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

Jeremiah,
Would you be sharing on your blog the final shortlisted vendors that get into the report?

Anyways – have a good time doing this.

best,
/a

Yes, that’s usually public info, see for example this public summary of this recent report:

“CERTPOINT Systems, Cornerstone OnDemand, GeoLearning, Learn.com, Mzinga, Oracle Learning Management (OLM), Oracle PeopleSoft, OutStart, Plateau Systems, Saba, SAP, and SumTotal Systems.”

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,37146,00.html

thanks. I understand it’s public *after* the report is published

best,

[...] Why analysts matter – “I get asked daily in one medium or another who to buy” Posted on July 4, 2008 by sagecircle Some analyst relations (AR) managers are lucky in that their executives really get the analysts and their impact on the vendor’s leads and sales deals. Alas, not all AR professionals are so lucky. However, there is a resource to use to educate* executives about the impact of the analysts – the analysts’ own words. For example, here is a throwaway line by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang in Starting the Forrester Wave: White Label Social Networks and Community Platforms: [...]

Thanks for sharing behind the scene info on how you do manage the analyst work at Forrester. It’s really interesting and I hope you can share more and more to make your work more and more collaborative and iterative.
But since you’re making this work for Fortune 500 (5000?) business, is there any hope reading your opinion about white label social networks and community platform? Sure it would be a great help for entrepreneurs willing to connect with their customers.

Note: Do you read the trackback from Carter Lusher, he extracted an important sentence, thanks Carter for reading so carefully.

Romain, My research is somewhat collaborative. Well, it certainly is internally, there are teams that work together to create each report.

If you’ve watched carefully, there’s a reason I ask so many questions on my blog, make lists, and allow for feedback –I’m already doing collaboration.

Yes, it’s Fortune 5,000, not just Fortune 500. The good news is you can purchase the report (any report) on the website for a few hundred dollars. Anytime I mention buying something, I also mention that if for some reason you’re not satisfied, we’ve a money back guarantee. I feel so good about saying that, as I know it means customers will be satisfied.

Thanks Jeremiah. I and other AR professionals appreciate your candor and openess about how you conduct research and what you are working on. Keep up the good work.

A comment on “money back guarantee”. Forrester is the only analyst that I know of — and SageCircle tracks many firms — that offers a formal “money back guarantee.” This was initiated in early 2005 about the time of the Gartner acquisition of META Group, so in part it’s a bit of marketing.

Regardless, Forrester deserves kudos for standing behind its products and offering to return money if the client feels that the research was not worth cost.

Thanks Jeremiah for this posting, I’m one of your regular readers but with all my recent traveling I wasn’t able to keep up, so this reminder is great. At http://www.rsitez.com, we missed the first call for submitting our details for your vendor catalog but I’m going to send you all our information. I hope we are not so late in the process to be analyzed by you and your team. In any case, we are looking forward to see the results of your report, it’s clear it will define this new industry.

Luis Carbajo
VP Business Development
rSitez, Inc
Create your own social network within minutes!

Luis

Please email sglass at forrester.com and CC me. We’ll send you the sheet.

[...] point was highlighted by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang in Starting the Forrester Wave: White Label Social Networks and Community Platforms about some research he is working [...]

[...] July, 2008: I am now conducting a Forrester Wave report to find out which one of these vendors will be best suited for Fortune 5000 in…. [...]

[...] I embark on this Forrester Wave Report for Community Platforms, I’m just reminded of what the experience was like on the other side of the table. So if [...]

A belated comment – Consider the value of linking social networking solutions, such as integrating IBM Lotus Connections, a social networking solution designed for the enterprise, with external social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Skype. This following site provides a practical example and “how to” http://www.lbenitez.com/2008/08/how-to-integrate-lotus-connections-with.html

[...] 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 [...]

[...] to filter out which vendors would be appropriate for the Wave report. I made a few public calls on my blog, twitter, indicating my intent as a result over 50 vendors submitted. We generally do not [...]

[...] 1: Starting the Wave Part 2: Data Collection Process Part 3: The Analysis Process Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the [...]

[...] 4, 2008          Part 1: Starting the Wave August 22, 2008   Part 2: Data Collection Process October 24, 2008 Part 3: The Analysis Process [...]

[...] About the Wave: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/07/04/starting-the-forrester-wave-white-label-social-network... [...]