Listening Platforms – Brand monitoring grows up.

Two years ago, in Forrester’s brand monitoring Wave, we evaluated vendors that help marketers monitor mainstream and consumer-generated media in order to identify key trends in the market. But social forces have gathered plenty of momentum since that evaluation. Today, consumers actively participate in the dialogue around the brand — witness the power of the consumer in shifting marketing strategies of brands like Dell, Motrin, and Wal-Mart. To add insult to injury, advertising distrust grows as consumers turn to their peers for product and brand recommendations.

The broad shifts in influence, trust, and control of marketing messages from brands to consumers forces marketers to do more than just monitor their brands. How are vendors evolving to meet marketers’ shifting needs? While brand monitoring platforms faithfully report on brand conversations and competitive news, they do not go far enough to turn this information into marketing insights. Enter the next evolution of this market in which listening platforms not only listen to conversations but also extract insights and deliver those insights in ways to facilitate a change in marketing strategy.

Forrester defines listening platforms as: A technology and analytics infrastructure that mines a wide variety of traditional, online, and social sources to extract and deliver insights that shape a firm’s marketing strategy.

To view report CLICK on link below:
http://www.nielsen-online.com/emc/0901_forrester/The%20Forrester%20Wave%20Listening%20Platforms%20Q1.pdf>