Hello
From Dr Jillian Ney
I’m so pleased that tools are being developed to make our work easier.
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On a serious note, the reason we’ve created this tech landscape is to try and clear up some of the confusion around the different types of social intelligence technology, and also to add some legitimacy to our industry. Since I started in social listening almost two decades ago the amount of technology that’s been developed to support our work has grown massively. And, as you’ll see from the timeline in the introduction, the type of work they help us with is also changing as our industry evolves.
This is a great thing! I’m so pleased that tools are being developed to make our work easier. But all this choice means we have to make more decisions.
That’s fine, if we know exactly what we need and we’re able to compare different tools easily. But that’s not always the case. One of my biggest bugbears with this industry is that we don’t have a consistent shared language to talk about what we do and what we need. That’s allowed technology vendors, in an attempt to stand out from competitors, to create their own language about the features and functionality they offer. In many cases, they’re offering the same thing just with a different name. In other cases, it’s not actually clear what they’re offering. This leaves you - the user - more confused than ever about which technology you should be buying.
And so that’s why we decided to step in. As an independent voice in this space, the SI Lab has been able to assess all the technology out there that claims to support social intelligence and categorise it in a way that we think makes most sense to you: the people actually doing the work. We’re not driven by any bias or agenda other than to help you understand the technology that’s available, make better decisions on the technology you work with, and stop wasting money on tools that don’t do what you think they’re going to do.
The SITech Landscape Map is important, not just to help individual users do better, but also to help our industry grow. If social intelligence is to be taken seriously as a discipline we need to show that we’re united as an industry. And a key part of that is using the same language to talk about what we do.
This has been a mammoth project that has been led by our resident SITech expert, Ben Ellis, and we didn’t realise quite how big until we started! Did he regret taking on this project? Maybe. Am I glad he did it? Definitely. But we know that this isn’t the final version, and we’ll carry on updating it as the industry evolves. We’ll need to revisit the categories and definitions and maybe even create some new ones. But this is a good place to start, and we really hope you find it useful.
