11 Replies to “Status: Forrester Wave Report for Community Platforms, Data Collection (Part 2/4)”

  1. Very much looking forward to this wave report. We have many clients asking about it who are in the process of evaluating community tools. We also have been researching one for internally within our agency. Looking forward to seeing the results of your hard work! With such a disparate crowd of vendors I think this will be a very influential report to help weed out the top innovators in this space.

  2. Hi Jeremiah, Thanks fot the link. I have a few follow up questions.

    Is the wiki you mentioned a Forrester-wide tool? I’m curious. Do *all* Forrester analysts consistently capture essential details about *all* vendor briefings in the wiki? Or is this something that only the team of social media analysts do?

    Client inquiry is a critical source of information for advisory analysts like Forrester and Gartner. When it comes to client inquiry, Forrester does a great job of capturing clients’ basic questions — which is the basis for the fabulous “Forrester Advantage” data service. The initial capture is done by inquiry client service folks. Is there a formal and enforced policy at Forrester that after the inquiry analysts consistently expand the originally captured question with context and additional detail learned during the inquiry? Then there is the additional issue of whether the analysts™ specific advice was captured as well. Does management ensure that *all* analysts are consistently putting in details about the information and advice they give clients?

    I am also a little skeptical that published reports are an effective way to capture knowledge. First, published research represents only a fraction of what lies between the ears of the analyst. Second, reports because of space constraints have to boil down the subject to its essence eliminating much context and nuance. Even though Forrester reports tend to be longer and more detailed than other firms, this is still a constraint you face. For example, you have stated that the Wave you are working on contains only a fraction of the analysts in this market. While you have diligently created a vendor catalog, do all analysts have a similarly detailed catalog or is the published Wave the prime repository? Third, reports are often written for a generic audience, with inquiry encouraged to apply the research report to a client™s specific situation. In some “ many? “ cases, the applied recommendations can be subtly different from the basic recommendations in the published research. How are these subtle differences disseminated between analysts, especially if a replacement analyst comes in after his or her predecessor has already left?

    Is team communication and team research meetings insights consistently captured in the wiki? Or is this an oral tradition? How is this base of information systematically communicated to new analysts?

    Thanks as always for your blog and your wiliness to discuss your research methodology.

    Cheers, -carter j

  3. Carter

    Sorry it took so long to respond –was in a Wave lab. I can only speak to my personal workstyle, within my team. As one would guess, the social computing team experiments as well as regularly uses a variety of tools, we’re having success with a wiki on the topics of social computing, keeping track of team efforts, and even discussion with folks outside of Forrester, collaboration tools are useful.

    Regarding Forrester’s overall use of these tools, I don’t have broad visibility into this, but can put you in touch with research management to learn more.

  4. Jeremiah,
    Be sure to consider both large and small brands as the potential community platform customers. Start-ups are interested in launching communities just as much as the big guys. And, we need a solid platform with a good amount of features, but that needs little bandwidth to maintain. Plus, it has to look just as customized and professional as what the biggies would launch.

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