It’s arguably the next big thing in research. Or, perhaps, the next really big thing.

It’s the emergence of what Suresh Vittal, principal analyst at Forrester, calls the ‘listening platform’, something he defines in his recent report 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.”

In a market dominated by firms that aren’t from the mainstream research community, Vittal anoints Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony as the leaders in “a pack of strong performers.”

Big opportunity
“It’s not a $25m market opportunity or we wouldn’t be in it, it’s definitely in the billions…in five years,” says Jim Nail, chief strategy & marketing officer, TNS Cymfony.

A couple of years ago TNS bought Cymfony, a company with roots in PR measurement. “PR in the US is a $45bn market and measurement is 5-10% of that,” says Nail to underpin the opportunity.

In trademark ebullient style, Pete Blackshaw, EVP, Nielsen Online declares: “I kind of see this as the new centre of marketing.”

Then again, he would say that. Blackshaw realised the power of consumer-generated and social media years before others and co-founded BuzzMetrics to capitalise on this. BuzzMetrics is now at the epicentre of Nielsen’s listening platform strategy.

Forrester’s Vittal says the market is too nascent to quantify the opportunity. He estimates that 1500-2000 companies have made the decision to use a listening platform and that another 10-15% of Fortune 1000 firms are actively looking into it: “There is a recognition that your customers are talking all around you and if you want to react to their discussion and maintain a listening strategy you have to listen.”

But he believes the opportunity will end up being much larger: “This [market] is very similar to the business intelligence market…practically every company under the sun will need listening tools…it’s a very broad platform: the CEO uses it, the CFO uses it…”

The catalyst for growth has of course been the rapid rise in social media and user-generated content. Vittal says that the pharma, CPG and travel sectors are particularly focused on using these platforms, and it’s a particular boon for pharma who: “…traditionally had limited access to their end consumers because of regulation, business model etc.”

Uses
The range of applications for these listening platforms is as diverse as for research in general.

At first the aim of these tools was simply to understand what was being said about brands online and then summarise through metrics. Metrics, Vittal says, such as the level of buzz or positive/negative sentiment, share of discussion, tone of voice, impressions, share of mentions, etc. While mostly quantitative, sentiment measurement tends to be managed qualitatively because it has proved problematic to automate.

But as the market has developed, so the applications have grown in sophistication: “Some of our best early traction revolved around almost extended notions of a customer satisfaction/loyalty service (e.g. Toyota)…this was almost like an extension of their Six Sigma thinking around quality…it’s almost, boy, I want to re-engineer my whole CRM operation to be much more in sync with a lot of these social media realities,” says Blackshaw.

As a result, he now talks of a shift away from quality strategy Six Sigma, towards what he calls ‘six signals of listening’.

The market does not seem to have evolved any particular killer application yet. Defensive branding was thought to be a candidate, says Nail: “But no one has found a way of predicting which issues will go nuclear on you.” Moreover, when things do go ‘nuclear’, there’s less time between chatter and when it goes nuclear making it difficult if not impossible to intervene fast enough (that said, daily updates can be used to monitor the impact of defensive initiatives).

Performance
Forrester tested a number of listening platforms by asking each vendor to monitor chatter around the ‘Forrester’ brand. Although admittedly not a consumer brand, it was nevertheless one that Vittal could expertly assess.

Both Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony scored well on the comprehensiveness of their coverage of data sources, i.e. general and trade publications, forums, social networks, etc. If you want to know everything being said about you, comprehensiveness is clearly important. The strong media (measurement) heritage of both firms has clearly benefited them.

Both gather content through so-called online aggregators that, Nail says, have some room for improvement: “We found so far that while there is some overlap, nobody has everything.”

Blackshaw says that Nielsen has an additional data advantage, namely the ability to integrate internal Nielsen data such as purchase data. The data modelling possibilities are mouth-watering.

The next stage in the workflow is natural language processing or text-mining to understand meaning.

Language is one of the big issues here. Cymfony only deals with English content, although Nail states that overcoming this is a priority. And even though BuzzMetrics operates a multi-lingual service, Blackshaw says there is still room for improvement to better understand meaning and context: “I have a hunch that there is something in the airwaves of conversation on some of these strategic groups – such as Spanish - that might be untapped.”

A particular issue with all platforms that Vittal assessed is that of sentiment analysis, namely the ability to establish whether chatter is positive, negative or neutral towards a brand. Vittal found that most systems reported a high level of neutrals (i.e. algorithms failed), requiring manual intervention and thereby compromising scalability.

It is not clear whether an automated solution is possible here. Language is remarkably ambiguous and full of irony, and computers have a hard time dealing with that.

Both systems perform well on analytics. One reason is the availability of an in-house online metrics facility to help weight the data (to correctly represent for each media type). Note, for example, how TNS bought online metrics firm Compete.com soon after the Cymfony acquisition, and the fact that Nielsen Online houses the BuzzMetrics and NetRatings units – there is direct synergy.

A slight bone of contention for Nail is that Vittal rated BuzzMetrics higher for its ability to deliver insights, with Vittal saying they did “a lot of brand association diagrams“ and managed to synthesise everything well.

Nail says he hears the opposite from clients, particularly those who have recently switched from Nielsen: “We’ve taken probably half a dozen Nielsen clients in the past year or so. What we hear from them is that they [Nielsen] give them a hundred slide PowerPoint deck with lots of charts but no insight.”

Nail admits to being “friendly rivals” with Blackshaw, and concedes that Nielsen is slightly ahead in some areas: “We are catching up with them now in terms of creating vertical experts in our analyst teams, ” says Nail. Current verticals include financial services, CPG, consumer technology, enterprise technology, retail and healthcare/pharma.

Nielsen is always looking to improve its insight capability, says Blackshaw. His team distributes a regular collection of analysis and commentary to clients over and above dashboard and PowerPoint deliverables. These include threat trackers, issue briefs and outreach videos: “The way you construct knowledge share within your client is also really important, e.g. how do you convince legal to approve this? We’re starting a program…an advocacy round-table, client-only conversation [to promote effective knowledge share].”

Iteration
Listening platforms are clearly in their infancy. Vittal reckons they are only 20% of what they could become and has a laundry list of suggestions.

One of these is pricing. Current pricing and sales strategy suggests that the leading players are focused on the enterprise market. But Vittal would like value-for-money solutions aimed at small and medium businesses. The same strategy that drove Google’s meteoric rise in revenues. Blackshaw admits to pricing pressure due to competition and the availability of alternative approaches.

Another suggestion is to go beyond online sources of data: “The emphasis seems to be online because of the quantity of conversations happening here…but it’s not purely online,” a reference to, among other things, customer service conversations by phone. “Eventually it will be across all touch points – anywhere where there is a conversation happening,” says Vittal.

Another recommendation, along the lines of what BuzzMetrics is already doing, is to integrate more data such as sales, awareness etc. to help clients make more effective RoI decisions. This should be easier for Cymfony to accomplish now that it is part of the much larger WPP group.

Ultimately, Vittal, Nail and Blackshaw all agree on the aspiration to deliver reporting with a clear ‘call to action’. Much of this will require a more strategic, consultative approach.

Privacy is a hot topic that is only mentioned by Nail. Although not a particular issue now, this is something the vendors need to be mindful of as consumers start to think through the implications of putting their lives and thoughts online, as happened during the recent controversial u-turn from Facebook when adapting its terms and conditions. Pressure for greater privacy and/or more weary users could limit the coverage of listening platforms.

Big elephant
Although two of the largest research companies in the world lead in these systems, that in no way implies that they are universally welcomed by those who focus on traditional modes of research.

Client research and insight teams will, no doubt, be weary of using these systems for core studies such as customer satisfaction and loyalty given the issues around representativity and response bias.

But Cymfony’s Nail says that there is a growing acceptance of their value: “There’s going to be greater acceptance of using social media as a data source to mine for consumer insights…We’re starting to see money come out of focus groups, surveys and other kinds of market research tools, invested with us either as a substitute or increasingly as a part of a market research project.”