I’m in the process of working on a book on how to effectively and credibly use blogs to do market research and track trends, (to be published by Paramount Market Publishing in 2007) so I was certainly pleased to discover this just released Forrester Research market report, titled: The Forrester Wave. Brand Monitoring.
There’s great stuff in the study comparing features and coverage on key blog monitoring vendors like BuzzMetrics,Umbria, Factiva and several others–but the funny thing is that the report is priced at $995 (a typical market research price for a market study) on the Forrester site; but BuzzMetrics is making it available as a free white paper download here, and telling site visitors that the report is available free, even though it’s a “$349″ value!
So, I don’t want to complain about getting a $995 or $349 report for free….but it does seem a bit odd…it may not help that BuzzMetrics is promoting on its site that “Forrester recently cited Nielsen BuzzMetrics as a Leader in its 2006 Brand Monitoring Wave™ Report. Overall, Forrester “found that the vendor has the strongest strategic vision and currently competes at a scale unmatched by any other competitor.”
I don’t question the objectivity of Forrester, nor its top notch researcher Peter Kim, but having once almost been hired by a major New England-based IT market research firm, and told that part of my compensation when researching and writing these would be based on any report sales I could make to those companies covered in the study (which made me decide that this was an inherent conflict of interest so I did not take the position), I think that given the conflict of interest problems that plagued the brokerage research industry, it doesn’t help the credibility of the research industry to have the firm that did the best in an independent market study be in the position (how did they get in that position?) to be able to offer an expensive report for free.
This is *kind of* a sideline to my recommending the report–it is a detailed, comprehensive and well put together study. I just wish someone would explain why there is no conflict of interest here; or at least, why they would not care about a perceived conflict.
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Hello Robert,
I came across this post while doing some research. Someone else asked me the same question - I asked him to post it on my blog and I responded there as well: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2006/09/forresters_q3_2.html. Forrester has a strict policy on how vendors cite Wave data. Moreover, there is no “pay for play” involved in the evaluation process. Sorry for the delay in responding, but you would have gotten an answer to your question a lot quicker if you had just dropped a quick email or made a call.
My prior comments, which apply to your post as well:
“The brand monitoring wave consists of eight parts - one main overview
document which contains the market overview and side-by-side comparison tool. Then there is a detailed scorecard for each vendor that describes particular strengths and weaknesses of their solution.
Vendors often purchase reprint rights for a period of time, six months I
think. My guess is that they would typically purchase the rights to
their own scorecard and possibly the overview. However, they can’t
redistribute the comparison tool, which is important so clients can
customize the criteria based on their own needs. This is a critical
element of the Wave, which allows a client-side marketer to essentially
shortcut an evaluation process dramatically, because we’ve done all the
heavy research and analysis already that an RFP typically involves.
BTW Cymfony has also made reprints available through their site. I’ve
seen the links there and from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, but not sure exactly
what’s on offer.
So hopefully that clears things up - there is no “pay to play” for
participating in a wave, nor any compensation provided to vendors for
being included. You’ll never see a Wave distributed for free directly
from Forrester.”
Comment by Peter Kim — November 27, 2006 @ 11:27 pm