Corporate social media listening is starting to exhibit the characteristics that will eventually lead to enterprise Social Intelligence. That’s just one of the many interesting new insights contained in the latest Forrester Research Report: Trends 2010: Listening Platforms.
Unlike its earlier WaveTM Report that focused on the top vendors in the industry, this report in many ways is even more valuable for brands. The findings are based on a survey of more than 150 listening platform customers around the world. I can’t give away all the good nuggets since this is a subscription-charged report from social listening expert analyst Zach Hofer-Shall, but here are a few items worth noting.
- Marketing and research are the leading divisions deploying social listening in most companies
- Social listening is not just for consumer brands; the number of B2B companies listening is higher than you might think
- The average company tracks less than 25 topics across the enterprise
- Companies have growing concerns about the quality of the data they are receiving from listening providers and the accuracy of the sentiment analysis
- Social media remains a nascent practice in most companies, but growing rapidly.
I was surprised that Social Servicing wasn’t mentioned as a bigger trend in this report, but quite frankly that is a whole other world in the social media listening industry.
This is a report I think is well worth your time and money.
