The Forrester Blog

Greetings from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, where I'm at the 2010 Omniture Summit. It's been a good week, I must say that my favorite part has been the opportunity to meet with so many web analytics practitioners, friends, Forrester clients and the Omniture team.  If you didn't attend but are interested in getting a feel for the event, check out the Twitter hashtag, #omtrsummit.

I am pleased to announce that this week we are initiating the research process for the inaugural Forrester Wave™ evaluation of Online Testing and Targeting platforms.  We plan to publish this Wave report in the third quarter of 2010. Upon completion this research will be distributed to senior marketing executives at hundreds of large marketing organizations globally.

The first phase of the process is to determine the field of vendors who comprise the Online Testing and Targeting landscape.  We have already identified and contacted a number of companies who participate in the market via previous research efforts.

Forrester is actively innovating our use of social media, and this extends to the research process.  I would like to solicit your input through two modes of participation:

1. If you are a practitioner, please share which Online Testing and Targeting vendors you currently or have previously used.  Also please let me know if you would be interested in receiving followup communications to discuss your experiences with vendors and online testing in general.

2. If you represent a vendor in the Online Testing and Targeting space and would like to be considered for inclusion in the Wave report please let me know and we'll send you  our preliminary vendor survey to complete and submit.

Last month we published our research on Influence Measurement – a dive into consumers' influence over brands and the benefits it provides marketers who can identify a customer's relative influence. This research outlines a framework by which to measure an individual's influence and get the most out of the metrics you collect.

Now we've published our follow up, "Overcoming The Challenges Of Measuring Influence”. This research addresses some of the difficulties that influence measurement faces, such as the lack of accessible data and the amount of manual work required to compile the metrics. We've found that there are a number of problems, but it's still worth the effort. Sure ideal influence measurement requires access to things like number of Facebook friends, trust between connections, relevance of shared content, and offline sharing behavior – but there’s plenty of data readily available that Customer Intelligence professionals can use.

Right now most influence measurement will benefit from outside help, either from a listening platform or agency, but even these options face data restrictions and remain far from perfect. Check out the report for a full dive into influence measurement – and tips to help navigate around the challenges.

Happy New Year! At the beginning of the year (and the start of a new decade), it's appropriate to acknowledge one of the year's hottest trends: #0856a4;">Influence Measurement.

Less than a year ago we published the Listening Platform Landscape report, laying out the evolution of social media monitoring. That research continues to drive many client inquiries today, but in the months since it published a very unsurprising thing happened: the landscape continued to grow up.

Since the last report published a lot has happened. There are dozens of new players in the space – from simple brand monitoring dashboards to large listening platforms - new startups to technology behemoths. We've seen consolidation, acquisition, and expansion. The vendors we covered a year ago now offer more advanced tools and features and as a result marketers too have evolved, finding new ways to use the social media data these platforms collect. Further, we're watching new tools emerge – collecting and analyzing social data and pushing the boundaries of what we’d call a listening platform.