Starting the Forrester Wave: White Label Social Networks and Community Platforms (Part 1/4)

Blogging the status of my research agenda has become an efficient way for me to communicate with the market I cover, as well as signal to clients new areas of expertise.

Fortunately, much of the market I cover (or their PR firms) read this blog and my tweets (and vice versa), making my job as a researcher very, very efficient.

Many weeks ago, I made a call for the vendor product catalog in this market, (and via email and twitter) that document, is a detailed index of over 40 vendors in the space, (aprox 50% of the market) and will be available to Forrester clients and those who submitted to it in the coming days.

My research agenda for this quarter is to complete a Forrester Wave (learn more), which is a market segmentation and prioritization report that will help clients (Fortune 5000, Interactive Marketers) determine which vendor is right for them. (I get asked daily in one medium or another who to buy). The primary purpose of this report is to aid my clients to efficiently come to a short list or decision on who to buy. The lingering side effects could also signal to the VC space who to fund, as well as within the industry who will want to partner from a CMS, ERP, CRM, widget, services aspect.

Due to the rigorous methodology (there will be thousands of excel cells created, analyzed, and weighed among our team) The Wave will only include several vendors. During this 10 week process, I’ll be following the guidelines set before me (we’ve done many Wave reports) this consuming activity will meet my entire report coverage for the entire quarter. This coupled with the changes in our team, will keep me very busy, I hope it doesn’t impact my other duties, as well as blogging.

From time to time, I’ll post updates about where I am in developing this product (reports are one of our products), in that spirit, I’m now whittling down the big list to the core vendors that can stand the rigors of enterprise requirements (Fortune 5000) and are primarily suited for interactive marketers (mainly external deployments) who I serve.

If you’ve already submitted to the vendor product catalog, I’m already reviewing with the team. However, if you have an extensive track record for the Fortune 5000 interactive marketer (perhaps with references), and did not submit, you ought to let me know, email me at jowyang at forrester.com . I’ve already reached out to a few who I think could qualify.

You’ve already shown that you know what analysts do, but how we do it is a shrouded mystery, so now, you’re getting a behind the scenes tour as I trek forward –a little transparency should help you to better understand what we do.

Read more about this Wave Research project:

Part 1: Starting the Wave
Part 2: Data Collection Process
Part 3: The Analysis Process
Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.