Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms

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Data Defines The Future Of Social
Relationship Platforms
by Nate Elliott, March 6, 2014
For: Marketing
Leadership
Professionals
Key Takeaways
Established Social Relationship Platforms Aren’t Doing Their Job Very Well
Barely one-half of marketers are satisfied with their social relationship marketing
programs. Most still face a long list of challenges, from measurement to content creation
to staffing. But the social relationship platforms those marketers have hired to solve these
problems are failing them: Most marketers wouldn’t recommend their SRP to a peer.
“Data In” Practices Will Make Social Relationship Marketing More
Successful
Fortunately for marketers, a new breed of emerging SRPs is harnessing data to solve
their problems. These vendors reduce social marketers’ workloads and improve their
output by telling them what topics will work best, helping them source content, and
publishing at the best possible moment. The best of these tools can even automate
mundane tasks.
“Data Out” Practices Will Improve Social Measurement (And More)
Measurement is both marketers’ greatest social challenge and SRPs’ greatest opportunity.
SRPs’ biggest contribution to measurement will come from exporting marketers’ data to
established measurement tools like mix modeling and attribution vendors. Vendors can
also help marketers use social data to improve their marketing in other channels.

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For Marketing Leadership Professionals
Why Read This Report
More marketers use branded Facebook pages and Twitter accounts than use any other social tactic, but
barely one-half say they’re satisfied.Many don’t know what content to post, or when; others don’t have
the human resources they need to succeed; and most say they can’t measure effectively. And the social
relationship platforms (SRPs) they hire to solve these problems just aren’t offering much help. In fact, most
marketers wouldn’t recommend their SRP to a peer. This report details how smart vendors are using “data
in, data out” practices to find innovative solutions to marketers’ problems — and reveals which emerging
SRPs are leading the way.
Table Of Contents
Social Relationship Platforms Aren’t Solving
Marketers’ Problems
Vendors That Use “Data In, Data Out”
Practices Will Win The Market
“Data In” Goes Beyond Insights To Offer
Automation
“Data Out” Will Prove The Value Of Social And
Improve The Rest Of Your Marketing
WHAT IT MEANS
“Data In, Data Out” Models Will Disrupt The
Entire Social Space
Supplemental Material
Notes & Resources
Forrester interviewed 14 vendor and user
companies, including Adobe, Beckon, Brand
Networks, Expion, HootSuite, Percolate
Industries, salesforce.com, Shoutlet,
SimpleFeed, SocialFlow, Spredfast, Sprinklr,
Twitter, and Umbel.
Related Research Documents
Integrate Social Into Your Marketing RaDaR
August 7, 2013
The Four Social Marketing Tools You Need
August 7, 2013
The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship
Platforms, Q2 2013
April 16, 2013
Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship
Platforms
How And Why Emerging SRPs Are Overtaking Established Vendors
by Nate Elliott
with Melissa Parrish and Sarah Takvorian
2
6
4
7
March 6, 2014

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Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms 2
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
Social Relationship Platforms Aren’t Solving Marketers’ Problems
More marketers use branded Facebook pages and Twitter accounts than use any other social channel
or tactic.1
But barely one-half of marketers say they’re satisfied their Facebook and Twitter programs
deliver business value.2
Marketers struggle with social relationship marketing because they:
■ Can’t measure effectively. Measurement remains social marketers’ biggest challenge (see Figure
1). More than one-half of the marketers we surveyed said they struggle to gauge the value of
their Facebook and Twitter accounts. One key reason: Most social metrics track simple user
interactions (e.g., likes or shares) rather than business value (e.g., brand impact or sales).
■ Don’t know what content to post, or when. Finding and selecting good social content is hard.
In fact, social relationship marketers list both deciding what to publish and sourcing content
among their top three challenges. And 20% say that effectively scheduling posts is one of their
toughest tasks.
■ Don’t have the human resources they need to succeed. Managing branded profiles can
be resource intensive and requires a well-drilled team. But more than one-quarter of social
marketers say they don’t have the budget to hire enough social staff. Another 14% say that even
when they find the money, their staff isn’t well trained for the job.
■ Aren’t getting the help they need from vendors. Marketers’ commitment to social plus their
difficulties and disappointments equals an opportunity for vendors. But while dozens of SRPs
chase that opportunity, few provide strong answers to marketers’ most important questions.
Our most recent SRP Forrester Wave™ evaluation found no clear market leaders.3
And most
marketers tell us they wouldn’t recommend their SRP to a colleague (see Figure 2).

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Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms 3
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
Figure 1 Social Relationship Marketers Struggle With Measurement, Content, And Staffing
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.113001
“Thinking only about how you post content to or engage with fans on your branded
profiles, which of the following are your biggest challenges?”
52%
39%
35%
27%
20%
18%
15%
14%
11%
8%
5%
9%
Measuring the performance
of these profiles
Finding or creating content to publish
Deciding what type of content to publish
Finding budget for staff
to manage these profiles
Scheduling posts and creating
a content calendar
Finding budget for external support
Responding to user posts and comments
Finding or training qualified staff
to manage these profiles
Deciding which social networks to use
Selecting an effective agency
to manage these profiles
Selecting an effective tech vendor
to manage these profiles
Other
Source: Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey
Base: 66 marketers
(multiple responses accepted)

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Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms 4
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
Figure 2 Most Social Relationship Marketers Aren’t Satisfied With Their Technology Partners
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.113001
“Thinking only about the primary vendor or tool you use to manage your branded
social profiles, how likely is it that you would recommend
it to a friend or colleague?”
Detractors
43%
Source: Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey
Base: 56 marketers
Passives
30%
Promoters
27%Net Promoter Score:
-16
Vendors That Use “Data In, Data Out” Practices Will Win The Market
How can SRPs better solve marketers’ toughest challenges? More-effective use of data will help vendors
find innovative solutions to marketers’ problems — and help vendors stand out from the pack.
■ SRPs already use data to help marketers monitor and respond. Most leading SRPs offer
at least basic monitoring functionality. And once they’ve tracked customer questions and
comments, these tools use sentiment and influence data to help marketers analyze which
require attention.
■ SRPs that best pull data into their platforms will innovate social publishing. In the past 18
months, social sites have let marketers import third-party ad targeting data, and the result has
been greatly improved ad performance. Vendors that replicate such smart data practices to
power better organic posts will give marketers a big leg up.
■ SRPs that best push data out of their platforms will innovate measurement (and more).
Measurement isn’t just marketers’ greatest social challenge; it’s SRPs’ greatest opportunity. The
vendors that best help clients port social data into attribution and marketing mix tools will
emerge as measurement leaders. Vendors can also help marketers use social data to improve
their marketing in other channels.

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Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms 5
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
A recent review of SRPs’ latest offerings reveals that it’s upstart vendors, not established names, that
are most ready to leverage data effectively and help marketers use “data in, data out” practices.
“Data In” Goes Beyond Insights To Offer Automation
Leveraging external data sources to power better social marketing isn’t science fiction; it’s just out
of the reach of many established SRPs. Today, a new breed of emerging SRPs is already harnessing
data to ease (and even automate) everyday tasks — both reducing social marketers’ workloads and
improving their output. These innovative platforms:
■ Tell marketers which topics will work best. Brand Networks and PlayAnalytics tap historical
sales and weather databases to tell retailers which products will generate the most social interest,
based on local forecasts. And Percolate Industries’ “content marketing platform” doesn’t simply
listen to what brands’ social audiences are talking about; it inserts a ranking of key themes into its
publishing tool so marketers can easily post on the topics most likely to resonate with their fans.
■ Source effective social content. Once marketers have selected a topic, Percolate’s tool also scans
their digital asset databases for relevant preapproved images and videos — and lets marketers
insert logos and slogans into the assets so they’re ready to post. In contrast, SimpleFeed asks
marketers to identify a goal (e.g., clicks or comments), then searches their company’s prior
social activity for posts that have delivered those results in the past.
■ Publish at the best possible moment. SocialFlow’s Cadence product ensures that marketers
publish to Facebook or Twitter when their posts have the best chance of being seen. Marketers
set boundaries for their posts (e.g., only 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays) and put content into
a queue. The tool then tracks the social actions of each brand’s followers to estimate what
percentage of them are active at any given moment — and when it senses a large number are
online, it automatically publishes a post from the queue.
■ Automate mundane tasks. Many established SRPs already use data to offer marketing insights.
For instance, Adobe and Shoutlet tell marketers at what time of day their tweets historically
perform best, while Spredfast tells marketers which of their Facebook updates might work best
as promoted posts. But at its best, this new breed of SRPs goes one step further to automate
actions based on these insights. Witness SocialFlow’s ability to automatically post content at the
right moment. Likewise, SimpleFeed helps one carmaker’s dealers automate content selection —
dynamically publishing posts that have worked for other dealers on their Facebook pages.
“Data Out” Will Prove The Value Of Social And Improve The Rest Of Your Marketing
While several new-breed SRPs already leverage “data in” practices, today, neither emerging nor
established vendors are effectively pushing data from their platforms to other tools. But smart SRPs
will aggressively pursue “data out” methods to:

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Data Defines The Future Of Social Relationship Platforms 6
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
■ Deliver marketers’ social data to measurement tools that work. Most SRPs’ measurement
dashboards simply revisualize engagement data pulled directly from social networks. But
marketers need business metrics, not just fancy charts. While some vendors offer genuinely
useful measurement (e.g., Brand Networks and Datalogix map retailers’ social product
promotions to those products’ in-store sales) most cannot. SRPs’ greatest contribution to
measurement will come from effectively exporting marketers’ data to established measurement
tools like mix modeling vendors and cross-channel attribution providers.
■ Help marketers build the database of affinity. We define the database of affinity as a catalog
of people’s tastes and preferences collected by observing their social behaviors. It could be the
Holy Grail for more-accurate brand advertising, powering effective targeting in everything
from banner ads to TV spots. But Facebook, Google, and the other sites that collect masses of
affinity data are moving slowly in their efforts to sell that data to marketers.4
Any SRP that can
help marketers build and leverage their own database of affinity — likely by exporting it to data
experts like Acxiom and Epsilon for analysis and list creation — will land the first blow in what
will become a $100 billion battle for targeted brand spending.
w h at i t m e a n s
“Data In, Data Out” Models Will Disrupt The Entire Social Space
As vendors adopt smarter data practices, the impact will reach far beyond SRPs to the rest of the
social marketing industry.
■ Established SRPs must innovate or perish. The first wave of SRPs just isn’t getting the job
done. Six years after the category appeared, there’s still no clear leader. Most new feature
launches simply parrot other vendors’ offerings; genuine innovation is almost nonexistent;
and client satisfaction is low. The established SRPs now face a choice: Either develop
innovative data-driven functionality such as that detailed in this report or acquire the
emerging vendors that have. If they fail to act, we’ll be talking about an entirely new set of
“established” firms 18 months from now.
■ Social agencies are going to shrink, one way or another. These upstart SRPs aren’t only
going to disrupt established SRPs — agencies are in the firing line as well. In some agencies,
entire rooms of strategists hold daily brainstorms to plan a single brand’s social content.
Managed well, that model can deliver great work.5
But it doesn’t scale for agencies and is
hugely expensive for brands.The result? Agencies also face a choice: Either use data to drive
automation within their business or lose clients to the technology vendors that do. In the
next few years, social agencies will either shrink on their own as they automate or shrink by
force as they lose business.

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© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
■ Traditional data providers will acquire independent SRPs. If Acxiom, Epsilon, and
other data providers want to build the database of affinity (and they tell us they do), they’ll
need piles of social data. And because the social sites themselves won’t provide that data,
brands and their SRPs will need to. That’s why we believe that the second great wave of SRP
acquisition will be driven by data providers rather than software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors.
Supplemental Material
Methodology
Forrester’s Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey was fielded to 66 Forrester contacts with
knowledge of social marketing. For quality assurance, we screened respondents to ensure they met
minimum standards in terms of content knowledge, job responsibilities, and budget insight.
Forrester fielded the survey during January 2014. Respondent incentives included two
complimentary Forrester reports. Exact sample sizes are provided in this report on a question-
by-question basis. This survey used a self-selected group of respondents (Forrester contacts
knowledgeable of social marketing) and is therefore not random. This data is not guaranteed to be
representative of the population, and, unless otherwise noted, statistical data is intended to be used
for descriptive and not inferential purposes. While nonrandom, the survey is still a valuable tool for
understanding where users are today and where the industry is headed.
Companies Interviewed For This Report
Adobe
Beckon
Brand Networks
Expion
HootSuite
Percolate Industries
Salesforce.com
Shoutlet
SimpleFeed
SocialFlow
Spredfast
Sprinklr
Twitter
Umbel

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© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 6, 2014
Endnotes
1
One recent Forrester survey found that 79% of marketers use Facebook and 60% use Twitter. Source: Q1
2014 Social Marketing Online Survey.
2
Just 55% of marketers are satisfied with the business value of posting updates to their Facebook pages, and
the same number are satisfied with their Twitter programs. By comparison, 68% are satisfied with the
business value of email marketing, and 66% are satisfied with search marketing. Source: Q1 2014 Social
Marketing Online Survey.
3
In fact, most of the largest vendors offered lookalike platforms and identikit feature sets. See the April 16,
2013, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013” report.
4
Google’s recent launch of Affinity Segments targeting is a promising start toward offering marketers the
database of affinity, but the company has more work left to do. And Facebook only started its artificial
intelligence research team to analyze its affinity data in September 2013 — and at last count, this team had
fewer than 10 members. Source: Nate Elliott, “Database Of Affinity: The Race Is On,” Nate Elliott’s Blog,
September 25, 2013 (http://blogs.forrester.com/nate_elliott/13-09-25-database_of_affinity_the_race_is_on).
5
We know this model can work because we’ve seen it produce occasionally outstanding results. In fact, one
of our favorite 2013 Forrester Groundswell Award winners — the Dr Pepper Facebook page managed by
agency Code and Theory — uses exactly this model. But there are only so many smart social strategists in
the world, and most marketers can’t afford to pay for so much of their time. Source: Code and Theory, “Dr
Pepper Social Media Program,” Empowered Blog (http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards/
detail.php?id=1028).

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