We work with a lot of different types of marketers at Forrester, and we always customize the recommendations we deliver to different clients based upon their unique situations and needs. But over the past few years there's one piece of advice I've found myself giving nearly every company I work with: "Hire a listening vendor."

I love listening platforms and the social data they create; it's a powerful source of information that, used correctly, can make marketers and their programs more effective. But not enough marketers are taking advantage of these benefits.

No matter what type of company you work for -- indeed, whether you work directly with social media or not -- you should be using social data right now to:

1. Develop your messaging. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about. Many of our past Forrester Groundswell Award winners have used private listening communities to craft their marketing messages; increasingly, we're seeing companies use data from public social media to guide their messaging as well.
2. Source your creative. We know that consumers trust what they hear from other consumers more than any other source of information -- why not use listening platforms to identify positive social content that can be included in campaign creative? I've even seen a UK bank, First Direct, use social sentiment data in an outdoor advertising campaign.

As much as I believe in the power of social media data, I've always stood by the fact that if you just monitor social media, you'll only learn about social media. If you want to learn about your customers, you'll have to look at them across all of their varied communication channels.

With this concept in mind, today NM Incite and Clarabridge announced they are joining forces — and data — through an integration partnership. The strategic alliance gives customers the ability to feed NM Incite's social data through Clarabridge's text analytics platform, run sentiment analysis, and combine it with other voice of the customer (VoC) data. This partnership signifies two important areas for Customer Intelligence professionals:

• Successful VoC programs require access to social media. Social media is important in the customer feedback space, but it's not the silver bullet. It is a series of channels to monitor consumer discussion and gain customer insight — but it's just one set of many areas to learn about customers. A complete picture of a customer comes from any of the fragmented ways they communicate — including surveys, chat transcripts, call logs, and more. Just yesterday my colleague Andrew McInnes — our resident VoC expert — published research on the importance of listening to social media as part of the customer feedback process. Check out Andrew's blog for more VoC coverage.

In July 2010, we posted a Data Digest that shows that almost half of US online males and 42% of online females read consumer ratings and reviews at least monthly. Well, what types of decisions are reviews helping these consumers to make?

Our Technographics® data shows that, as most would expect, more than half of the consumers who check ratings and reviews use them to help make more complex decisions such as a car, TV, or refrigerator. However, these are not the only types of decisions consumers are looking to reviews for — in fact, most check reviews to help with a variety of decisions — from entertainment decisions to making purchases for their jobs.

When we look at this data by generation, it is no surprise that Gen Yers are more likely to use online reviews across most of the decision types that we ask about compared to the overall US population. What is interesting is how dependent they are on online reviews when it comes to entertainment choices (44%) and purchasing ongoing services (41%). And although young consumers lead with using ratings and reviews, it is interesting to see that Seniors that are using ratings and reviews show similar behaviors compated to the total US population for most categories -- apart from the job related one.

After an entire month without any acquisitions in the social media data space, there is no excuse but to get back to normal blogging. I assume I'll be back to posting on M&A again soon, but in the meantime I've been busy working on some big research and now it's finally ready to show off. Today we've published "The 2011 Listening Platform Landscape," a report aimed at helping Marketing and Customer Intelligence professionals navigate a crowded and fragmented array of social media data tools and technologies.

The inspiration for this report was easy: vendor selection is the single most popular topic from clients this year. Forrester clients know they need help managing online conversation, but don't know where to turn for that help. In the last six months alone I've spoken with over 100 companies about finding the right listening platform partner. And with hoards of competing vendors (thanks Ken Burbary for helping put together such a comprehensive list!), buyers across the board face challenges finding the partner(s) that best fits their listening needs. This report breaks down the market's fragmentation and helps Customer Intelligence professionals shortlist vendors based on their listening requirements.

After months of briefings with platforms and interviews with buyers, we found: