FORRESTER APAC 2016

The Forrester Wave™: Asia Pacific Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Clement TeoMarch 2, 2016

For B2C MarkeTing ProFessionals

ForrESTEr.coM

key TakeawaysSynthesio And Brandwatch Lead The PackForrester’s research uncovered a market in which synthesio and Brandwatch lead the pack in asia Pacific. Digimind, salesforce, kantar Media CiC, oracle, and sysomos offer competitive options.

B2c Marketing Pros Seek Improved Language Support And More Powerful Analyticsnearly half of B2C marketers in asia Pacific plan to increase their budget this year. listening platforms are primary social tactics that deliver insights to social marketing. social listening has moved well beyond buzzword recognition to informing brand health and shaping regional marketing content.

Integration And Self-Service reporting capabilities Are Key Differentiatorsas social listening matures, clients want platforms that provide out-of-the-box integration with sources of nonsocial feedback data. They also seek customizable, self-service reporting and the ability to distribute data insights to drive action across the organization. Vendors that can help clients infuse social insights into their marketing activities and measure the outcomes of marketing actions will be the most successful.

Why read This report

in Forrester’s 30-criteria evaluation of enterprise social listening platform providers in asia Pacific, we identified the seven most significant ones — Brandwatch, Digimind, kantar Media CiC, oracle, salesforce, synthesio, and sysomos — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help B2C marketing professionals select the right partner for their enterprise social listening needs.

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© 2016 Forrester research, 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

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Table of Contents

Social Listening Is An Essential Ingredient Of Social Marketing

enterprise social listening needs are evolving Beyond The Basics

Vendors in aP need To advance Their regional language and integration Capabilities

Asia Pacific Enterprise Social Listening Platforms Evaluation Overview

evaluated Vendors and inclusion Criteria

Vendor Profiles

leaders

strong Performers

Contenders

Supplemental Material

notes & resources

Forrester conducted product evaluations in october 2015 and interviewed more than 20 vendor and user companies as customer references.

related research Documents

Brief: Unleash social’s True Value By extending Your Focus Beyond Brand Monitoring

The Forrester Wave™: enterprise social listening Platforms, Q1 2016

Predictions 2016: social gets reinforcements

For B2C MarkeTing ProFessionals

The Forrester Wave™: Asia Pacific Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Clement Teowith Frederic giron, samantha ngo, Mary Pilecki, nick Hayes, Flora Zhang, and Bill nagel

March 2, 2016

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES128686





http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO5484





For B2C Marketing ProFessionals

The Forrester Wave™: Asia Pacific Enterprise Social Listening Platforms, Q1 2016March 2, 2016

© 2016 Forrester research, inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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The Seven Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

social listening is an essential ingredient of social Marketing

The maturity of social marketing varies across asia Pacific (aP), but social’s importance to firms in many industries has already taken off. For example, 40% of marketing decision-makers in China and india plan to expand or upgrade their implementation of listening platforms in 2016.1 in addition, 45% of the marketers responding to Forrester’s Q4 2015 asia Pacific social Marketing online survey expect social marketing budgets to increase in 2016 (see Figure 1).2 social listening platforms give B2C marketing professionals access to how customers perceive brands, products, and experiences and guide their marketing activities.

FIGUrE 1 social Marketing Budgets Will grow in 2016 in asia Pacific

Base: 32 social marketers in Australia, India, Indonesia, and Singapore

Source: Forrester’s Q4 2015 Asia Paci�c Social Marketing Online Survey

“How will your social marketing budget in 2016 compare with 2015?”

Stay the same 50%

Increase by up to 9% 25%

Increase by 10% to 24% 20%

Increase by 25% or more 5%

Enterprise Social Listening Needs Are Evolving Beyond The Basics

The social marketers we interviewed are responsible for brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, and public relations crisis management — common requirements in the aP region.3 With these basic needs met, new use cases for social listening have emerged. Today, we see more marketers using social listening platforms to:

› Inform brand health in regional markets. listening platforms help aP marketers keep their ears to the ground and gain insights into what key opinion leaders and consumers are saying about their brands in the region. The social media manager at a food products company told us that listening is the foundation of customer understanding and informs her regional marketing programs: “We use the top topical drivers to shape our content strategy to target key regional influencers.”

› Get insights quicker via self-service dashboards. social media managers in aP are providing users self-service access and customized dashboards specific to their profiles. More advanced users expect stronger feature and functionality alignment between the desktop interface and the mobile app that will broaden their capabilities, such as managing campaigns from anywhere.




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“We used to put reports together for our client, but it became clear that we needed to let users across the organization learn how to obtain information on their own to accelerate data insights that they could turn into action.” (senior digital manager, digital agency)

› Provide customer service. Customers expect consistent service across offline and online touchpoints including voice, digital, and social channels.4 six of the 21 customer references we spoke with currently use listening as a customer service channel to improve response times and cut call center expenses. social marketers are looking at how they can extend social’s value by training their customer service peers to respond directly to the brands’ social profiles.

Vendors In AP Need To Advance Their regional Language And Integration capabilities

Vendors today offer listening solutions ranging from basic tools that track social buzz to more sophisticated enterprise tools that analyze social data to calculate sentiment and intent to buy. Users of listening platforms still struggle with regional language support as their brands expand into the region; for example, one customer reference told Forrester that he still relies on an in-country agency to translate data from Bahasa indonesia into english, increasing the time that it takes to get actionable insights. in aP, social listening platforms must provide:

› Strong regional language capabilities. all vendors have access to the same social data on networks like Twitter and Weibo. But buyers need better language translation capabilities — for example, to carry out sentiment analyses on posts written in Japanese or Bahasa indonesia — to enable them to extract key insights from in-country data on their users.

› More powerful local sentiment analytics engines. as B2C marketers in aP focus on regional coverage, they require listening platforms that help them gain deeper insights into what consumers are saying about their brands. The tricky part is accurately analyzing the region’s languages. The social media manager at a regional broadcaster told us that she still has to recode inaccurate data when she interprets sentiment analyses — a task that consumes a substantial part of her time each week.

› Integration with other marketing and business tools. Customers want to raise the value of social marketing within their organization; platforms that integrate easily with their existing CrM, customer analytics, or voice of the customer tools will help them tremendously.5 For instance, customer care professionals could view CrM data via customized dashboards to improve how they serve customers in social channels.

asia Pacific enterprise social listening Platforms evaluation overview

To evaluate enterprise listening platform vendors in aP, we used our global criteria plus a refined version of the international language support criterion that is critical for organizations in the region to consider when selecting vendors. From past research, user needs assessments, and conversations with related vendor and industry experts, we developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 30 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets:




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› current offering. a vendor’s position on the vertical axis indicates the strength of its current offering. We evaluated vendors’ capabilities for capturing social data, analyzing it, and integrating it with customer analytics engines, CrM systems, or marketing automation systems. We also assessed how well vendors set up and implement queries, propose new listening strategies, and correlate social data with business data. Vendors were allowed to select two of three scenarios to demonstrate their product capabilities in solving scenario-based problems, such as monitoring and resolving crises and inspiring new product development using social insights.

› Strategy. a vendor’s position on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of its go-to-market strategy. To gauge the forward momentum of the vendors in this report, we considered whether the vendor could articulate a clear vision and strategy for the future of social listening and retain customers. We also considered whether vendors have piloted data visualization projects with clients and whether data visualization is a key priority on their product road map.

› Market presence. Finally, we evaluated each vendor’s active customer base in the region, customer growth rate, and revenue as indicators of its financial health. While few customer references indicated that having an in-country physical presence was critical, most of them had initial onboarding support from vendors on the ground.

Evaluated Vendors And Inclusion criteria

Forrester included seven vendors in the assessment: Brandwatch, Digimind, kantar Media CiC, oracle, salesforce, synthesio, and sysomos. each of these vendors has (see Figure 2):

› An enterprise focus on Asia Pacific. Forrester clients in aP are firms with at least 500 employees, so we limited the study to vendors that focus on this audience. only companies that could demonstrate having at least 30 enterprise customers and that social listening was a core part of their business in aP were eligible.

› Solid annual revenues. To ensure that we evaluated vendors stable enough for enterprise buyers, we limited our assessment to companies receiving annual revenues of more than $3 million from their social listening platform.

› A diverse customer base. no more than 55% of each vendor’s customers came from a single line of business, such as market research or public relations.

More social media managers are providing users self-service access and customized dashboards specific to their profiles.




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FIGUrE 2 evaluated Vendors: Vendor information and selection Criteria

Vendor

Brandwatch

Digimind

Kantar Media CIC

Oracle

Salesforce

Synthesio

Sysomos

Date evaluated

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Q4 2015

Vendor selection criteria

Vendors must receive at least $3 million in annual revenue from their social listening offering.

Vendors must have a minimum of 30 enterprise customers.

No more than 55% of the vendor’s business can come from a single business line, such as public relations or market research.




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Vendor Profiles

This evaluation of the asia Pacific enterprise social listening platform 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).

FIGUrE 3 Forrester Wave™: asia Pacific enterprise social listening Platforms, Q1 ’16

Challengers Contenders LeadersStrong

Performers

StrategyWeak Strong

Currentoffering

Weak

Strong

Go to Forrester.com to

download the Forrester

Wave tool for more

detailed product

evaluations, feature

comparisons, and

customizable rankings.

Market presence

Brandwatch

Digimind

KantarMedia CICOracle

Salesforce

Synthesio

Sysomos




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FIGUrE 3 Forrester Wave™: asia Pacific enterprise social listening Platforms, Q1 ’16 (Cont.)

CURRENT OFFERING Data sources Data processing Dashboard functionality Integration Consulting, analysis, and support services Research reporting

STRATEGY Enterprise customer listening focus Customer retention Product road map

MARKET PRESENCE Customers Revenue Customer growth rate

Forr

este

r’sW

eigh

ting

50%10%20%20%20%20%10%

50%50%10%40%

0%70%20%10%

4.134.803.504.254.005.003.00

3.804.002.004.00

2.803.002.003.00

3.563.003.503.804.003.004.00

3.103.004.003.00

2.503.002.000.00

3.023.603.403.402.003.003.00

3.504.003.003.00

2.803.003.001.00

2.963.352.103.503.003.003.00

2.303.000.002.00

3.204.002.000.00

3.433.753.204.053.003.004.00

2.703.000.003.00

2.804.000.000.00

4.465.004.254.054.005.005.00

4.605.005.004.00

3.304.002.001.00

2.501.502.453.302.003.002.00

2.202.000.003.00

3.905.002.000.00

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

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Dig

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Kan

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Ora

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Syn

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Sys

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Leaders

› Synthesio. synthesio was a leader in the last Forrester Wave evaluation of enterprise listening platforms; it has retained that status due to its superior global data coverage (600 million data sources across most of the world’s countries), automated analysis built from human coding, and functional dashboard.6 in the past two years, synthesio has opened offices in singapore and australia. Customer references appreciate its intuitive dashboard and the Flash Dash feature that allows users to quickly build keyword queries on the fly. However, mobile-first users tell us that its mobile app features are not as advanced as its desktop user interface (Ui), especially in delivering similar experiences across both Uis. synthesio focuses on metrics that gauge business results and on establishing an industry-standard social reputation score to help social marketers communicate and track social data more elegantly. While the vendor’s mission is to use social data in conjunction with business data, the tool itself is not meant for those who lack social media savvy or analytical knowledge.




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› Brandwatch. Brandwatch’s customer references appreciate the ease of use and reliability of the vendor’s platform. However, enterprise customers in the region have experienced uneven account service that varies according to the account manager assigned to the client. While Brandwatch’s text analysis methodologies lag slightly behind the other leaders and strong Performers, it is well suited for less technical users at large enterprises and agencies. Customers laud it for its self-service feature and intuitive Ui; it also offers intuitive reporting and mobile outputs and has a growing number of financial services clients due to its laser focus on privacy and compliance. Brandwatch, which opened an office in singapore in mid-2015, has a vibrant partner network and a strategy that focuses on providers of data critical for enterprise customer listening, such as Weibo and renren in China.

Strong Performers

› Digimind. Digimind built its social platform primarily for social monitoring, campaign and product launches, crisis management, and audience engagement. The vendor has enhanced its dashboard capability to serve nonsocial analysts; for example, it gives customer service personnel the ability to customize dashboards to uncover insights in three dimensions: what people, google, and competitive intelligence say. While customers like that they can monitor a variety of data sources and automatically tag and filter users, they felt that Digimind’s influencer analysis feature fell short of expectations: For instance, its influencer list only extracts names, not Urls, making it a challenge to identify users. also, customers needing historical data today have to pay Digimind to extract the data — and many prefer a self-service approach.

› Salesforce. radian6 is part of the reorganized salesforce social studio, which focuses on publishing, engagement, and analytical tools. new users appreciate the combined tools for social listening and social relationships that enable them to use one platform to both derive intelligence from and build relationships with customers — an integrated feature that aP customers lost access to after salesforce’s acquisitions of radian6 in 2011 and BuddyMedia in 2012. some aP customers that wanted more accurate sentiment analyses also migrated from radian6 to other social listening vendors. While customers in the region prize salesforce’s customer and tech support, they felt that the vendor could make the social studio road map more transparent so that they can plan to include new features in campaign rollouts. as the platform supports limited integrations outside of salesforce.com, it’s the best option for aP marketers already entrenched in the salesforce solution suite.




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› Kantar Media cIc. kantar Media CiC is a solid option for enterprises seeking to grow their presence in China due to its strong partnerships with major social platforms like WeChat and sina Weibo and proprietary crawlers for sources like blogs and bulletin boards. Marketers in the automotive and fast-moving consumer goods sectors requiring extensive, granular Chinese social data for their marketing initiatives will appreciate kantar Media CiC’s social intelligence system design framework, which offers basic to detailed reporting. it also taps into social sources like Facebook and Twitter to analyze social intelligence in 67 non-Chinese languages. However, Chinese and non-Chinese social data appear on separate monitoring dashboards, and customer references felt that the vendor was slow to add new features like automated text analysis to its platform. kantar Media CiC’s product road map includes dashboard integration (in the first half of 2016) and WarP, a new analytics engine that will improve sentiment analyses.

contenders

› oracle. oracle’s biggest differentiator is its dynamic link tracking feature, which is the closest to social attribution we’ve seen globally. oracle has also linked its social cloud to its customer experience suite, signaling its customer-first approach to help users tie social intelligence more intrinsically to sales and commerce outcomes. The vendor’s aP customers all agree that it provides great customer support: one said that “oracle has been flexible and approachable. its product, training, and development teams are all very responsive. We’re very happy with oracle.” While oracle customers that use its platform standalone are happy, its limited workflow, user management options, integration capabilities with other platforms, and outreach make it ideally suited for marketers already using the oracle marketing cloud.

› Sysomos. sysomos acquired companies like expion and gazeMetrix in 2015. While this is good news for social listening users, sysomos will need time to piece together an integrated platform that adds value. By acquiring expion, for instance, sysomos is looking to tie its social listening tools (Heartbeat, Map) to social relationships — but for the time being these tools are separate, with packaging and pricing yet to be determined. sysomos told us that it is building a data science layer that will support a single dashboard for monitoring, listening, research, and action, but did not provide details at the time of evaluation. its aP customers prefer Map to Heartbeat, as Map allows them to quickly analyze social data to identify trends. sysomos has all the right tools in place, but stumbles because it lacks a cohesive way to sell its value proposition. sysomos is a good choice for research purposes and customer insights analysts; eventually, customer care and other functions will also find it valuable.




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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.

Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave

Forrester used a combination of four 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 2015.

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

› Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct scenario-based demonstrations of their product’s functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate product capability claims from our vendor surveys.

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› Executive briefings. Forrester met with members of each vendor’s executive team to discuss the company’s strategy and road map.

› customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with three of each vendor’s current customers and required 10 of the vendor’s customers to fill out an online survey about their experiences and satisfaction.

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.

endnotes1 source: Forrester’s global Business Technographics® Marketing survey, 2015.

2 source: Forrester’s Q4 2015 asia Pacific social Marketing online survey.

B2C marketers in australia, india, indonesia, and singapore are fast adopting social platforms to engage with customers. Forrester’s first asia Pacific social Marketing Benchmark examines key indicators that marketers should track to help optimize their social marketing strategies, including understanding the usage of and satisfaction with key social networks such as Facebook, linkedin, Twitter, and WeChat. see the “Benchmarking social Marketing efforts in asia Pacific in 2015” Forrester report.






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3 asia Pacific marketers are missing out on valuable social marketing opportunities, such as providing proactive social care and building social relationships, by limiting its usage mostly to reputation management. This brief seeks to inspire B2C marketers by highlighting how firms have made advanced use of social marketing such as applying intelligence collected via social listening to deliver new actionable insights for product development and improve customer service. see the “Brief: Unleash social’s True Value By extending Your Focus Beyond Brand Monitoring” Forrester report.

4 How can B2C marketers provide value for customers within social media and cultivate a relationship with them? This report explains how social customer care can help customers in their time of need and provide an opportunity for your firm to fulfill its brand promise. see the “Build Customer relationships With social Customer Care” Forrester report and see the “Brief: Unleash social’s True Value By extending Your Focus Beyond Brand Monitoring” Forrester report.

5 However, there are four phases through which social marketers will mature before they can glean the full benefits of integration. see the “The road Map To integrated social intelligence” Forrester report.

6 in Forrester’s 27-criteria evaluation of enterprise listening platform vendors, we identified the 11 most significant software and service providers in the category — attensity, Brandwatch, Converseon, Crimson Hexagon, netBase, salesforce.com (radian6), sprinklr, synthesio, sysomos, Tracx, and Visible Technologies — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help customer insights professionals select the right partner for their enterprise social listening needs. see the “The Forrester Wave™: enterprise listening Platforms, Q1 2014” Forrester report.






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