The Wisdom of the Crowd: Honest, Transparent Reviews of Social Listening Tools

User reviews have fundamentally shaken up business. From TripAdvisor and Yelp to Amazon and Twitter, the way that consumers select products and services is now entrenched within the bold transparency of digital reviews.

Billboards, slogans and press conferences have given way to honest, crowd-sourced and (usually) genuine feedback from the real users of different products.

The power of ‘checking the internet’ to verify the merits of a potential purchase is exemplified in HTC’s new advert for their One phone, in which Gary Oldman advises viewers to independently turn to the internet to learn about it.

That’s certainly been the case for a raft of consumer products, as is the case for HTC’s devices, but high-value enterprise deals between businesses have been slower to adapt.

We’ve long triumphed the idea of using uncensored, authentic user opinions to expose the strengths and weaknesses of Brandwatch.

We publicly display all the reviews of our product that we find on our website, regularly showcase a list of unsolicited tweets about us in this widely-shared visualization and also display unedited social data about Brandwatch in real-time in all of our international office reception areas, using Brandwatch Vizia.

However, there are still many organizations that rely on the opinions and subjective reports of expert analysts and research bodies, such as Gartner or IDC, to help advise on recommended purchases. This model has pervaded for decades.

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Whoooshhoosoohhhooshh

 

Do you hear that? That’s the wind of change, and it’s getting stronger.

Helping add energy to this gust is G2 Crowd, a Chicago-based (the windy city) organization aimed at disrupting this dependence upon analyst reports and showing that the user review revolution needn’t be limited to consumer products

The site uses LinkedIn to validate reviews of software, meaning every single one of its 10,000+ reviews are written by genuine users of the technology.

Categorizing and subdividing submissions into different market sections (like social media management or CRM systems) and criteria (like ease of use or sentiment analysis) helps give the reviews added granularity, context and relevance.

Social media monitoring is one such market sector, and G2 Crowd have just released their first report analyzing the vendors within it.

All data showcased in the report is sourced via the site’s transparent  reviews, each compiled from authentic customers of each platform.

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What does the report show?

 

You might have heard us talking about our customer survey results recently, an annual endeavour we take to attempt to understand what our customers think. We summarized the results in a stunning way in this interactive visualization.

We thought we did pretty well in keeping them happy, in general.

Luckily, the data from G2 Crowd testifies this, with the report declaring Brandwatch a high performer and showing that we were higher rated than any other platform.

Here are some our favorite parts of the report’s findings:

• 97% of users rated us 4 or 5 stars

• 92% of our customers would recommend us to peers

• Our support offering was rated at 93%

• We were scored 94% for ease of doing business

• In feature comparison, our social listening capabilities were rated highest, at 95%

• Social measurement and social reporting scored 93% and 91%, respectively

• We had the second highest Klout score of any product, and were identified as having the second largest market presence

• Our Net Promoter Score was higher than any other vendor, at 77

• 100% of reviewers thought our product was going in the right direction

Basically, we cleaned up.

We’d like to give credit to Synthesio and Mention, both of which also performed well.

Both platforms scored very slightly higher than us for ease of use, ease of admin and for ease of setup. All the eases. We were still high, but not number one.

Marrying complex, advanced functionality with accessibility is an ongoing challenge for us, but we really are listening. We’re currently ‘very good’ for ease of use. We want to be exceptional.

Our product team are also completely taking all of this feedback on board, and have some major plans to improve these areas in the coming months. So, thanks for that.

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Customers & other reports

 

We love this movement towards the wisdom of the crowd, and truly feel proud to see our beloved baby adored so much by our customers. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.

It’s not just our customers either. Gleanster named us ‘best’ in three categories and ‘better’ in the other – again for ease of use (we really are working on it!) – in its Social Listening report.

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014 report also identified Brandwatch as a strong performer, again scoring highest in the customers sub-category.

Pleasing our customers is paramount, and we’re glad there are platforms like G2 Crowd, which encourage and expose genuine feedback.

If you have something to say about your experiences with Brandwatch or one of our competitors, you can share it by visiting this page and submitting your review.

 

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