Publicis Groupe's opinion on the best social listening technology.
We are sure none of this is news for the experienced media analysists out there. Nor is the idea that after we sliced and diced the data for several days, we circled back to the conviction that proper social media intelligence still requires the right mix of tech and human touch to extract the relevant data, translate it through the proper zeitgeist lenses, and distill actionable insights out of it.
The proliferation of data sources and the volumes of generated content, as well as the metadata that accompanies this content, will continue to fuel the demand for enhanced and automated analytics features in the content platforms. We believe that this will remain the key differentiator for the content vendors.
When it comes to “qualitative” content analysis, we feel that the AI and machine learning vendor solutions will remain sub-par. Any progress in this field, even an incremental one, or in any related filed like image and video recognition, will definitely have a positive impact on the analysts' daily work but for the foreseeable future output of the algorithms will and should continue to be treated with suspicion.
We started off quoting the Forrester Wave reports and will wrap things up again agreeing with Forrester’s verdict on the best content platforms available and confirm that NetBase and Crimson Hexagon currently provide some of the best tools on the market. We feel that both platforms match our needs in terms of advanced Boolean search operators and capabilities, breadth and quality of source covered, and extra features for additional data manipulation and analysis.
It is also important to remind you, at the time of writing this report, we did not have access to the new Brandwatch Consumer Research platform which has been the result of the Brandwatch and Crimson Hexagon merger. We also did not have access to the new Meltwater Social Solutions platform which has been the results of the Sysomos and Meltwater merger.
We know that this makes the results of this study a little "out of date". However, we feel that it was important to publish this snapshot comparison. As professionals working in the industry and analsying the data, we do not have access to other content like this. All vendors are constantly changing and updating their platforms, functionality, and capabilities - this makes it difficult to compare solutions but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
With the rapid pace of technological change makes it a must to keep an eye on competitors and newcomers in the social listening space. We're looking forward to the future development of social listening technologies, and running more studies of this nature.
