For B2C Marketing Professionals

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Samantha Ngo and Mary Pilecki March 2, 2016

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways In our 30-criteria evaluation of enterprise social Synthesio, NetBase, Sprinklr, And Brandwatch listening platform providers, we identified the 12 Lead The Pack most significant ones — Brandwatch, Cision, Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which Clarabridge, Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, Synthesio, NetBase, Sprinklr, and Brandwatch Networked Insights, Oracle, Prime Research, lead the pack. Crimson Hexagon, Clarabridge, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Synthesio, and Sysomos — Networked Insights, Salesforce, and Cision offer and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This competitive options. Prime Research, Oracle, and report shows how each provider measures up Sysomos lag behind. and helps B2C marketing professionals make the B2C Marketing Pros Are Looking For right choice. Engagement, Measurement, And Analytics The social listening market is growing because more B2C marketers see social intelligence as a way to get closer to their customers. Social listening has moved well beyond just looking for buzz, and now informs marketing content and product innovation, as well as measures brand health.

Analytics And Integration Features Are Key Differentiators As social intelligence technology matures, more platforms will offer improved analytics tools and better integration with business data to help drive business objectives. Vendors that can provide tools that help clients better understand the preferences of their customers and measure the outcomes of actions resulting from insights will win.

forrester.com For B2C Marketing Professionals

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Samantha Ngo and Mary Pilecki with Carlton A. Doty, Clement Teo, Nick Hayes, and Emily Miller March 2, 2016

Table Of Contents Notes & Resources

2 Social Listening Platforms Now Inform The Forrester conducted product evaluations in Entire Enterprise November 2015 and interviewed 12 vendors and 36 customer references. Clients Look To Social Listening Platforms To Fill In The Gaps Related Research Documents Vendors Advance Their Analytics And Integration Capabilities To Keep Pace Drive Toward Social Intelligence Maturity

4 Enterprise Social Listening Platforms The Forrester Wave™: Asia Pacific Enterprise Evaluation Overview Listening Platforms, Q1 2016

Evaluated Vendors And Inclusion Criteria The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2015 6 Vendor Profiles Predictions 2016: Social Gets Reinforcements Leaders Understand The Enterprise Listening Platform Strong Performers Landscape Contenders

12 Supplemental Material

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA +1 617-613-6000 | Fax: +1 617-613-5000 | forrester.com

© 2016 , Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378 For B2C Marketing Professionals March 2, 2016 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

Social Listening Platforms Now Inform The Entire Enterprise

As the landscape of social technology develops, social listening platforms prove their value beyond simple brand monitoring by doubling down on analytics and surfacing insights that can be used across the enterprise. Since our last evaluation of the space, B2C marketing professionals have increased the sophistication of their social strategies, and thus the complexity of their use cases. Social listening vendors have kept pace through product enhancements in some areas and consolidation in others.

Clients Look To Social Listening Platforms To Fill In The Gaps

Marketers no longer see social data collection as a critical challenge.1 With that out of the way, their use cases for social listening have evolved beyond the basics of buzz and public relations crisis management (see Figure 1). Now, marketers look for all forms of social insights to better understand their customer and use social listening to:

›› Inform cross-channel campaigns. Social listening platforms can surface insights from social data, whether it’s user-generated content or images of people using a product to help inspire campaigns — 26% of customer references in this Forrester Wave do just this and the need for inspiration is apparent. In 2015, 38% of avid social marketers stated finding or creating content was a top problem and 53% stated measuring the performance of their brand profiles was a top challenge.2 Only 21% of US online adults believe that brands share interesting content on websites and online social tools.3

›› Provide customer service. Customers expect to get service through social media channels. Over the past two years, more than 37% of US online adults contacted a company on for service — growing from 22% in 2013.4 Brands are using social media as a customer service channel not only to meet customer expectations, but also to reduce call center expenses. Of the client references we surveyed in this study, 22% use social data for customer service.5

›› Measure brand health. One-third of customer references mention understanding customers or brand monitoring and brand health tracking as part of their current initiatives for social listening.6 Brands use social to keep an ear to the ground for new content, understand trends, and develop a relationship with their customers. Clients are looking to understand the “why” behind customer behavior and turning to social means getting data straight from the source — the customer.

›› Drive product innovation. Social data must be tied to business metrics that make sense to those outside the digital or marketing teams. Emerging use cases, like using social insights for product development help brands get buy-in across the organization. Seventeen percent of customer references surveyed in this study use social data for product development.

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FIGURE 1 Social Listening Platforms Help Solve Client Challenges

“What are your current initiatives and goals for social listening?”

Brand monitoring/brand health 36%

Measuring campaign success 36%

Gain better understanding of customers 33%

Customer service or customer care 22%

Inspiring content for campaigns 22%

Risk and crisis management 19%

Competitive analysis 19%

Product innovation 17%

Base: 36 social listening platform users

Source: Forrester’s Q4 2015 Global Enterprise Social Listening Platforms Customer Reference Phone/Online Survey

Vendors Advance Their Analytics And Integration Capabilities To Keep Pace

As we see this technology mature, listening vendors are keeping pace by adding more features and enhancing functionality. For instance, 10 of the 12 vendors in this Forrester Wave evaluation offer some sort of customer engagement features. As these enhancements mature across the category, we predict that social listening platforms will converge with social relationship platforms.7 But customers of social listening platforms still struggle to measure the impact of social listening and validate social data’s usage across the organization.8 To support these endeavors, vendors must tie the social insights that their platforms deliver to the real-world business objectives of their clients. Specifically, social listening platforms must:

›› Integrate with other marketing and business tools. Social maturity involves tying social metrics to business objectives.9 Social usage continues to grow, with over 70% of consumers wanting to engage on social channels, but only 10% of marketers expanding or upgrading their implementation of listening platforms.10 As one client told us, “I’ve measured impressions before and when I presented it to my CFO at the end of the quarter, he shrugged. I don’t want to be there again.”11 Marketers in search of a social platform should include in their critical selection criteria the ease of integration with their existing CRM, customer analytics tools, or voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools.

›› Surface insights for action across the enterprise. Social listening tools enable you to parse out influencers and audiences that matter most to cut through the noise, bubble up insights, and take action across the enterprise. The success of Yoplait’s removal of high fructose corn

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syrup is just one example of a product team taking note of social insights.12 Firms can use social listening platforms to test campaign results or find insights to inspire them. A major automotive manufacturer leveraged social listening to find insights about consumers’ perceptions of electric vehicles in Europe. Identifying five key barriers to purchase, the manufacturer used the barriers as pillars for their messaging, getting their customers excited about electric cars and positioning themselves as the market leader.13 Several vendors have dashboards that track predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) like “intent to buy” to help surface the most valuable insights. Data visualization features (like topic maps) have also become valuable tools.

›› Measure the intangible and inspire new ideas. Social listening platform vendors are beginning to understand that there’s much more to be done with sentiment than just tracking an overall positive or negative tone for a specific product, campaign, or brand. Vendors are leveraging text analysis methodologies overlaid with audience or topic analyses to find relationships between the two to help clients better understand their customers. Before its new crime show aired, a television network looked at the actress who played the main character’s followers on Twitter and found that audience had affinities for telenovelas, Telemundo, The Real Housewives series, and beauty trends — not your typical crime show watchers. Using this information to inform its marketing, the show delivered the network’s second-best A18-49 (Nielsen audience rating) result for a Thursday drama premiere in nearly four years.14

Enterprise Social Listening Platforms Evaluation Overview

To assess the state of the enterprise customer listening market and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top enterprise social listening vendors. After examining past research, user needs assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 30 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets:

›› Current offering. In this section, we assess how vendors compare in data coverage, how they process data for accuracy and how they enable insights to action. We also looked at how social listening vendors help support their clients’ social strategies and their current capabilities to combine data to enable enterprise social listening.

›› Strategy. We evaluated each vendor’s vision and road map in the journey to enterprise customer listening. Vision and future-looking enhancements that lead to faster insights to action were the crux of this section.

›› Market presence. Lastly, we measured the vendor’s market based on the number of clients, revenues, and growth rates.

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Evaluated Vendors And Inclusion Criteria

Forrester included 12 vendors in the assessment: Brandwatch, Cision, Clarabridge, Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, Networked Insights, Oracle, Prime Research, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Synthesio, and Sysomos. Each of these vendors has (see Figure 2):

›› Revenue from social listening product. We evaluated vendors with more than $15 million in revenue generated specifically from their social listening product. We see this revenue threshold as an indicator of company stability and experience with client demands.

›› An enterprise orientation. Forrester’s client firms are mostly enterprise sized, which we define as more than $1 billion dollars in revenue. Only vendors with more than 50 enterprise customers were included, as these vendors have helped solve the problems Forrester’s clients are seeking to answer.

›› End-to-end technology for social listening. Forrester selected vendors that offer technology that captures social data, presents it to users, and analyzes it to produce actionable insights. In cases where vendors provide services to clients, they must use their own technology for all of these functions.

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FIGURE 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria

Product version Vendor Product evaluated evaluated Date evaluated Brandwatch Brandwatch Analytics 15.2.0 Q4 2015

Cision Visible Intelligence (VI), V*IQ, N/A Q4 2015 Cision Social Edition, & Cision PRE

Clarabridge CX Engagor Clarabridge 7 Q4 2015

Crimson Hexagon The Crimson Hexagon Platform N/A Q4 2015

NetBase NetBase, NetBase LIVE Pulse, & Audience 3D N/A Q4 2015

Networked Insights Kairos 2 Q4 2015

Oracle Oracle Social Relationship Management N/A Q4 2015 (SRM) Platform

Prime Research Media Insight Suite N/A Q4 2015

Salesforce Social Studio N/A Q4 2015

Sprinklr Sprinklr Experience Cloud 9.2.1 Q4 2015

Synthesio Synthesio N/A Q4 2015

Sysomos Heartbeat & Map 1.14.2 Heartbeat & Q4 2015 1.14.2 Map

Vendor selection criteria The vendor must have revenues of at least $15 million generated specifically from their social listening product.

The vendor must have at least 50 enterprise customers. Forrester defines enterprise sized customers as firms with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

The vendor must offer technology that captures social data, presents it to users, and analyzes it to produce actionable insights. In cases where vendors provide services to clients, they must use their own technology for all of these functions.

Vendor Profiles

This evaluation of the enterprise social listening market is intended to be a starting point only. We encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 3).

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FIGURE 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 ’16

Strong Challengers Contenders Performers Leaders Strong

Synthesio Go to Forrester.com to Brandwatch Networked download the Forrester Sprinklr NetBase Insights Wave tool for more Prime Clarabridge detailed product Research Cision Crimson Hexagon evaluations, feature Salesforce comparisons, and Oracle customizable rankings. Current offering Sysomos

Market presence

Weak

Weak Strategy Strong

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FIGURE 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 ’16 (Cont.) xagon h e d Insights s search tc g o r’ s e ke te orce wa or es ightin tw rr ime Re Cision Clarabridg Crimson He NetBas Ne Fo Brand Oracle Pr Salesf Sprinklr Synthesi Sysomo We CURRENT OFFERING 50% 4.17 3.51 3.64 3.44 4.10 3.68 2.96 3.63 3.43 4.17 4.46 2.50 Data sources 10% 4.80 3.40 4.05 3.85 3.20 3.75 3.35 3.50 3.75 4.20 5.00 1.50 Data processing 20% 3.70 3.75 3.65 3.95 4.90 4.20 2.10 3.95 3.20 4.25 4.25 2.45 Dashboard functionality 20% 4.25 3.60 4.50 2.80 3.00 3.30 3.50 3.95 4.05 4.50 4.05 3.30 Integration 20% 4.00 4.00 4.00 2.00 4.00 2.00 3.00 1.00 3.00 5.00 4.00 2.00 Consulting, analysis, and 20% 5.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 3.00 5.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 3.00 support services Research reporting 10% 3.00 3.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 4.00 3.00 5.00 4.00 4.00 5.00 2.00

STRATEGY 50% 3.80 2.50 2.70 3.40 4.80 2.60 2.30 1.70 2.70 4.00 4.60 2.20 Corporate strategy: 50% 4.00 3.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 3.00 3.00 1.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 2.00 Enterprise customer listening focus Customer retention 10% 2.00 2.00 4.00 2.00 3.00 3.00 0.00 4.00 0.00 5.00 5.00 0.00 Product road map 40% 4.00 2.00 2.00 3.00 5.00 2.00 2.00 2.00 3.00 5.00 4.00 3.00

MARKET PRESENCE 0% 4.10 2.40 4.50 2.60 2.80 3.00 2.80 2.30 4.50 3.90 3.30 4.10 Customers 70% 5.00 3.00 5.00 3.00 3.00 3.00 3.00 2.00 5.00 4.00 4.00 5.00 Revenue 20% 2.00 1.00 4.00 1.00 2.00 2.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 3.00 2.00 3.00 Customer growth rate 10% 2.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 1.00 3.00 0.00 5.00 1.00 0.00

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

Leaders

›› Synthesio. Synthesio’s ability to align social listening data with a firm’s other business data enables its clients to quickly mature their listening programs. This is achieved primarily through the strong ecosystem of partnerships Synthesio has built with vendors, as well as an extensive API that supports merging all forms of business data. Lauded for its account management, customer references speak highly of Synthesio’s services — one said, “We selected Synthesio because we had a gut feeling we’d be a number one priority. We were right.” Its strategic vision and road map are focused on the potential of social listening and on metrics that tie to business results — rather than attempting to become an all-in-one solution. This vendor is also the only one that spoke specifically of trying to help establish industry standards, an example being the Social Reputation Score that helps marketers track and communicate social data more eloquently by giving them a metric that correlates to Net Promoter Score (NPS).15 Overall, Synthesio offers a well-balanced

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and useful listening product, but you won’t find fluid workflows to engagement with this product. Synthesio is sticking to its core as a pure player in the social listening space, and is best suited for research and customer insights analysts. ›› NetBase. Since our 2014 evaluation, NetBase has shifted its business strategy to be fully customer-centric. After moving its executive vice president of customer success and consulting to head up the product team, NetBase improved its platform significantly with analytics methodologies, enhanced reporting outputs, and better business integration partnerships and features. With Audience 3D, clients get data on an audience’s interest levels in specific topics in a clean, useable way, and can even compare how often a custom audience is speaking about a specific topic compared to the rest of the population. The platform has advanced entity-level sentiment analysis that gives clients a deeper understanding of how consumers speak about their products or brands — including emotional and behavioral indicators. You pay for what you get with NetBase comprehensive analytics — it’s an option for those willing to dig deep in their pockets, and customer references state that NetBase is “a good partner,” “their leadership is in tune,” and the company is “forward-thinking.” NetBase has an improved user interface to support digital marketers but is still strongly suited for research users.

›› Sprinklr. Customers appreciate Sprinklr’s full social marketing suite, which allows them to manage social experiences with customers. Focused on workflows for social data, the vendor provides a rules-based engine that routes flagged posts to specific agents for more comprehensive social customer care. Sprinklr has strong integrations with its other social tools, and with business applications — like Marketo for enterprise marketing, Salesforce for CRM, and Adobe SiteCatalyst and Coremetrics for analytics. However, despite these integrations, its metrics haven’t evolved beyond counting volume and hashtag mentions. Sprinklr’s audience analysis is not as advanced as others in this group. The vendor chooses to put efforts into becoming a better suite, rather than a collection of best-in-class point solutions — and its customer references said that the platform is “complex.” This platform is best suited for those looking to combine all their social marketing teams and associated functions.

›› Brandwatch. Brandwatch understands the need to clarify social listening’s business value and works to disseminate social insights across organizations in a cohesive and comprehensive way. It exhibits a strong focus on data visualization with its Vizia product, supporting enterprise social intelligence through easy-to-understand dashboards and an intuitive distribution process. Customer references expressed Brandwatch’s commitment to being a strategic partner, saying it “follows the ‘social to dollars’ mantra.” With its acquisition of PeerIndex in December 2014, Brandwatch is improving audience analysis through a planned release of advanced audience features in February 2016. The vendor is expanding out of Europe and North America to focus on Latin America, but its international presence is still stunted by lack of regional support. Brandwatch lags slightly behind other Leaders in text analysis methodologies, but the platform is well suited for large enterprises with users who might have fewer technical people like insights analysts. Brandwatch is strong in reporting and mobile outputs and has a growing number of financial services clients due to its commitment to privacy and compliance.

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Strong Performers

›› Crimson Hexagon. Customers commend Crimson’s efforts to make the platform more user- friendly in recent years and for continually being a strategic partner. One customer reference states, “It’s the partnership with them that allows us to mature the practice. Crimson is not just providing a tool for us to use, but a tool to do better work.” Crimson’s topic analysis goes beyond keyword queries and gives clients a broader perspective on what their customers are speaking about in relation to their brand or original query. Crimson also offers solid audience analysis. However, a customer reference recalled “getting lost” in too much detail when drilling down on topic or audience data. Customer references also reported poor satisfaction in data security, spam filtering, and workflow management. Crimson’s road map further simplifies the platform in efforts to broaden the user base to include more marketers, rather than just hardcore social analysts. This platform is best suited for market analysis and research and for use by analysts in unregulated industries.

›› Clarabridge. Historically focused on text analytics for customer experience, Clarabridge uses these methodologies to quantify and measure structured and unstructured data for customer service. It can ingest other forms of business data and built out a comprehensive ecosystem with other business tools, resulting in intuitive workflow features. The platform comes out-of-the-box with industry-tuned sentiment templates and has advanced audience and topic analysis features. Customer references say the tool is “straightforward” and that the vendor is “deep in the art of social media;” however, there is room for the vendor to share client best practices and strengthen business knowledge to become a strategic partner. While Clarabridge fits the requirements for a social listening platform, many clients use it as a customer service platform. Its customer-centric approach makes it a valuable tool for clients looking to use social listening to enhance customer relationships, but not necessarily to find deep insights for product development, market research, and more innovative use cases like propensity to buy and brand health.

›› Networked Insights. Networked Insights’ product, Kairos, helps clients understand their opportunity audiences. Its mission is to help clients invest in the right media and create content that resonates with the right people. Networked Insights’ text analysis methodologies and sentiment analysis include entity-level analysis and extraction techniques that categorize the poster’s intent or emotion. Its partnership with Twitter allows for deeper audience analysis as well. Its dashboards are simple to read and have aesthetic appeal. However, customer references state disappointment in its reporting and integration capabilities. Networked Insights’ road map lists integration plans to business tools, but the lack of any current partnerships causes us to be skeptical of this commitment. It currently takes the vendor two to four weeks to complete a custom integration with business data if requested by a client. Networked Insights’ approach to social listening is “creative focused” and the vendor is best suited for media and marketing teams.

›› Salesforce. Salesforce has overcome most of its major integration challenges with its Radian6, Buddy Media, and ExactTarget acquisitions. Customer references are more satisfied with the platform, stating the Salesforce team is “very supportive and responsive.” The workflows in

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Salesforce Social Studio have been simplified, making the platform more user-friendly and customer references stated the tool was widely adopted by large teams of 30 to 50 people. Salesforce believes in the democratization of social data and is focused on tools and workflows to distribute reports and importing and exporting data easily. But Salesforce still has a way to go with its planned road map — many vendors already offer the enhancements in Salesforce’s future, such as hashtag listening, scheduled reporting, and audience demographics data. Buyers shouldn’t be surprised to hear Salesforce Social Studio is still a great fit for clients already using other Salesforce tools such as its CRM system or service cloud.

›› Cision. Cision bought Visible Technologies in September 2014 in an effort to track and analyze earned, owned, and paid media, and ultimately, to make it a communications tool. Its technical capabilities are still strong, and its user management and workflow features are robust. However, its topic analysis, privacy measures, and mobile outputs still have further to go to compete in this market. Though customer references stated their love for their account managers (who also assist with strategic decisions), they stated a desire for Cision to innovate faster and be more prompt with questions or requests. Cision is best suited for customers looking for a communications or public relations tool who want to look at a wide range of media for top trends and analysis.

Contenders

›› Prime Research. With a strong research and analytics background, Prime Research is a tool for enterprises looking for a hands-off approach for their social listening tool. Prime Research has an academic feel — it covers the largest amount of media of any vendor in this evaluation and manually scans offline print sources. Prime Research has advanced text analysis methodologies, consulting and support, and data coverage; but it remains research-focused and lacks a clear articulation of enterprise social listening that includes integration with CRM or business intelligence (BI) tools through partnerships. With longer lead times for technical setup and limited self-service capabilities, Prime is best for companies wanting to outsource deep social market research.

›› Oracle. Oracle tells the customer-first story, as evidenced by placing the social cloud in its customer experience suite and purposefully separating it from the marketing cloud so it intrinsically ties to sales and commerce. Oracle’s biggest differentiator is its dynamic link tracking, which is the closest to social attribution we’ve seen. But its text analysis methodologies, sentiment analysis, and influencer analysis lag, indicating a lack of transparency and innovation for data processing methods. Regarding the user interface, a customer reference stated, “It would be helpful if they could figure out how to make sentiment more digestible in the tool.” There’s no doubt that Oracle has the know-how to drive data integration across an organization- and there’s trust in the social cloud’s integration with Eloqua, BlueKai, Responsys, etc. Over 80% of its social listening clients use the full social suite — including its tools for social engagement and social marketing. While Oracle offers an open API to other systems, it is still inherently best suited out-of-the-box for clients who have Oracle deeply imbedded in related areas of their organization.

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›› Sysomos. Sysomos’ recent acquisitions put it in a tough spot for this evaluation, as it will take some time to stitch together the workflows to immerse Expion and Gazemetrix into the Sysomos ecosystem. Currently, for the Heartbeat, Map, GazeMetrix, and Expion products, Sysomos fails to tell a coherent story about the overall product design and how it will be sold, packaged, and priced. In its current state, customer references commend the vendor for being responsive to problems and questions, and call it a “simple tool to use,” and commend its account managers and customer service. Sysomos is building out a data science layer that will support a single dashboard for monitoring, listening/research, and action; however, it failed to give us details at the time of evaluation. Sysomos has all the right tools in place, but stumbles because it lacks a cohesive way to sell its value proposition. As it stands, Sysomos is a good choice for research purposes and customer insights analysts; and eventually, for customer care.

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Supplemental Material

Online Resource

The online version of Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings.

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Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave

Forrester used a combination of 3 data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each solution. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester Wave, in part, using materials that they provided to us by November 20, 2016.

›› Vendor surveys. Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation criteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where necessary to gather details of vendor qualifications.

›› Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their products’ functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.

›› Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with 3 of each vendor’s current customers.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated in this market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose these vendors based on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate vendors that have limited customer references and products that don’t fit the scope of our evaluation.

After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria, we gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires, demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review, and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.

We set default weightings to reflect our analysis of the needs of large user companies — and/or other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave evaluation — and then score the vendors based on a clearly defined scale. We intend these default weightings to serve only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based tool. The final scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering, strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every Forrester Wave follows, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-wave-methodology.html.

Integrity Policy

We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with our Integrity Policy. For more information, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.

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Endnotes

1 thirty six customer references interviewed for the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 evaluation answered the question, “What are current challenges for your social listening program?”

2 During the Social Relationship Platform Wave evaluation, Forrester surveyed 118 avid social marketers. Source: Forrester’s Q1 2015 Global Social Relationship Platform Wave™ Online Survey.

3 Source: Forrester’s North American Consumer Technographics® Online Benchmark Survey (Part 1), 2015. 4 over the past two years, more than one-third of US online adults contacted a company on Twitter for service, and this trend is growing. For more information, see the “Build Customer Relationships With Social Customer Care” Forrester report.

5 thirty six customer references interviewed for the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 answered the question, “What are your current initiatives for your social listening program?” In an analysis of responses, approximately 20% mentioned customer service.

6 thirty six customer references interviewed for the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 answered the question, “What are your current initiatives for your social listening program?” In an analysis of responses, 30% mentioned the listed initiatives as part of the goals for their program.

7 We see the convergence of social relationship platforms and social listening platforms on the horizon, as evidenced by Sysomos’ acquisition of Expion, and the vendor capabilities we saw in this Forrester Wave evaluation. For more information, see the “Predictions 2016: Social Gets Reinforcements” Forrester report.

8 thirty six customer references interviewed for the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016 answered the question, “What are current challenges for your social listening program?” 39% mentioned understanding insights and making sense of the data. 32% talked about internal challenges.

9 according to our social maturity model, integrating social data with other business data is the highest level of maturity. It isn’t easy and you have to crawl, walk, and run before you fly. For more information, see the “The Road Map To Integrated Social Intelligence” Forrester report.

10 In 2015, our Consumer Technographics Social Technographics framework found that 20% of US online adults (18+) appreciate social interactions with a company, 25% expect social interactions, and 27% demand social interactions. See the “Social Technographics® Defines Your Social Strategies And Tactics” Forrester report and Forrester’s North American Consumer Technographics Online Benchmark Survey (Part 1), 2015. Our data also shows that 10% of marketing decision-makers’ companies in North America are expanding or upgrading their listening platforms. Source: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Marketing Survey, 2015.

11 Source: Inquiry with a Forrester analyst on February 10, 2016. 12 After a consumer posted about removing high fructose corn syrup from the Yoplait recipe, the company decided to take action. It used this post and launched a campaign around social, showcasing its commitment to its customers. Source: “Sparked by a Post,” Yoplait (http://www.yoplait.com/yoplait-in-action/great-minds-think-alike).

13 Source: “Synthesio’s Great Big Book of Insights,” Synthesio, February 5, 2014 (http://www.synthesio.com/resources/ synthesios-great-big-book-insights/).

14 Source: Interview with a Forrester client in November 2015.

15 Net Promoter and NPS are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark, of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, and Fred Reichheld.

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