For: Marketing

Leadership
Professionals

The Forrester Wave: Social Depth

Platforms, Q3 2013
by Kim Celestre and Zachary Reiss-Davis, July 9, 2013

Key Takeaways
Marketers Seek Better Ways To Tell Their Products Story
Marketers need to provide buyers with dynamic, customer-centric destinations
that encourage user-generated content and facilitate interactions rather than with
static, company-centric web pages. Social depth platforms meet this need by helping
companies deploy online communities and related social capabilities on their websites
and microsites.
Social Depth And Community Platform Vendors Provide Features That
Add Depth
Community platform and social marketing technology vendors provide features that
help marketers launch and moderate online discussions, import and publish usergenerated content, and manage and track community actions.
Customization, Integrations, And Analytics Are The Key Differentiators
Community platform features such as discussion boards, ratings and reviews, and forums
are now table stakes, and this has led vendors to seek new ways to differentiate. The
vendors that led this Wave stand out in three areas crucial to marketers: customization
of features, integrations with other marketing platforms, and robust analytics.

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com

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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

We Evaluate Nine Community And Social Depth Marketing Technology Providers That
Help Turn A Brands Website Into A Social Hub
by Kim Celestre and Zachary Reiss-Davis
with David Truog and Sarah Takvorian

Why Read This Report

In Forresters 57-criteria evaluation of social depth platforms (SDPs), we identified the nine most
significant vendors Acquia, Bazaarvoice, Get Satisfaction, Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, Livefyre,
Mzinga, Pluck, and Telligent Systems in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This
report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where the vendors stand in
relation to each other; it is designed to help marketing professionals select the right technology partner to
manage their social activities on their own branded website, microsite, or online community.

Table Of Contents

Notes & Resources

2 Marketers Seek Better Ways To Tell Their

Product Story Online

Forrester conducted product evaluations

with nine vendor companies in Q2 2013:
Acquia, Bazaarvoice, Get Satisfaction, Jive,
Lithium Technologies, Livefyre, Mzinga,
Pluck, and Telligent Systems.

Social Depth Platforms Catalyze Activity That

Adds Depth To A Brands Story
3 What We Required From Vendors To Qualify
For This Evaluation
Our Evaluation Considered Current Offering,
Strategy, And Market Presence
5 SDP Vendors Strive To Differentiate In A
Mature Market
8 Vendor Profiles

Related Research Documents

Align Your B2B Community Marketing With
Your Customers Life Cycle
April 22, 2013
The ROI Of Owner Communities
February 14, 2013
Mix Art And Science For Marketing Success
January 14, 2013

Leaders
Strong Performers
Contenders
11 Supplemental Material

CLICK: A Design Framework For Online B2B

Communities
August 6, 2012

2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar,
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For Marketing Leadership Professionals

The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

marketers seek Better ways to tell their product story online

Marketers have invested significant budget and resources to make their websites content-rich
destinations that effectively tell stories about their brands, products, and offerings. And with the
proliferation of social media, marketers strive to incorporate social features that help transform their
static, company-centric websites into dynamic, customer-centric destinations that 1) encourage
user-generated content, and 2) facilitate interactions between their companys brand and potential
customers. This is because:

The Internet is the No. 1 destination for exploration. When exploring a product or service,

more than half of online consumers who have made a recent purchase use the Internet as a
primary research tool.1 During this process, these individuals often wind up on a brands website
seeking deeper content to help them make purchase decisions. Their secondary research tool is
the actual retail store or a sales rep. So websites that are optimized for exploration will ultimately
influence an online or in-person purchase.

Social activity attracts site visitors. Marketers find that having an active online community

makes their sites more likely to rank high in search engine results pages. So the more social
activity on a brands site, the more individuals will discover the brand through online searches.
And by moving social activity into domains that they control, marketers can drive more traffic
to their brands home page.

User-generated content favorably influences buying behavior. Ratings, reviews, comments,

and other content from users rather than just your brand strongly influence buying
behavior. In fact, 50% of individuals prefer to buy products or services from websites that allow
customers to post ratings and reviews.2 Because big consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands
and retailers have figured this out, most incorporate ratings and reviews directly into their own
branded web pages or import them from external review sites and companies from other
industries, including business-to-business (B2B) companies, are increasingly investigating how
to use ratings and reviews to influence purchases.

Social Depth Platforms Catalyze Activity That Adds Depth To A Brands Story
Vendors have evolved their offerings from basic discussion forum tools to robust online community
platforms that enable up to millions of users to interact, create content, and engage with a brand
on its own community website. Some marketers have taken this one step further by incorporating
standalone community widgets and social applications into their brands home pages and product
pages. Forrester now refers to these community and social technologies as social depth platforms:
Social depth platforms are technologies that add social content and experiences to marketing sites.

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Social depth platforms allow marketers to:

Launch and moderate online discussions. Marketers have primarily deployed social depth

platforms to provide online venues where their customers can ask questions, seek support, and
share their experiences of the brands products and services. But increasingly, marketers seek
ways to expose these discussions to prospective buyers, too, who visit their website to explore
and gather information to inform a future purchase decision. Social depth platforms provide
both private (i.e., gated) communities and the ability to publish community content on the
home page and product page(s).

Import and publish user-generated content. In addition to the vendors owned content,

prospective buyers seek out content from peers when visiting a brands web pages. Social depth
platforms facilitate the process of importing user-generated content from third-party social
networks (e.g., Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter) and from the brands own online community.
This content can be viewed through real-time streams and curation on the brands web pages,
turning the website into a public social hub. SDPs also let marketers incorporate user-generated
comments, ratings, and reviews directly on the brands product and community pages.

Manage and track community actions. SDPs provide administrative consoles that allow

marketers and community managers to set permissions, moderate actions, and analyze
user activity. The platforms also generate standard and custom reports and dashboards that
marketers can use to present the communitys performance to internal stakeholders.

The SDP space is rapidly evolving as marketers seek to consolidate multiple technology platforms
that overlap in features and functionality and therefore drain internal resources. In response to
this need for an end-to-end solution, traditional online community vendors have extended their
platform capabilities by snapping up other vendors, integrating with marketing systems, and
partnering with technology vendors.3 Other user-generated content platform providers are also
seeking ways to extend their platforms by adding more community-like features to their offerings.
What does this mean to marketers? These platforms will continue to become more robust and
integrated, eventually eliminating the need for multiple, disparate technologies.
What We Required From Vendors To Qualify For This Evaluation
To assess the state of the social depth platform market and see how the vendors stack up against
each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top social depth platform vendors
(see Figure 1).
Forrester included nine vendors in the assessment: Acquia, Bazaarvoice, Get Satisfaction, Jive,
Lithium Technologies, Livefyre, Mzinga, Pluck, and Telligent Systems. These vendors were selected
for their ability to provide:

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Externally facing social features to a brands owned website. We included in this evaluation
only vendors with active customers that currently use the platform to deploy externally facing
communities. Vendors must also have the ability to add social features such as blogs, social
network feeds, and ratings and reviews to the brands home and product pages.

A platform that can be integrated with other marketing systems. We also required that the
vendors platform have the ability to be integrated with at least one marketing platform (e.g.,
marketing automation, customer relationship management system, or analytics platform).

Large deployments with big brands. We required that vendors have at least 10 customers with
known business-to-consumer (B2C) and/or B2B brands that have deployed communities with
more than 200,000 members or users. At least 15% of each vendors customers must have over
$1 billion in revenue.

Strong market presence. We included vendors that have at least 100 active, named accounts.

We also included vendors that Forrester clients have considered for implementing social depth
capabilities on their own brands websites.

Figure 1 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria

Product version
evaluated

Version
release date

Vendor

Product evaluated

Acquia

Drupal Commons

3.2

April 2013

Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice Conversations

NA

April 2013

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction

NA

April 2013

Jive Software

Jive

Jive 7

April 2013

Lithium Technologies

Lithium Social Customer Experience Platform

Spring 2013

April 2013

Livefyre

StreamHub

NA

April 2013

Mzinga

OmniSocial Engaged

NA

April 2013

Pluck

Pluck

5.4

April 2013

Telligent Systems

Telligent Community

7.5

April 2013

Vendor selection criteria

The vendor offers the ability to add external-facing social features to the website.
The vendor has the capacity to integrate with at least one marketing platform.
The vendor has at least 15% of customers with over $1 billion in revenue and at least 10 customers with
communities of more than 200,000 members or users.
The vendor has a minimum of 100 active, named accounts.
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

Our Evaluation Considered Current Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence

After examining past research and user need assessments and interviewing industry experts and
vendors, we developed a comprehensive set of 57 evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against
these criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:

Current offering. We evaluated each vendors capabilities to help marketers add social and

community features to their brands owned web properties. We assessed how each vendor
performed across the entire range of social depth platform tasks. We studied how many SDP
features each platform can provide and how well they perform those functions.

Strategy. We examined the strength, experience, and vision of each companys executive team

and what professional services and strategic services it offers and collected information on client
satisfaction. We also assessed each vendors product development road map and how the vendor
is evolving its platform to better connect digital, social, and mobile channels.

Market presence. Last, we examined each vendors overall size and marketing position based on
the number and size of its clients and deployments, 2012 revenue, existing partnerships, global
presence, and customer retention.

sdp vendors strive to differentiate in a mature market

The evaluation uncovered a market in which (see Figure 2):

Lithium Technologies, Jive, Bazaarvoice, and Acquia are Leaders. Lithium Technologies

maintains its position as a Leader due to a combination of marketer-friendly admin console

and community features, its social marketing thought leadership, and its breadth of marketing
platform integrations, all of which provide marketers with a cohesive end-to-end solution.4
Jive continues to maintain its leadership position with its robust set of community platform
features, strong services offerings, and healthy financials. Bazaarvoice is also a Leader due to the
platforms strong ratings and reviews capabilities and its usability and administrative features,
but it lacks basic community features that the other SRP providers offer. Acquia provides
marketers with a large ecosystem of application programming interfaces (APIs) and widgets
that provide many options for easy customization of a community or website. In Forrester
interviews, customers praised all of these vendors for the administrative features and ease of use
of their platforms. Three out of four of our Leaders offer above-average analytics features that
them apart from other vendors in this evaluation.

Telligent Systems, Get Satisfaction, and Pluck offer competitive options. Get Satisfaction,

Pluck, and Telligent Systems all hold positions in the Strong Performer category. All vendors
in this category have solid leadership teams, healthy customer ecosystems, and extensive
services offerings. However, usability and integration capabilities vary widely. Two vendors

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offer multiple out-of-the-box plug-ins for all types of marketing platform integrations, while
the third primarily provides integrations through professional services. Vendors also differ on
their industry focus. For example, one vendor focuses primarily on large B2C retailers, but
others focus on the B2B high technology segment. Marketers must establish clear priorities and
objectives for their social depth marketing strategy to select the best-fit vendor in the Strong
Performer category.

Livefyre and Mzinga are Contenders. Livefyre and Mzinga offer very different platforms that

each focus on specific SDP features. Livefyre provides real-time, user-generated content streams
and comments that can be plugged into a brands website but has essentially no traditional
online community platform features such as discussion forums or basic content search. Mzinga
provides basic community features that can be implemented on both private communities and
on a brands website but lacks the advanced features that other community platforms in the SDP
space provide, such as sharing, rich media, and mobile. Marketers who seek a quick, lightweight
community platform may prefer Mzinga over other providers. Marketers who need no more
than the minimal set of discussion features and have customers that create a high volume of
user-generated content online may turn to Livefyre, which provides user-generated content
(UGC) streams and curation in real time.

This evaluation of the social depth platform market is intended to be a starting point only. We
encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their
individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.

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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

Figure 2 Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 13

Risky
Bets

Contenders

Strong
Performers

Leaders

Strong
Lithium
Technologies

Current
offering

Livefyre

the Forrester Wave tool

for more detailed product

Acquia
Telligent Systems

Go online to download

Jive
Software
Bazaarvoice

evaluations, feature
comparisons, and
customizable rankings.

Get Satisfaction
Pluck

Mzinga

Market presence
Weak
Weak

Strategy

Strong
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Forresters
Weighting

Acquia

Bazaarvoice

Get Satisfaction

Jive Software

Lithium Technologies

Livefyre

Mzinga

Pluck

Telligent Systems

Figure 2 Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 13 (Cont.)

CURRENT OFFERING
Platform
Features
Integration
Usability
Services
Pricing

50%
20%
25%
25%
15%
15%
0%

3.51
3.15
2.66
4.65
4.50
2.50
0.00

3.32
4.00
2.88
1.95
5.00
3.75
0.00

2.83
3.15
2.78
1.95
4.00
2.75
0.00

3.62
3.60
3.95
2.85
3.50
4.50
0.00

3.92
4.65
3.67
3.65
3.50
4.25
0.00

2.49
2.90
2.82
1.20
3.50
2.50
0.00

2.05
1.85
1.80
1.90
1.50
3.50
0.00

2.58
2.45
3.57
2.25
1.00
3.25
0.00

3.43
4.15
4.15
3.10
2.50
2.75
0.00

STRATEGY
Leadership
Other staff

50%
80%
20%

3.52
3.40
4.00

3.88
3.60
5.00

2.92
3.40
1.00

4.44
4.30
5.00

4.66
4.70
4.50

2.54
2.80
1.50

2.30
2.50
1.50

2.74
3.30
0.50

3.38
3.60
2.50

MARKET PRESENCE
Financial strength
Customers

0%
50%
50%

3.10
2.75
3.45

4.45
4.75
4.15

2.83
2.00
3.65

3.75
4.50
3.00

3.10
2.50
3.70

2.55
2.00
3.10

1.43
1.00
1.85

4.23
4.25
4.20

2.30
1.00
3.60

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Vendor Profiles
Leaders

Lithium Technologies enhances its social depth offerings, leaving others in the dust. Lithium
continues to make its vision of providing the one social platform a reality for marketers
through its acquisition of Social Dynamx in 2012 and continued enhancements to admin
features and customizable community capabilities. Key differentiators include its ability to
facilitate crowdsourcing of user-generated content (i.e., Tribal Knowledge) and its advanced
search engine optimization (SEO) and analytics platform, to name a few. Customers find the
Lithium community platform to be marketer-friendly and intuitive, with lots of out-of-thebox features such as influencer identification and gamification. Customers also praise Lithium
for being a true partner and give the vendor high marks for its strategic, professional, and
management services.

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Jive leverages its expertise in employee collaboration communities. Jive has increased its

focus on externally facing communities and applied its collaboration expertise to provide
marketers with a high-quality solution. Existing customers who have used Jive for internal
collaboration also find Jive attractive for externally facing communities, since it provides them
with a 360-degree view of activity. Jive is also notable for its out-of-the-box analytics capabilities,
which allow a marketer to drill down and slice and dice the data. Jives main strengths are
the platforms customizable administration features, using its drag-and-drop functionality;
its collaboration features (enhanced by Innovation Jam templates, available through the Jive
Application Marketplace); content search options; and out-of-the-box gamification. To round
out its offering, Jive provides extensive professional services and account management.

Bazaarvoice continues to improve and evolve its ratings and reviews platform. Bazaarvoice is

widely known for its ratings and reviews platform, which has been deployed by many big brands
with large product catalogs. The vendor continues to extend its platform as it pursues its vision
of the Bazaarvoice Shopper Network, which connects 400 million monthly unique customers
that share feedback on tens of millions of products on a single network. It also is focusing on its
campaigns offering, which is still gaining traction among its customers. In addition to ratings
and reviews, Bazaarvoices top strengths are marketer-friendly administration tools, robust
analytics, and mobile capabilities. Customers praise Bazaarvoice for its strategic guidance and
dedicated employees.

Acquia provides marketers with a flexible and customizable community platform. Drupals

free Drupal Commons platform has gained rapid adoption among companies that appreciate
the flexibility of the platform to meet marketers specific needs. One of Acquias primary
strengths is its large and active developer ecosystem, which includes comprehensive sets of
software development kits (SDKs), APIs, and about 2,000 Drupal modules that allow a marketer
to easily customize a community or the social elements of a site. Acquia provides the best
integration options of all the vendors we evaluated. Customers touted Acquia Drupal Commons
for its flexibility, ease of use, and high return on investment. Marketers who are comfortable
deploying a free open source platform and choosing from thousands of modules will benefit
from the unique benefits of Acquia Drupal Commons.

Strong Performers

Telligent Systems provides robust platform capabilities and community features. We

found that Telligent offers marketers a comprehensive community feature set. The platforms
strengths include support for various rich media formats, customizable search options, and
advanced mobile features. In addition, Telligent offers a large development ecosystem, including
Widget Studio and Telligent Marketplace, which includes dozens of applications that can be
customized by marketers. Telligents customers give it high marks for its professional services
offerings but are disappointed with the platforms overall usability and deployment for complex

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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

implementations. We found that Telligents ability to launch a lightweight community in 60

seconds is a nice feature for marketers who require very short lead times to pilot or deploy a
simple community. Telligent also provides internal collaboration communities and tight support
for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office documents.

Get Satisfaction offers an intuitive, lightweight community platform. Customers are very

appreciative of Get Satisfactions easy-to-use community platform, which offers exceptional

search engine optimization and data authenticity options. Notable features include its out-of-thebox collaboration, gamification, and advanced mobile features, including responsive design. Get
Satisfaction falls short on integration and generally offers fewer marketing platform integrations
than other vendors in this class. Get Satisfaction customers also noted that integration was an
area for improvement. Overall, Get Satisfaction offers a solid, lightweight, marketer-friendly
platform that is well suited for support, peer-to-peer, and collaboration communities.

Pluck provides a customizable community platform but has room for improvement.

Demand Medias Pluck provides marketers with a customizable platform that is supported
by a robust application ecosystem that includes approximately 500 modules. Its strengths are
its discussion forums, ratings and reviews features, and standalone social applications. Pluck
has a clear and focused vision for integrated customer interactions that span multiple online
and offline channels, combined with a detailed product road map that reflects the vision. But
according to customers, Pluck must practice what it preaches: Unfortunately, customers feel
that Pluck falls significantly short on ease of use and deployment. Some basic features, such as
sharing and notifications, are difficult to implement.

Contenders

Livefyre is a promising new entrant with a unique community vision. With its first enterprise
clients on board in 2011, Livefyre is a young company with ambitious goals. The vendor is
rapidly evolving its real-time content curation (initially deployed with big media brands) into
a community platform that facilitates the process of transforming brand sites into social hubs.
Livefyres key differentiator and greatest strength is the platforms real-time capabilities. The
platform also offers intuitive administration features and strong content authentication options.
During platform demos, we found that Livefyres rich media and website capabilities were
superior, compared with other vendors. The vendor receives high customer satisfaction scores,
but customers feel there are still kinks in platform deployment. At the time of this evaluation,
Livefyre did not yet offer any discussion forum capabilities, and its ratings and reviews features
were minimal.

Mzinga lags behind the competition but plans significant product improvements. Mzingas
platform and features have not kept up with the competition, and this was obvious during
our evaluation. Mzinga offers a basic, lightweight platform with solid data management and

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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

authenticity features. Its other strengths include its breadth of international support and
professional services. Customers felt that some table stakes features were difficult to deploy
with the Mzinga platform. And in our evaluation, we found that basic features such as sharing,
search, and language translation were subpar. On the other hand, Mzinga has significant
product improvements in its road map. The question is whether the vendor will be able to
implement the improvements fast enough to meet marketers needs.
Supplemental Material
Online Resource
The online version of Figure 2 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings.
Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave
Forrester used a combination of three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each
solution:

Vendor surveys. Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation
criteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where
necessary to gather details of vendor qualifications.

Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their products functionality. We

used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendors product capabilities.

Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also
conducted reference calls with three of each vendors current customers.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated
in this market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose these
vendors based on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate
vendors that have limited customer references and products that dont fit the scope of our evaluation.
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop
the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria, we
gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires,
demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review,
and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.

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The Forrester Wave: Social Depth Platforms, Q3 2013

We set default weightings to reflect our analysis of the needs of large user companies and/or
other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document and then score the vendors based
on a clearly defined scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we
encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based
tool. The final scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering,
strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product
capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every
Forrester Wave follows, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-wavemethodology.html.
Integrity Policy
All of Forresters research, including Waves, is conducted according to our Integrity Policy. For more
information, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.
Endnotes
For more information on research for product purchases, see the January 14, 2013, Mix Art And Science
For Marketing Success report.

In fact, 50% of US online adults who have used customer ratings/reviews indicated they agree with the
statement, I prefer to buy products/services from websites that allow customers to post ratings/reviews.
Source: North American Technographics Retail Online Benchmark Recontact Survey Q3 2012 (US).

Social depth platform vendors have significantly extended their platforms in the past two years to achieve
their goal(s) of providing an end-to-end solution for customers. For example, in 2011, Lithium acquired
social listening platform vendor Scout Labs, and in 2012, it acquired social relationship platform vendor
Social Dynamx. In April 2013, Jive announced its acquisition of analytics platform vendor Clara (analytics)
and integration platform vendor StreamOnce. In 2012, Bazaarvoice acquired reviews platform vendor
PowerReviews.

To compare vendors performances with a past related Wave evaluation, see the November 1, 2010, The
Forrester Wave: Community Platforms, Q4 2010 report.

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