State of the Union: social media monitoring market – Vendors & strategies
As a participant in the Social media monitoring or Social Media analysis market I took some time to check out the competitors and get a lay of the land. There are many social media monitoring companies. In fact we track about 42 companies ranging from those that have raised over $40+ Million to a single developer providing some free solutions.
Here are some high level observations:
1. Over the last year data collection and reporting have become table stakes or “commodity”. Everyone does a simple listen dashboard or a total number of mentions and basic sentiment analysis. Since the data is all available freely (or at very little cost) over the net, its value is appropriately priced – free.
2. There are 3 basic areas of differentiation for vendors – Text analysis, Signal to Noise intelligence and CRM integration. All thes products have a basic “tag cloud” and keywords. Everyone also has some form of authority or ranking which is proprietary and in most cases rudimentary. Finally the CRM integration is only being done by a few vendors. These are areas that lend themselves to differentiation. From our customers we have heard that Radian 6 is doing a great job at the CRM integration and Collective Intellect has done a good job in the text analysis.
3. Finally dashboards and representation. As you can imagine every vendor has their view of the perfect dashboard needed by the client. This is another area where it can easily become commodity so putting effort here while “table stakes” is not going to result in a huge differentiation. Of the lot we have heard both BuzzLogic and Visible Technologies are doing a good job here.
Lastly business metrics that matter such as # customers, revenues, profitability etc. are still important. The grand total of # of customers of all vendors (paying customers that is) is still about 100-200 per vendor. We are at little over 1000+ customers paying so we are among the largest in terms of # of customers, but working our way towards profitability and certainly not the largest in terms of revenue.
See related post by Max Kalehoff and an older Forrester report.
Posted: July 15th, 2009 under Marketing.
Tags: Buzzlogic, Collective Intellect, Radian 6, social media analysis, Social Media Monitoring, Visible Technologies
Comment from Ryan Stephens
Time July 21, 2009 at 3:55 pm
These are some solid insights into the monitoring industry. I think the brands that will ultimately be most successful are those that can provide 2 solutions: one streamlined solution of data that savvy clients and quickly evaluate themselves, and one where in-house analysts explain the data, extract key themes and provide recommendations based on the “listening” efforts.