Forrester Report: Vendor Product Catalog of Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer

A few months ago, I put a call out to the industry to submit to this catalog of the Community Platform space (also known as the White Label Social Network space), my interest in this space grew from a list I started over a year ago on my blog even before I was an analyst covering this space. The list continues to grow, as commodity software is fueled by market demand for brands to create their own hosted communities.

Forrester Report: Announcing Vendor Product Catalog of Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer (part 1/2)
This report is the first of two, If you’re a client, you probably have access to the report, or you can purchase it on the site, we stand by our work and offer a money back guarantee if you’re not completely satisfied.

This Vendor Product Catalog which we’re launching today is more or less the “yellow pages” of the space, but unlike my generic list on my blog, the companies have been vetted and important information has been added such as:

Enterprise focus (percent of clients with more than 1000 employees)

SMB focus (percent of clients with less than 1000 employees)

Categorization of their business model (Breakdown of Hardware, Hosted Web Service, Services, Software, Support)

Top three industries the vendor is involved with

Focus on external/vs internal community deployment (customer/employee)

Brands should use this report to:
You should use this report to help narrow down specific needs and questions you have given this is such a large industry, these key attributes will help you filter.

In the spirit of Social Computing, this report has rating and comment features, this way clients can rate and rank their experience with the vendors, much in the way CNET or Amazon.com does for consumer products. So if you’ve used these vendors leave a comment and rank the experience.

There were almost 50 products submitted to this Vendor Product Catalog which is pretty amazing considering how young the market is. The data has helped us to select the vendors for my next report:

Vendors should use this report to:
If you didn’t initially submit to this catalog but feel you should be on it, you can submit their information online here and selecting ‘Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer’ from the VPC topic drop down menu.

Underway: Wave Report on Community Platforms (part 2)
I recently announced my intent to complete a Forrester Wave report which will focus on the nine firms best suited for Fortune 5000 interactive marketers. This is currently underway. I’m gathering market requirements from clients and analysts to create a detailed and thorough scorecard which will be completed during in depth meetings with each of the nine final vendors. In order to keep the process simple, I won’t be disclosing who the nine vendors are until the report goes live in October. You can learn more about this and other Wave reports on the Forrester site.

In addition to thanking all the vendors who submitted, I’d like to recognize Sarah Glass who has been instrumental in getting this catalog done. Although you can’t often see, behind the scenes, there is a large research group here that supports the analysts I’m grateful.