I’ve been spending some time lately researching the brand monitoring space. A portion of the various vendors of these services (Biz360, Brandimensions, Cymfony, Factiva, MotiveQuest, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and Umbria) have approached us to ask about potential conference sponsorships over the years, and a few have presented at one or more Blog Business Summits.
I read that Peter Kim of Forrester had conducted in-depth evaluations in Q3 2006 of the main players in this space, and also “conducted client reference interviews with 17 user companies, including ABC, Activision, BP, Citigroup, CNN, DaimlerChrysler, Fleishman-Hillard, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Toyota, VeriSign, Verizon, and Xerox.”
The result is a PDF file available for $995.00 here, or for free(!) here.
After reading the report, I still had a few questions, so I called Peter Kim up and grilled him. He was very patient with my ignorance, and very generous with his time. Here is the short synopsis of what I concluded from the call:
To get an analysis across all major media (Web, Television, Print) that reveals what is being said (and how often) about you or your products — you’re talking a price tag of around $75,000.00. The alternative is do it yourself ad hoc (Google searches, Technorati, etc.) for “free.” Of course “free” means a ton of staff/your time.
How much of this stuff is algorithmic? It varies, but non-trivial human involvement is essential for all of the profiled services. At least one company (Brandimensions) employs an army of 400 part-time humans to manually catalog and tag news etc.
Another interesting note is that the market for these services appears to be booming. Kim said that many of the services were growing their client lists at a rapid clip, and based on the recent coverage of VC funding for buzz monitoring firms, there seems to be no lack of investor enthusiasm.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Jeremiah Owyang 02.03.07 at 7:25 am
I’m watching this space very carefully too. The links to your reports don’t work.
Nathan Gilliatt 02.03.07 at 5:50 pm
There are a lot more than 7 options. I’m doing a new survey of companies in this space and have found about 40 worldwide. There’s obviously some variation in what they offer, but the market isn’t divided cleanly between free, do-it-yourself tools and the extreme high end.
(Add an “h” to the beginning of the link to fix it.)
Steve Broback 02.03.07 at 8:12 pm
Jeremiah: One link was indeed broken — it’s fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.
Arnaud Fischer 12.05.07 at 5:15 am
Steve, very good post. The brand monitoring space and more specifically the Sentiment Analysis discipline is definitely heating up. I would have added Andiamo Systems to your list of leading players. Your point regarding manual processing is pretty interesting. As consumer generated content explodes, manual processing and opinion (ie post, comments, …) rating won’t scale. I would add SentiMetrix - automating tone polarity scoring - to your list as well. Brand monitoring (Andiamo, BuzzMetrics, …), semantic precision targeting (BuzzLogic), consumer generated content search engines, reputation management, public opinion engagement monitoring should all be pretty interesting to watch in 2008.
-arnaud