2014 Readers' Choice Survey: Social Media

Download the full 2014 Social Media report

The results of this list — only in its second year — shows that consumer goods companies are focusing social media technology investments in developing solutions (rather than more developed point solutions), with an eye toward future integration needs. Also, the absence of marketing agencies demonstrates that they may be looking to primary CRM providers for social capabilities. Don Scheibenreif, research vice president, and Jenny Sussin, principal research analyst, both of Gartner, Inc., share their thoughts around vendor selection and capabilities in this developing space.

Can you comment on this list?
Scheibenreif/Sussin: Overall, this list of companies isn’t surprising. Salesforce.com has done a brilliant job of marketing their solutions, particularly riding and perpetuating the Radian6 wave, and packaging its solutions as a part of bigger deals. In addition to these companies, we’d expect to see some point solutions. NetBase joining the ranks speaks less about a point solution, and more about SAP’s marketing of NetBase, which serves as the underlying technology for SAP Social Media Analytics.

Where are — and where should — consumer goods companies focus their investments in this emerging area?
Scheibenreif/Sussin: In the consumer goods space, we see heavy focus in two areas of social media: analytics for market research and social campaign management. Investment in these applications is high, and priority is being put on analytics for market research because companies are seeing return on investment from these efforts. One other area to look into is idea management applications. Companies, like PepsiCo, Heineken and Kimberly-Clark, have seen success crowdsourcing innovative product ideas. Consumer goods companies will achieve a significant amount of their innovation capabilities from crowdsourcing applications (a form of social) over the next several years as consumers share more of their ideas and opinions on social channels.   

How can consumer goods companies leverage insights gleaned from social media interactions and monitoring?
Scheibenreif/Sussin: At Gartner, we believe social media insights can help consumer goods companies better understand the consumer in ways they haven’t been able to before, with less channel noise. Organizations no longer need to rely solely on retail data or traditional consumer research. With social media, they can make adjustments to marketing plans in real time, which allow them to better serve the end consumer and, thus, the retailer who fulfills that demand, especially in online channels.

Gartner recommends you have a clear purpose if you are going to leverage an application, like social analytics or social campaign management. From there, we recommend you talk to a variety of vendors with experience in your category or the consumer goods industry. One of the key ways to build partnerships with retailers is to bring unique consumer insight they can’t get on their own. Leveraging technologies such as social analytics and social campaign management is the critical way to do this.