKinsey to provide industry consulting on top of Nielsen’s technology offerings -  called NM Incite which I heard about a few weeks ago from a friend who works at McKinsey.  Radian6, the Wave suggests, must improve it’s text analytics and grow it’s consulting practice while Converseon’s offerings are so tailored to each client that it may not be scalable – like a Hong Kong suit that is tailored just so.

As much as I’ve worked with Converseon (and still do work for them at times) I haven’t ever seen Conversation Miner, their platform.

My thoughts range from wondering when Radian6 is going to be acquired (I heard from a friend that it already has been acquired but the announcement hasn’t yet been made – my friend thinks it’s a large Ad Agency and my guess is Cision or the New York Times – we’ll see who owns Radian6 once the news is announced in the next month or so) and wondering who isn’t going to end up being sold – to wishing they all were sold to larger companies that do something entirely different but complementary to Listening Systems as they’re all to immature to be all that useful as they are.  In fact, I said as much on a call Jasmine Teer and Borge Hald of Medallia last week.   The idea of what these systems do is actually more impressive than what they usually deliver – so I’m all for all of them being acquired – hopefully they will all be improved when applied to a working business model – we’ll see.

Sometimes, when I read a Forrester report like this one, I like to imagine myself as the CEO of this or that large enterprise company, wondering what kind of decisions I’d make where I’d need to read a study like this; plus, once having read it, what decision would I make?

Well, this In The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 study does not tell the reader which platform you should invest in – and one might be temped to think that by delaying getting involved the technology will continue to evolve, more powerful features moving into lower end platforms like ViralHeat or even Trackur will be fairly common in  a few.

Yet the cheap, inexpensive and free monitoring tools aren’t up to snuff and usually can’t handle complicated queries and questions and if you need robust measurement and work flow (many clients need workflow platforms) you’ll need to move forward on purchasing one of the platforms, and, more likely than not, it will be a platform in this study.

The main difference between the new In The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 study and previous study 18 months earlier – Forrester said in 2009 that  Listening Platforms were not  providing enough useful information and in 2010 they’re suggesting Listening Systems are in a reactive mode – responding to events as they happen and can’t entirely catch up with new use cases, even if they wanted to.

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