Appendix
Vendor Profiles A Resource Guide
Brands have an extraordinary array of solution types and vendors from which to choose for their listening research. In the following pages we organize solutions into the five categories described in Chapter 2, and provide capsule reviews of commercial products and services available today, organized by the marketplace so that you can become familiar with the types of solutions that may be best suited to your listening projects. The five groups are:
- Search engines
- Social media monitoring
- Text analysis
- Communities
- Full-service listening platform vendors
We chose vendors that have publicly available products for review. None were paid to be included; the companies we selected were based completely on our criteria. They run the gamut from established firms that were instrumental in launching the listening movement to newer startups whose innovative approaches are influencing the listening market. The space is constantly in motion and fermenting with investor interest. With so many new entrants, it's likely that the listening marketplace will consolidate over the next few years. For this reason, it is vital to carefully evaluate companies you may consider partnering with and make sure that their data is portable.
We group solutions into two categories:
- General Search Engines
- Real-Time Search
General Search Engines
AOL Hot Searches
AOL Hot Searches provides a list of the top 10 search terms from the previous day and a blog that comments on searches or topics the blog editors find of interest. Within the blog posts, the editors list a subset of searches related to the topic, which offers some insight into searcher interests. One example is a US Open story that was reported on September 11, 2009, for which the top five searches were: Melanie Oudin, Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer. This tool also provides a helpful bit of context by briefly annotating the top searches. Although AOL Hot Searches is not searchable and does not report trend data, it does lend a social media twist by allowing participants to comment on blog posts. Additionally, the service solicits feedback by running occasional celebrity-oriented and topical polls, such as awareness and use of Groupon.
ESPN Searches
ESPN offers a handful of tools reflecting searches across ESPN.com: Recent Searches (top 16), Top 10 Searches (last 24 hours), Top Mover, and Top Searches of the Month (25), which also includes an editorial wrap on the most interesting stories. Top Searches of the Month is archived and available from 2005 on.
Google Services
Google has three generally available products for analyzing search trends: Google Alerts, Google Trends, and Google Insights for Search. All draw upon a portion of Google's worldwide database of Web searches performed across all its domains. Google only includes search terms that have sufficient volumes for analysis, which must pass a minimum threshold. Search terms can be any word or phrase or keywords purchased by search engine marketers. Google positions Insights for Search as an advanced research, analysis, and display tool designed for researchers and advertisers.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts monitors Google properties Web Google News, Google Blogsearch, and Google Images for predefined keywords. Typically sent as a daily e-mail roundup, alert frequency can range from “as it happens” to longer time periods. News feeds are also available.
Google Insights for Search
http://www.google.com/insights/search
Google Insights for Search orders lists of the top searches and top-rising searches. Users can enter one to five terms for analysis, and Google provides filtering capabilities that tailor the information displayed: time period, Google property (Web, image, news, or product), country, and category. The results page shows graphs with search volume trends, news context, and geographic distributions, and as a 12-month forecast of search volume for each term. Google provides several features for downloading and integrating the Insights data with other systems or displays through data feeds and embeddable widgets.
Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Google Trends positions itself as a resource for understanding popular or user-specified search trends. It furnishes the top 100 search queries on an hourly basis. Each term is hyperlinked to a page that presents a graph of the search volume index and related news stories, blog postings, and Web results. Google Trends also provides a search capability that allows users to compare multiple words over time, as well as by country, city, and language. Data mined here can be exported to other programs.
Yahoo! Buzz Index
http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog
Yahoo! provides two listening services: Buzz Index and Y!buzz.
Buzz Index provides a ranking of searches organized into categories: Overall, Actors, Movies, Music, Sports, TV, Video Games, and Decliners. The service aims to present the terms of greatest general interest, which the service monitors editorially and then omits those that are irrelevant or ambiguous. Additionally, Buzz Index's associated blog features weekly reviews of the top 20 searches and daily commentaries on stories Yahoo! editors find postworthy. Buzz Index publishes different flavors—kids, Canada, United Kingdom, and France. Data is exportable via RSS.
Y!buzz reports terms in two groups: Leaders and Movers. Leaders rank Buzz Scores for each term, most popular first, by the percentage of searchers using that term. Movers charts and ranks the daily change in score from one day to the next. Leaders show the most popular searches; Movers show what's hot. Yahoo updates its data daily, and it reflects the traffic from two days earlier. Yahoo! explains in its FAQ that this lag is required because it takes 24 hours for data processing and verification.
Real-Time Search
Within real-time search we further organize solutions into these subcategories:
- Blog-centric services
- Twitter-centric
- “Real-time” Web
- Collaboration and workflow
- Analytic-oriented
Blog-Centric Services
BlogPulse
A service of Nielsen, BlogPulse combines blog search with analysis and reporting on various blogosphere events. This tool allows users to plot trends that compare one or more keywords and drill down into the supporting posts. The Conversation tracker aggregates posts related to search terms users enter, while BlogPulse Profiles provide metrics that help users understand the influence of the blogger. Like most services, BlogPulse reports on Featured Trends, and is a subset of Nielsen Online's MyBuzzMetrics, which covers virtually all consumer-generated media.
Google presents real-time search results that are available in the left sidebar. When expanded, options are available for “recent results,” “past hour,” “past 24 hours,” “past week,” “past year,” or alternate date ranges that the user can specify. It also includes Twitter updates, which appear as they happen.
Technorati and Twittorati
Technorati users search the blogosphere for topics using keywords or phrases, receiving results and automated trend graphs on daily blog post mentions. As one of the first services to measure online influence, Technorati's “authority” rating ranks blogs by the number of other blogs linking to them in the last six months.
Newer service Twittorati provides a Twitter-focused search by tracking tweets from the highest-authority bloggers, starting with the entire Technorati Top 100. The company claims it will include “many more of the Web's most influential voices.”
Twitter-Centric
CoTweet
CoTweet couples Twitter management with a customer service platform that enables organizations to manage and respond to customer issues. CoTweet's capabilities include elements like keywords and trends monitoring; group collaboration features (letting teams control multiple accounts, set alerts, escalate and assign Tweets for action, schedule Tweets, and post to multiple accounts); and tracking and analysis tools.
CrowdEye
Dedicated solely to Twitter, CrowdEye graphs Tweet volume by time period, and organizes key terms into word clouds and drill-down capabilities, and surfaces the underlying Tweets. It also offers links to related searches.
DailyRT
DailyRT tracks the popularity of individual Twitter tweets by analyzing retweets. In addition to providing keyword search, it displays “hot tweets,” those that receive the greatest number of retweets, and “profiles,” which identify the authors of the most retweeted posts, as well as “resources.”
hootsuite 2.0
Recent entrant hootsuite 2.0 offers similar features to CoTweet. Hootsuite provides integration with ping.fm, which allows users to update all their social networks with one push.
Topsy
Twitter-only measurement tool Topsy adds a social search component to searches. This service's ranking approach factors in a source's authority and how many times the content was shared. Source influence centers around what followers do with their tweets, such as respond or retweet.
Tweetmeme
Tweetmeme's service collects and organizes popular links on Twitter into top-level categories—such as “entertainment,” “science,” or “sports”—and then divides these into subcategories. The sports category, for instance, is further broken down into “baseball,” “extreme,” “football,” and “Olympics.”
Twitter Search
Twitter's search displays results in real time, with the most recent first. Its results page shows what's buzzing around the Twittersphere in its lists of “trending topics” and “nifty queries.”
“Real-Time” Web
Collecta
Collecta provides a constant stream of social media blogs, comments, status updates, photos, and videos relating to the search terms that users enter. The service puts forth “hot topics” and allows users to include all results or limit to one or a combination of sources. Collecta offers “chicklets,” to share items, and an API for integration with third-party applications.
IceRocket
By tracking blogs, the Web, Twitter, MySpace, news, and images including videos, IceRocket's real-time searches are ranked by timelines (most recent first) and organized by source. The interface and feature set concentrates on aggregating results, and presently offers little in the way of analysis, social media, collaboration, or reporting. However, IceRocket's integration features—RSS and a programmer's API—enable users to easily share results with colleagues or incorporate them into other systems for the heavy lifting. IceRocket also offers Ice Spy, a keyhole that reveals the terms and phrases being searched most frequently at that moment.
IceRocket's Trend Tool (http://trend.icerocket.com) lists out popular posts and sports, celebrity, and entertainment news. Its tracker allows users to search on one to five search terms and plot activity over 30- to 90-day periods. Graphs display the percent of all blog posts for which the search terms account over time, and furnish tables of posts per day, as well as average percentage of posts per day. For detail, hyperlinked search times fire off a query that returns results from IceRocket.
OneRiot
OneRiot focuses on indexing the links people share on Twitter and social bookmark services, which they refer to as the “realtime Web.” OneRiot shows the number of times that each result has been shared, who shared it, and the first person to share it. This capability, which several other services share, allows marketers to track down influencers and expose the viral path content takes. OneRiot allows searching within specific Web sites, and makes it possible to identify the content being discussed most frequently.
OneRiot presents results in two ways: “realtime” and “pulse.” Realtime rankings list results by time, while Pulse Rank, with its proprietary scoring system, weighs posts by a number of factors, including freshness, Web site authority, personal authority, and acceleration (better thought of as “hotness”).
Scoopler
Scoopler collects, organizes, and indexes live updated content, such as breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and hot topics from real-time sources like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious. Results are displayed in two columns: presented as a stream in one, and ranked by popularity in the other.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user-generated content. Categories such as sentiment, reach, time of mention, responses, actions, top keywords, top users, and number of unique authors are all used. Filters for managing result display include date, source, and post rank. Social Mention provides alert capabilities.
Social media monitoring tools and capabilities allow end users to monitor, measure, analyze, and report on social media activity by querying their collection of social media sources. Monitoring tools help companies track mentions of themselves, competitors and industry, topics and issues, words or phrases of interest, the sentiment around them, and key influencers (which can be people, blogs, or sites). The primary purposes for monitoring, as mentioned in Chapter 2, are public relations, including reputation management; company and brand protection; and customer service, outreach, and engagement.
Alterian Techrigy SM2
http://socialmedia.alterian.com
Techrigy monitors mainstream media, blogs, and social media, and allows users to set alerts for selected conversations and topics. The program computes sentiments around each discussion and aggregates them to provide an overview of social media trends. Discussion clustering classifies and graphs all discussions around the brand. Charts offer drill-down capability, to see the buzz generating trends, and are customizable.
Brain Juicer
Brain Juicer specializes in insights development and validation, concept testing, product evaluation, communications testing, sales forecasting, and brand personality tracking. The company uses listening research to support its services, such as predictive markets, hybrid qualitative/quantitative tools (MindReader), visual ethnography (FamCam), and, most recently, Digividuals, a “robot” avatar programmed to study trends in the Twitter environment.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch uses its own program, called Crawler, which visits microblogging sites like Twitter; blogs including Blogger and WordPress; video sites like YouTube and Vimeo; social networks like Facebook and MySpace; discussion forums; and news sites. Brandwatch also “cleans” the results by filtering out most irrelevant data, like ads and spam, which may match on key terms but are unrelated to the area of study. People use Crawler to collate information on topics called “queries,” which are uploaded to a workspace where users can view all the Web activity trends on multiple topics simultaneously.
BurrellesLuce
BurrellsLuce provides Media Contacts, Media Monitoring, and Media Measurement. Offering human-edited and automated services, they cover traditional and online sources, including social media and paid sources. Their automated metrics include: story volume, media type, audience segment, and DMA. Custom metrics add finer layers of analysis: tone, share of voice, key messages, prominence, and marketing power. Through the BurrelsLuce Portal 2.0, customers manage their results and can perform self guided searches with iMonitor.
ChatThreads
ChatThreads’ Touchpoints service seeks to help brands quantify the reach, purchase, and trial impact of all their points of contact with consumers. Touchpoints evaluates many different media of consumer contact, including sampling; word of mouth; and online social, mobile, gaming, customer service, retail, and traditional media. All parts of the transaction funnel are considered to provide a picture of how consumers are receiving a brand's marketing efforts. Dashboards are used to show real-time results of brand buzz, where available, while monthly insight reports assess data in a more detailed way—looking at how each touchpoint is performing compared to others in terms of share of voice (SOV); how other related brands are performing, if and how touchpoints are leading to purchase; and more.
CyberAlert
CyberAlert 4.0 monitors domestic and international sources and has a family of products for “consumer discussion and tracking,” which include message boards, forums, videos, blogs, and Twitter, for example. PR and media analysis included for each clip—such as a Web site ranking or news site it comes from—reach per million, national opportunities to see (an online data point similar to print circulation), and the print circulation of an Internet site (if a print version exists). Results are stored centrally in a digital “clip book,” where users can manage, share, and import them into third-party tools. Account staff advises on user queries and handles any changes requested to terms or collection frequency.
General Sentiment
General Sentiment is a technology company that produces comprehensive research products to help marketing, sales, and communications executives evaluate their brands’ performance in the media and assess return on investment. Through natural language processing and sentiment analysis, the company analyzes social media content by listening to opinions expressed regarding companies, brands, products, and people in near real-time. General Sentiment considers its key differentiator to be its capability to translate the data into high-level insights for the marketing executive through dashboards and customized reports.
Giga Alert
Giga Alert's service searches the Web and news sources against keyword searches its customers specify. It offers various tiers of service, from Personal to Platinum, which differ in the numbers of searches performed, number of results returned, result frequency, technical support level, and the capability to share results with colleagues or workgroups. Giga Alert provides capabilities to refine searches by enabling end users to configure filters that eliminate unwanted or irrelevant results by example. Results can be organized, managed, and shared online, and results can be integrated through RSS or HTML.
Infegy Social Radar
Social Radar continually collects social content from across the Web and allows customers to search its database, which contains information that stretches back to January 2007. Infegy provides tools for mining and reporting. Customers specify search terms, set parameters or limitations, such as date ranges or level of influence, and generate charts covering topics, top influencers, tone (sentiment), and trends.
Itracks
Established online market research company Itracks recently launched a social media monitoring platform that, in partnership with social software application MutualMind, captures data from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as data generated from other social media platforms. This information is then tailored for market researchers, who can develop their research design or monitor their clients’ activity. The dashboard gives a quick view of what people are discussing online and includes a sentiment analysis graph of online activity. It also offers a very useful Respond function, whereby users can update multiple social network platforms simultaneously.
Meltwater Group
Meltwater offers media monitoring (Meltwater News), social media monitoring (Meltwater Buzz), and a collaboration platform (Meltwater Drive). Founded in Norway, Meltwater is strong in multilingual coverage. The company furnishes its services through a software-as-a-service platform.
Netbase
NetBase's natural language processing engine (NLP) analyzes textual information at the sentence level. Patent-pending “lenses” provide context for search results and intelligently guide users to relevant results. NetBase products include ConsumerBase (social media analysis and brand tracking) and ScienceBase (insight discovery tool). Netbase provides its solutions as a software as a service, and provides consulting services.
OpinionLab
OpinionLab specializes in voice of the customer listening, specifically for Web sites, e-mails, and documents. OpinionLab solutions are, respectively, OnlineOpinion (for enterprises), DialogCentral (for smaller companies), O-Mail (for e-mail), and DocRate (for documents). These programs collect opinions from individuals through online “comment cards” or special links that capture information anonymously at very granular levels, like individual Web or PDF pages. The company offers a variety of analytics, visualizations, and reports that include data drill-downs and trends in pages, opinions, and user experiences. Collaboration tools enable users to share and act on knowledge, as appropriate.
PR Newswire eWatch
http://ewatch.prnewswire.com/rs/login.jsp
EWatch is a self-service tool that monitors editorial sites on the Web, including print or electronic publications, customer-specified sites, and public discussion sites—newsgroups, online service forums, and investor message boards—which eWatch delivers after human monitors review them for relevance. The service provides the capability to manage and share results, and integrates with PR Newswire's MediaAtlas service.
Radian6
Radian6 searches the social Web in near-real time. Users can filter and segment results to narrow them down to specific areas of interest. Radian6 provides a suite of robust analytic and visualization tools. Workflow and engagement management features enable customer teams to route, track, engage, and report. Radian6 helps companies achieve holistic views of customers by integrating with Salesforce.com and WebTrends Web analytic data.
Scout Labs by Lithium Technologies
Targeted to agencies, Scout Labs’ platform provides social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, collaboration tools, alerts, filtering, and analytics. When desired, customers can add their own URLs, to ensure coverage of all critical sources. Scout Lab Workspaces allow agencies such as Razorfish to create “collaborative client dashboards” for “sharing the voice of the customer in real time, along with their own insights and recommendations.”
Sentiment360
Sentiment360 evaluates social media activity concerning specific brands or topics across multiple mediums, including blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Analysts formulate qualitative and quantitative data and then organize it into customized market insight dashboards, enabling marketers to monitor the online discussion about a brand or topic in real time. Sentiment360 also offers clients strategic PR and advertising guidance, based on their market investigations.
Sysomos
Sysomos specializes in social media monitoring for public relations, word-of-mouth marketers, advertisers, corporations, and API/data partners. This program uses a holistic “five Ws” framework for monitoring social media for clients: What are people talking about? When did the conversations occur? Where in the world did they happen? Who is doing the talking, and what kind of influence do they have? Why are the conversations happening; are they positive or negative? They claim this segmented approach to monitoring online sentiment, helps construct a detailed portrait of the state of a brand in the eyes of the online social public.
Trendrr
Trendrr is a real-time social and digital media tracker of “trends,” which the company defines as a search time or phrase tracked on a single news or social media service. Service categories include blogs, financial, news, jobs, music, sales, and search, for example. Trendrr shows its trend results as graphs, and offers the capability to combine one or more trends to show comparisons and contrasts. The community features allow users to search all active trends, to create mashups of one's own trends with any other, to embed charts, and to share trends on social networks. The PRO version provides more reporting options, alerts, and a developer's interface for incorporating company data and integrating with third-party applications.
Webclipping.com
Webclipping.com offers four major products—clipping service, competitive analysis, political campaign monitoring, and brand monitoring—through its Massive Internet Presence Profile. Reports include “key phrases, competing brand correlation, the mention of specific people or celebrities, and the geographical location of Web sites,” for example.
Text analytics software companies furnish software that provides tools and capabilities for collecting conversations; processing, analyzing, and reporting them; providing workflow and collaboration tools for groups or teams; and data integration with CRM solutions, third-party, and in-house systems, to present a comprehensive view.
Offerings range from enterprise solutions to Web-based self-service tools that are installed on site or made available as a service. A number of vendors offer both deployments.
Adobe Online Marketing Suite: Powered by Omniture
Adobe's Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, offers a wide range of social media monitoring services that can be used individually or collaboratively. The platform integrates data from multiple sources including the Web, mobile and social media interactions, as well as CRM, call center, and point-of-sale systems. Marketing channels reports can line up all of a marketer's promotional outlets for easy evaluation of which marketing investments are proving to be the most effective in influencing customers.
Attensity
Attensity claims to “empower better customer experiences” by emphasizing the integration of its text analysis with capabilities to respond to customers in self-service or through assisted customer service. Providing the features characteristic of enterprise vendors, Attensity's Response Management and E-Service suites appear to showcase its approach to linking text analysis to action.
Clarabridge
Clarabridge Content Mining Platform positions itself as providing a “customer experience management” platform that addresses several functional areas: product/service management, marketing, and service delivery that is applicable across industries. Clarabridge describes its process in three stages: Collect and Connect incorporates data from all relevant external and internal sources. Mine and Refine extracts meaning from text, through techniques like natural language processing and machine learning, classification, and sentiment analysis; stores it in a data warehouse; and combines it with structured data (databases and spreadsheets) to form a “360 view of customer experience.” Analyze and Report uses analytical approaches like root cause, trends, and “advanced analytics,” to gain understanding of brand dynamics, patterns, and trends. Reports are made available through online business intelligence portals, reports, or third-party tools.
For companies wanting alternatives to installed solutions, Clarabridge offers Content Mining Service, software as a service alternative. Social Media Analysis offers customers the ability to integrate the Alterian Techrigy SM2 social media collection.
Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon's technology analyzes the social Web by statistically analyzing word patterns that express opinions on topics its customers identify. The company's platform, VoxTrot, provides two data views: VoxTrot Buzz reports mentions and sentiment trends on topics; and a proprietary metric, VoxScore, evaluates topic perceptions across media. VoxTrot Opinion is an analytics tool that enables users to understand drivers, patterns, and trends in opinions of interest. The company has a self-service offering in beta test.
Lexalytics
Sentiment and text analysis vendor Lexalytics concentrates on the OEM market, licensing its software and tools to third parties that integrate them into their product lines and services. Lexalytics customers include several reviewed here: BurrellesLuce, TNS Cymfony, and Scout Labs. Its core product, Salience 4, extracts entities (e.g., people, places, dates), entity relationships (e.g., people and their job titles), summarizes documents, and extracts sentiment or tone at the document and entity level. Lexalytics harvests content through Acquisition Engine and Classifier, which creates taxonomies. Lexalytics provides professional services and is considering expanding beyond the OEM market; the company is testing a self-service solution.
Networked Insights
Networked Insights’ platform SocialSense creates virtual communities drawn from preselected sites that focus on specific organizational or brand interests, and also tracks mentions across the Web, to explore the attitudes, behavior, and opinions of consumers. Networked Insights extracts themes, identifies trends and key verbatims, and integrates with comScore and WebTrends data for site statistics.
SAP Business Objects Text Analysis
SAP's offering focuses on providing text analysis, reporting, and integration with its own or third-party tools to provide a rich view of customers. Multilingual capability is a particular strength, with analysis of more than 30 languages available.
SAS Institute, SAS Text Miner
SAS Text Miner is a component available to licensees of SAS Enterprise Miner, the popular statistical and business intelligence software product. Text Miner stresses its integration with databases to provide a comprehensive customer view. Like SAP's offering, it is strongly multilingual. SAS Text Miner utilizes Teragram's natural language processing tools. Teragram is an SAS division that licenses its tools to the OEM market.
Temis Luxid
The Temis Luxid product family tackles text analysis for scientific discovery, content enrichment, competitive analysis, and sentiment analysis. Temis works with online sources each customer configures, as well as with in-house databases. Its software identifies tonality, feelings, and perceptions around products, services, people, or companies, and offers analytics that enable drill-downs, cross-tabs, mapping, and clustering. The company's capabilities include voice-of-the-customer functionality, providing alerting and intelligent routing to subject matter experts or service representatives.
Private branded communities allow the creation of invitation-only Web communities that combine brand interaction and social media. Communities run programs for brands that generate conversations among community members. Brand representatives may participate in the conversations, and feedback often is available using polls and surveys.
Private Online Community Vendors
Communispace
Communispace provides full-service community solutions that include project management, recruitment, facilitation, and insight generation. Facilitation helps make the community a familiar place and encourages regular participation through activities, discussions, polls, and surveys. Community managers report regularly to clients, highlighting actionable ideas, key insights, emerging trends, and important issues. Communispace research “has found that the smaller and more intimate the community, the more that people participate and provide value to clients’ businesses.” For this reason, Communispace limits community size to 300–500 participants.
Jive Software
Jive Software's Social Business Software (SBS) platform provides a competitive feature set for creating and managing community. Its Market Engagement Solution combines listening within the Jive-powered community, with buzz monitoring from “outside” sources like Twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, or Google Alerts, or internal e-mails discussing issues, for example. Jive provides collaboration features that enable groups or teams to share knowledge and coordinate actions.
MarketTools
MarketTools provides two different community solutions, branded Idea Networks and Insight Networks. Idea Networks brings together employees, customers, and consumers to “identify, refine, and prioritize ideas.” Insight Networks enables marketers to listen to community conversations, and allows them to engage target customers directly, all to understand their “needs, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors.”
Passenger
Passenger's software platform provides a full range of community features and professional services. Passenger clients include B2C as well as B2B companies that create communities for their employees and partners. Whether “B” or “C,” Passenger states its goals are similar: to improve products and services, customer insight, and evolving brands.
RightNow
CRM vendor RightNow recently acquired pure-play community software company HiveLive and renamed it RightNow Community. The community is positioned for customer support, engagement, loyalty, and innovation.
Ripple6
Gannett company Ripple6 offers a social media platform that helps companies implement their business strategy through social media. Its technology allows brands to create “cloud communities,” which work across multiple social networks and sites. The content is the same but is integrated into each individual site, providing members with a seamless experience. The Ripple6 platform has multiple uses: a way for customers to create consumer engagements and relationships; to conduct research and generate consumer insights; and for social marketing. Ripple6 Social Insights is a package of capabilities and services designed for marketers. The company provides a variety of professional services.
SheSpeaks
SheSpeaks specializes in creating women-only private communities for brands, with features designed explicitly for research and creating brand experiences. After registering on the site, women members engage with each other through discussion boards, blogs, product reviews, and comments. Depending on their activities and profiles, members are selectively invited to participate in product tests. Once accepted, these participants are given products, which they then review, comment on, and discuss their feelings about and experiences with; participants also may interact directly with brand representatives. During an interview, SheSpeaks advised that its tests measure change by rigorously following a pretest, test, posttest methodology. Brand clients are provided with analyses of test activity and all postings related to the program.
Vision Critical
Vision Critical is a market research online community (MROC) company that blends interactive technology, strategic research, and panel expertise. Vision Critical's Sparq Platform offers a competitive set of community and social-networking features and capabilities that are fully integrated with the company's research service.
Full-Service Listening Vendors
Listening-platform vendors provide technology, services, and consulting, and offer end-to-end solutions for analyzing both offline and online word of mouth. Some vendors extend their services beyond listening, to include agency services for planning, executing, and evaluating marketing, media, advertising, and public relations programs.
Attentio
Brussels-based Attentio provides Attentio Brand Dashboard, a hosted service that reports and visualizes social media activity and demographics for a company's own brands and competitors; it can filter by media source, topic, and country. Additionally, Attentio Buzz Report, written by analysts, furnishes deeper dives into brands. For context and planning, Attentio Industry Reports cover a variety of industries, their market leaders, and trends in areas like automotives, packaged goods, pharma, food, and media and entertainment.
BzzAgent
BzzAgent stimulates and measures word of mouth by enlisting “agents” to try products and introduce them to others as they see fit. BzzAgents are not a sales force; they are volunteers who share their knowledge and can provide samples and coupons. Bzz campaigns may involve thousands of agents, all of whom are expected to file reports describing context, such as people (e.g., with girlfriends), places (e.g., mountains), and activities (e.g., hiking); individuals’ reactions, and those of the people they engaged with. BzzAgent collects, analyzes, and reports the data in a number of ways, in a real-time stream showing the number of conversations and favorability of the reports, tag clouds, and graphs listing popular words and phrases, geographic distribution of the reports, and demographics of the agents.
Collective Intellect
Collective Intellect uses Web-based, automated, real-time text mining and analytics software to focus on Social Customer Relationship Management. Its Social CRM Insight platform can provide both open- and closed-end analysis. The open-end analysis identifies popular themes, terms, and places “snippets” on the “hub” application, with links to viewing the discussions in their original context. This helps in forging a deeper understanding of the true breadth of views being presented online. Collective Intellect's closed-end analysis collates and quantifies customer considerations and preferences into more clear sentiment categories that the brand wishes to analyze and learn from.
Converseon
Social marketing agency Converseon provides listening, strategy, program execution, and creative services, and segments its services into four areas: Conversation Miner, Converseon's social media monitoring and analytics engine, discovers brand-related issues, opinions, ideas, and concerns; Brand Reputation Management manages and protects online reputations, and includes search engine reputation management; Blogs and Social Media focuses on increasing transactions and burnishing reputation; and Affiliate and Search Marketing concentrates on lead generation and sales.
Converseon positions its Conversation Miner as a core service whose results and insights drive the others. For maximum impact of listening and social strategy, Converseon believes that organizations need to “bake” these into their management and internal processes, and offers consulting services to help stimulate this process.
CRM Metrix
Focusing on “brand backyard” sources, CRM Metrix combines and analyzes structured information through surveys with consumer-generated comments across marketing channels. Its family of tools, services, and reports aims to help marketers understand the drivers that prompt customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty, brand affinity, purchase intent, and revenue, and to help assess their marketing mix and marketing actions. SiteCRM measures Web sites and digital media impact on brands and business. Brand Scorecard measures and tracks brand health. BrandDelphi is used for developing and testing new-product concepts/advertising and improving message wording using an “adaptive conversation” algorithm developed and validated with MIT fellows. All reports are available through online digital dashboards, RSS feeds, and insight alerts (e-mail, SMS).
Cymfony
Cymfony (a Kantar Media Company) offers its customizable Maestro Platform—a resource that combines information retrieval, natural language processing, and reporting—and provides the foundation for its array of services. Cymfony packages its solutions as Market Intelligence Studies and as Verismo, a Public Relations measurement model. Their Marketing Intelligence Studies are of three types: Competitive Landscape Study, Category Insights Study, and Holistic Market Research Engagement.
DigitalMR
DigitalMR is a market research and consulting agency that uses digital methods exclusively and specializes in listening via the Serendio platform. Company services include online qualitative and quantitative research for product design and development, brand and communications, customer experience, and tactical and crisis management.
evolve24
Evolve24 is a “business analytics and research firm specializing in the measurement of perception, reputation, and risk.” This program analyzes both traditional and social media to determine the marketer's overall “information landscape” and provide quantitative metrics that let clients measure and report the value of their marketing and communications efforts. Its showpiece program, the Mirror Dashboard and Analytics Suite, is a Web-based business intelligence application that integrates the real-time collection of traditional and social media with text-mining and analytics algorithms to allow the measurement of media conversations and programs, and, ultimately, evaluates the impact of online activity on business performance and corporate reputation.
Harris Interactive
Market and opinion research company Harris Interactive offers its Text Analytics and Social Media Monitoring tools. Harris takes a business intelligence “data mining” approach to text analytics, by focusing on the combination of social media information and quantitative sources, such as surveys and databases, to gain a holistic brand insight. Harris uses Clarabridge Content Mining Platform (see the Clarabridge entry for a description). The company's Social Media Monitoring arm concentrates exclusively on social media, and features services such as collecting data through custom searching, analysis, and reporting results (e.g., daily volume, share of voice, demographics, sentiment, tone, conversation themes, and domains). Its report formats range from discussion to granular analysis, and are available through a portal or RSS feed.
InSites Consulting
Belgian-based InSites Consulting structures its research practice into four areas: market insights, innovation, customer experience, and brand and communication. The company's research methods combine structured techniques, like surveys, with unstructured approaches by using text analytics and related techniques to understand buzz and extract themes from online discussions and social media. InSites aim to make its quantitative surveys more open-ended and expressive by providing a “shout box” for every question, wherein people can express their opinions. These “shouts” then go directly to a staffer, who responds and engages. Additionally, InSites provides “exit forums,” where survey takers can discuss the survey with one another. This affords users with extra layers of conversation capable of generating insight beyond the questions asked.
J.D. Power and Associates Web Intelligence
http://businesscenter.jdpower.com/
J.D. Power and Associates Web Intelligence provides a competitive set of social media monitoring and analytic services, as the company claims to have the ability to segment the blogosphere by age, gender, and demographics. Its social media services include a combination of tracking, analysis, and consulting around areas such as competitive intelligence, marketing effectiveness, product development, and trend tracking. Web Connect allows marketers to identify bloggers based on age and gender criteria for targeting, influencer campaigns, seeding word-of-mouth campaigns, and creating communities. A new service called Tribes finds groups of people who share a common interest—for example, snacking on Doritos—and then collects and mines all of their posted content to find commonalities in their attitudes, attributes, and behaviors, and identify conversation topics.
Keller Fay Group
The Keller Fay Group provides word-of-mouth (WOM) research and consulting services. Through its syndicated product TalkTrack, the group continuously monitors “marketing-relevant conversations in America, in whatever form or context they occur, including face-to-face, telephone, and internet.” The firm interviews a nationally representative sample each week, totaling 36,000 Americans ages 13–69 annually. TalkTrack measures more than 350,000 conversations about brands annually and covers all major consumer categories. The research uncovers what “talkers say” and what “listeners hear and then do.”
Customers use TalkTrack for a variety of purposes, including situation assessment, targeting, channel selection, message development, and marketing effectiveness. Keller Fay consulting services help “clients plan and execute effective word-of-mouth programs, as well as monitor and evaluate their success.”
MotiveQuest
MotiveQuest specializes in understanding consumer motivations, discovering unmet needs, positioning brands, and finding new-product solutions. Using an “online anthropological” approach and toolset, the company mines brand-relevant online sources where consumers converse about client brands or product categories. Data reveals “peaks of passion,” consumer language, and motivational drivers. MotiveQuest analysts supplement the data and add expertise for business analysis and strategic recommendations. The company gauges marketplace success through its proprietary Online Promoter Score (OPS), which correlates word of mouth to sales by measuring the number of people online who are promoting a brand to others. MotiveQuest offers services for direct clients and for agencies.
NM Incite
NM Incite is a joint venture between Nielsen and management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Their solutions enable brands to extract value from social media as it relates to marketing, sales, product development, customer service, and business strategy development across industries. They include: Consumer Understanding; Defensive Branding and Threats; Brand Advocacy and Increasing Customer Value; Customer Service; and New Product Innovation. NM Incite provdes consulting services.
Onalytica
U.K.-based Onalytica “offer[s] software, systems, and services that transform publicly available online information into actionable intelligence” through its online platform, reports, live briefings, and direct feeds into systems. Onalytica's solution focuses on advertising, campaign monitoring and evaluation, corporate communications, customer service, management information, marketing, and outcome prediction, like forecasting sales, market share, and customer satisfaction.
Visible Technologies
Visible Technologies’ TruCast platform provides social media monitoring, analysis, and capabilities for participating in conversations. Visible Technologies organizes its solutions into four areas: Listen (conversation monitoring, perceptions, influencer identification), Learn (consumer insight, target audiences for word-of-mouth campaigns, and media buys), Engage (join conversations and manage them with collaboration and workflow tools), and Protect (executive and brand reputation management).