Andrew Frank

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Andrew Frank
Research VP
5 years at Gartner
30 years IT industry

Andrew Frank covers marketing and advertising technology trends as a research vice president with Gartner Research's media team. His research has focused on new opportunities in search engine marketing, viral marketing and social media, online video and consumer…Read Full Bio

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The Second Annual Social Media Watchdogs Challenge

by Andrew Frank  |  September 23, 2009  |  27 Comments

About a year ago I issued a challenge to the social media monitoring and analysis vendor community to determine which of these vendors “ate their own dogfood.” In other words, who was able, using their own product, to spot mention of their own brand names in the blogosphere and rapidly reply. The results were impressive: 36 companies responded, mostly within 24 hours (and many within seconds), even though only 34 were originally mentioned. 13 of the respondents weren’t on the original list.

Much has happened in a year, but one thing that hasn’t happened is a thinning of the field through consolidation or collapse. While some companies have merged or shifted focus, and a clear leadership tier has emerged, the overall number in my database has nearly doubled to sixty-one, making for a pretty noisy category. The good news is demand seems to still be growing as well, so, while consolidation’s to be expected, there’s yet a prize in store for the best vendors, and plenty of choice and competition for users who are still waking up to the critical importance of analyzing social media, or refining their approach based on some experience.

The goal here is simple: to determine which of these companies can respond with a comment within 48 hours (when the results will be posted) of having their name appear on this blog.

Disclaimer: this is not a true product test, nor is it meant to imply that a company’s ability to detect its own brand is necessarily a significant factor in choosing the right vendor. It’s just a way to showcase the power of this dynamic category, and to discover if this list is missing anyone important. Some may find it a useful guide as links to the websites (which are not always obvious) are included.

It’s also a way to foreshadow that we’ll be publishing more research on this category soon.

I look forward to hearing from you.

1st2c
Aberdeen Group
Attensity
Attentio
backtype
Biz360
BrandIntel
Brandseye
Brandtology
Brandwatch
BurrellesLuce
Buzzgain
BuzzLogic
Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Channel Signal
CIC
Cision
Clarabridge
Collective Intellect
Converseon
Crawdad Technologies
Crimson Hexagon
CSC NameProtect
CustomScoop
Cyberalert
TNS Media Intelligence Cymfony
dna13
eCairn
Echo Research
Envisional
News Corp Dow Jones Factiva
filtrbox
Gnip
Imente
InsideView
The McGraw-Hill Companies J.D. Power and Associates Web Intelligence
Jive Software
Kaava
Lexalytics
Leximancer
Market Sentinel
Moreover
MotiveQuest
Networked Insights
New Media Strategies
Onalytica
PopularMedia
Radian6 Technologies
RelevantNoise
RepuMetrix
ScoutLabs
Sentiment Metrics
SentiMetrix
Spiral16
Sports Media Challenge
Sysomos
Alterion Techrigy
Trackur
Unbound Technologies
VibeMetrix
Visible Technologies

27 Comments »

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27 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Michael Loop   September 23, 2009 at 11:41 pm

    We use Insideview, and I saw this post pretty quickly

  • 2 Michael Fraietta   September 23, 2009 at 11:52 pm

    Good evening ;-)

    Michael Fraietta
    Filtrbox
    mike@filtrbox.com
    @mike567

  • 3 Leon Chaddock   September 24, 2009 at 2:30 am

    Hello from Sentiment Metrics!
    http://www.sentimentmetrics.com

  • 4 Flemming Madsen   September 24, 2009 at 3:32 am

    Clearly a new high in Gartner research

  • 5 Chris Newton   September 24, 2009 at 5:53 am

    Hello from Radian6.

  • 6 Kevin Hoffmann   September 24, 2009 at 8:04 am

    Thanks for including Cision.

  • 7 Jake Rosen   September 24, 2009 at 8:18 am

    Glad you included Sports Media Challenge in the list. We noticed the mention using our proprietary Buzz Manager program. I had an e-mail alert waiting for me this morning when I came into the office.

  • 8 Brett Safron   September 24, 2009 at 8:35 am

    Wow, can’t believe it’s been a year already! That was fast! Cision is still listening!

  • 9 Hannah Del Porto   September 24, 2009 at 9:12 am

    Must have missed this last year, but please add ImpactWatch to the list. We monitor print, broadcast and online news, as well as social media.

    Thanks!
    Hannah Del Porto
    ImpactWatch

  • 10 Tweets that mention The Second Annual Social Media Watchdogs Challenge -- Topsy.com   September 24, 2009 at 10:47 am

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by lars basche and acfrank. acfrank said: The Second Annual Social Media Watchdogs Challenge: About a year ago I issued a challenge to the social media mo.. http://bit.ly/Q2lQW [...]

  • 11 Anthony Maughan   September 24, 2009 at 10:57 am

    Cool challenge! I re-twitted here RE http://bit.ly/172UiE

  • 12 Mike Spataro   September 24, 2009 at 10:59 am

    Thanks for including us Andrew.

    Mike Spataro

  • 13 Dave Howlett   September 24, 2009 at 11:09 am

    We’re here and listening. Unfortunately, I didn’t log in until this morning to see your post.

  • 14 Blake Cahill   September 24, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    Andrew,

    It was a fun experiment a year ago. Glad to see you doing it again. That list just keeps growing. Perhaps you should have a filter based number of customers or revenue size? My east coast colleague beat me again!

    Best,

    @bcahill
    @visible_tech

  • 15 Eric Melin   September 24, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    “Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…anyone?”

    Spiral16: Here!

    thanks for including us!

    Eric Melin
    @Spiral16
    @SceneStealrEric

  • 16 Rob Key   September 24, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    Hi Andrew — Converseon checking in. Cheers.

  • 17 Jim Reynolds   September 24, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    Techrigy is here — :)

    Saw the alert at 5am on the blackberry :)

  • 18 Jim Waggoner   September 25, 2009 at 8:56 am

    Got it with the morning news

  • 19 Gail Nelson   September 25, 2009 at 9:29 am

    Still here!

  • 20 Gail Nelson   September 25, 2009 at 9:31 am

    BurrellesLuce, that is.

  • 21 Connie Bensen   September 25, 2009 at 9:57 am

    Thanks for adding our parent company, Alterian for Techrigy SM2.

    Connie Bensen
    Director of Community Strategy, Alterian
    @cbensen

  • 22 Karina Silva   September 25, 2009 at 11:24 am

    Hello from Media Monitors – Love the initiative Andrew.
    We were not on your list, but we still found you! (Context is king)

    We just released a new version of Mediaportal.com where clients can incorporate relevant online conversations into their overall media coverage (TV, Radio, Print media and online news) and report and analyse performance across all media type getting the full picture. That was my plug :) now hopefully we make it onto next year’s list!

    Cheers, Karina
    @KarinaSilva

  • 23 Tom O'Brien   September 25, 2009 at 11:49 am

    Still here. But we aren’t actually SM watchdogs.

    Dashboards for brand monitoring are interesting, and all big brands should have them, but the economics are a race to zero. See yesterday’s Microsoft LookingGlass announcement.

    More interesting to consider what we can learn about the world, our category and our brand by listening and analyzing a much broader swath of consumer conversations.

    Brand mentions typically represent between 5% and 30% of the relevant conversation and if you are only listening for your brand mentions you only get a subset of that.

    Brand monitoring is important – but it isn’t everything.

    Tom O’Brien
    @tomob
    http://motivequest.com

  • 24 Kent Hollenbeck   September 25, 2009 at 7:10 pm

    We saw the results of The Second Annual Social Media Watchdogs Challenge and while we aren’t listed, we thought that we would comment as we were on the list with our Narrative Network tool last year, and this year, we garnered a significant amount of attention for the release of twendz™.

    twendz is a Twitter mining Web application that utilizes the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does twendz by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute.

    We are also excited about a new analytics product currently in beta. It will look to provide influential identification, automated emotion gauging, trending analysis and conversation engagement tools for marketing professionals. Unlike our first emotive measurement tool, twendz, this will be a paid-for product. We expect the product to be on the market at the end of Oct and can share more about it then.
    Thanks for the Challenge!

    Kent Hollenbeck
    Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
    @waggeneredstrom

  • 25 Mark Evans   September 26, 2009 at 9:23 am

    Thanks for mentioning us on the list.

    cheers, Mark

  • 26 Second Annual Watchdog Challenge Results   September 28, 2009 at 12:03 pm

    [...] ← The Second Annual Social Media Watchdogs Challenge [...]

  • 27 Mark Rogers   September 29, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Andrew: It’s good to hear from you again. I would share Tom O’Brien’s opinion … brand mentions are interesting, but relevant conversations are even better :-) Our forthcoming product Skyttle addresses that gap.

    @marketsentinel