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2016 North American Social Media Monitoring Tools

Product Line Strategy Leadership Award

2016

NORTH AMERICANSOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING TOOLS

PRODUCT LINE STRATEGY LEADERSHIP AWARD

2016

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© Frost & Sullivan 2015 1 “We Accelerate Growth”

Contents

Background and Company Performance ........................................................................ 2

Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 2

Product Line Strength and Customer Impact ............................................................ 2

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 2

Significance of Product Line Strategy ............................................................................ 7

Understanding Product Line Strategy Leadership ............................................................ 7

Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 8

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ....................... 8

Research Methodology .......................................................................................... 8

Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ................................................................................................................... 9

About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 10



Background and Company Performance

Industry Challenges

Frost & Sullivan research indicates how social media is becoming a core consumer and

business-user forum, and more companies now recognize the business value of social media

as a marketing, brand management, and customer service support tool1. Social media gives

additional insight into customers to influence sales, marketing, and business strategies, as

well as gauge effectiveness, threats, and opportunities. The proper use of social media can

also deepen the relationship between a brand or company and the audience.

Social media marketing is not a new idea; most companies of all sizes have social media

accounts. With every post, tweet, photo, like, and comment, a large amount of data is

available as part of the potential roadmap to company success. Frost & Sullivan identifies

an opportunity to gain a complete picture of a customer’s behavior by combining external

and internal data (e.g., sales reports, customer purchase histories, and other tracked

information), as well as maintaining the company’s healthy brand through social media

monitoring. Social media monitoring is a relatively new practice, and the market is still

emerging. The key challenge in this market is ensuring that companies understand that all

insight gathered from social media is actionable, resulting in a high return on investment

(ROI), successful integration with other data sources, and understanding as to how to

satisfy their target audience.

Frost & Sullivan recognizes the Sysomos social intelligence engine which collects data from

blogs, Twitter, social networks, message boards, wikis, and major news sources with

contextual text analytics and sophisticated data-mining technology2. The product line

offers a platform for social media listening to multiple brand-monitoring, giving an

advantage to any company’s social media strategy and turning social insights into

actionable data.

Product Line Strength and Customer Impact

Founded in Toronto, Canada with a home office in San Francisco, California, Sysomos ’

product line has grown from its first two established products—Social Media Analytics

Simplified (MAP) and Heartbeat—to seven products featuring new abilities such as image

monitoring and integration with other social media analytics. Companies can now keep

pace with the newest social media capabilities with Sysomos’ comprehensive product line.

Breadth of the Product Line

The company breached the market with its two flagship products: MAP and Heartbeat. The

market trend of social listening and monitoring paved the way for these two products as

well as the five others in the Sysomos offering:

1 See Frost & Sullivan’s Analyzing Customers’ Social Voices: Companies are Turning to Social Media Analytics to

Gain Customer Insights, (9857-00-41), November 2013 2 See Frost & Sullivan’s Refining Social Media Marketing Strategies: Personalization, Monetization, Responsiveness, and Channel Integration Key, (9857-76), February 2016



MAP: The Sysomos MAP application searches social media conversations. Its text

analytics feature uncovers and deep dives into sentiment, topics, and trends. Its

Tweet Life solution discovers where any tweet started, who spread it, what inspired

that interest, and how many times it was retweeted and shared.3

Heartbeat: Sysomos Heartbeat monitors and measures all relevant online

conversations so companies can track and measure campaigns. It also enables

client companies to publish content across social channels within one platform.4

Expion: A platform companies can use to plan, schedule, and publish any content

from one centralized workspace. Sysomos Expion allows companies to monitor all

brands, influencers, and insights into what is and what is not working for better

decision-making in their social media strategies across the globe.

Optimize: A tool to target and optimize social media and communications outreach

by identifying important conversations and the people having them. Through this

tool, companies can monitor specific users on one easy dashboard and actively

search for more users to add.

Gaze: A tool featuring powerful image recognition technology to bring all images of

a company’s brand to light. Companies proactively manage their brand as well as

engage the originator of the image.

Influence: A tool that allows the easy identification of the key influencers of a

brand, product, or service for companies. Companies gain additional insight such as

reach, what the influencers are saying, and how to best contact them.

Scout [beta]: This tool aggregates all interactions important to the company from

Facebook, presented in a user-friendly dashboard. Companies can compare and

contrast competitors’ reach, and brand performance on other channels.

3 See Frost & Sullivan’s Refining Social Media Marketing Strategies: Personalization, Monetization, Responsiveness,

and Channel Integration Key, (9857-76), February 2016 4 See Frost & Sullivan’s Refining Social Media Marketing Strategies: Personalization, Monetization, Responsiveness,

and Channel Integration Key, (9857-76), February 2016

Source: Sysomos

Sysomos MAP Dashboard

Source: Sysomos



Though each tool has a different purpose, they all revolve around the same idea of turning

insight into action for smarter social media marketing strategies. Frost & Sullivan

identifies the importance of integrating with the different channels to create a 360˚

customer view to have an advantage in a social media strategy and the Sysomos product

line provides that advantage.

A Scalable Product Line with Great Price/Performance Value

Frost & Sullivan research shows that social media has been the fastest growing

communication channel over the last two years5. Approximately 65% of American adults

used social networking sites in 2015, radically changed from 7% in 2005. Companies can

no longer count on organic results from their social media channels, but rather need a

competitive strategy and the tools to monitor while taking market share away from

competitors. In this sense, the social media monitoring tools market will soon be

commoditized as the market matures.

Frost & Sullivan commends Sysomos for recognizing the differences in company needs and

giving its customers a flexible and valuable system to utilize the right tools. Currently, the

company offers each tool individually, the first four (MAP, Heartbeat, Optimize, and

Influence) in Sysomos Everything Together (SET), and is pursuing a deal with all seven at

a reasonable price. SET allows customers and agencies to actualize results from a single,

integrated platform and brings together the richness of Sysomos’ best-in-class product

portfolio to drive relevant and meaningful engagement with their customers. Individual

prices vary from product to product and are based on the licensing requirements, specific

campaign targeting, query-based pricing for listening and monitoring, visual image

quantity for visual analytics, and social connection-based pricing for owned and publishing

brands.

Each purchase includes in-depth training and a dedicated social media specialist who will

optimize and guide the customer to best achieve its social media goals. Innovation to the

product line is based on customer feedback and listening, as Sysomos strives to do things

that others do not, while ensuring that its products work great on their own, and integrate

with one another on an user-friendly interface.

5 See Frost & Sullivan’s Refining Social Media Marketing Strategies: Personalization, Monetization, Responsiveness,

and Channel Integration Key, (9857-76), February 2016



Sysomos’ Current and

Future Growth Strategy

Since entering the market with

its flagship social media

monitoring tools, Sysomos

continues an excellent strategy

to sustain consistent growth.

The company acquired leading

tools such as GazeMetric (for

Sysomos Gaze) and Expion (for

Sysomos Expion) to further its

offering and gain greater

market share (see Sysomos

Expion example left).

The addition of Expion gave

Sysomos added robust

content management and

publishing capabilities to its

data analytics platform.

Additionally, the acquisition

of both Expion and

GazeMetric offered the

company growth into more

countries and the opening of

additional offices in

Singapore and Shanghai.6

With the GazeMetric

acquisition, Sysomos became the first social intelligence platform to expand into visual

listening7 (see Sysomos Gaze example on right above).

Sysomos identifies more opportunities for growth with its partners program, offering

standard resell and value-added partnership contracts. The company offers an intuitive

application program which interfaces on all its products for easy integration into other

technology by partners as a value-added feature. Through partnerships with social media

powerhouses such as Facebook, GooglePlus, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Weibo,

WeChat, and Twitter, Sysomos is kept abreast at the newest innovations to these

platforms and can update its data analytics and monitoring platforms accordingly.

Currently, the company has 55 global partners spanning across Austrailia, New Zealand,

parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. Partners are more often agencies and

consultants and a substantial part of the company’s overall revenue, along with individual

company purchases.

6 See http://www.expion.com/sysomos-acquires-expion/ 7 See https://blog.sysomos.com/2015/09/16/welcome-gazemetrix/

Sysomos Expion Content Discovery

Source: Sysomos

Sysomos Gaze Photo Monitor

Source: Sysomos



The company plans to expand more into Latin America due to the social media revolution

the region is undergoing and the vacant space for outreach. The product line offers

translation in over 186 languages, allowing companies to translate tweets or posts in

other languages about their brand or products to their native language. Sysomos has

users in over 94 countries—approximately 48% of the world8.

Sysomos Growth and Market Presence

Overall, Sysomos has grown considerably since its emergence in the market. The global

company presence includes offices in Toronto, Canada; New York City, New York; London,

England; San Francisco, California; Singapore; Shanghai, China; Raleigh, North Carolina;

Sunnyvale,California; and Fredricton, Canada. Sysomos identifies over 500% revenue

growth since 2012, attributed to the rising value of social analytics as a core business

driver and tool, and the deeper adoption and penetration within both existing and new

customers. Frost & Sullivan forecasts that industries who have not seen adoption will

soon, contributing to the social media monitoring and analytics market’s growth.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to be said through social media about a brand than many companies

realize. With the growing number of channels and users of all ages utilizing these

enhanced communication tools, there needs to be a solid strategy to prove the return on

investment through social media outreach. Sysomos has greatly enhanced its offerings

from two impressive products to seven, covering all aspects of social media listening for

companies with one or multiple brands to monitor, furthering the social media monitoring

tools market growth. With the support of Sysomos’ tools, companies can turn insights into

action and satisfy target audiences.

Because of its strong focus on innovation through social media monitoring tools and

turning insights into action, Sysomos is recognized with Frost & Sullivan’s 2016 North

American Product Line Strategy Leadership award in the Social Media Monitoring Tools

market.

8 See https://blog.sysomos.com/2015/12/18/sysomos-in-2015/



Significance of Product Line Strategy

Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon customers purchasing from your

company, and then making the decision to return time and again. A full, comprehensive

product line that addresses numerous customer needs and preferences is therefore a

critical ingredient to any company’s long-term retention efforts. To achieve these dual

goals (customer value and product line strength), an organization must be best-in-class in

three key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the

competition.

Understanding Product Line Strategy Leadership

As discussed above, driving demand, brand strength, and competitive differentiation all

play a critical role in delivering unique value to customers. This three-fold focus, however,

must ideally be complemented by an equally rigorous focus on building a superior and

comprehensive product line.



Key Benchmarking Criteria

For the Product Line Strategy Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently

evaluated two key factors—Product Line Strength and Customer Impact—according to the

criteria identified below.

Product Line Strength

Criterion 1: Breadth

Criterion 2: Scalability

Criterion 3: Technology Leverage

Criterion 4: Features

Criterion 5: Growth Strategy

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best

Practices Awards

Research Methodology

Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research

methodology represents the analytical

rigor of our research process. It offers a

360-degree-view of industry challenges,

trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of

Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies.

Too often, companies make important

growth decisions based on a narrow

understanding of their environment,

leading to errors of both omission and

commission. Successful growth strategies

are founded on a thorough understanding

of market, technical, economic, financial,

customer, best practices, and demographic

analyses. The integration of these research

disciplines into the 360-degree research

methodology provides an evaluation

platform for benchmarking industry

players and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN

THE CHAOS



Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching,

Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices

Frost & Sullivan Awards follow a 10-step process to evaluate award candidates and assess

their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are

based on close adherence to this process.

STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT

1 Monitor, target, and screen

Identify award recipient candidates from around the globe

Conduct in-depth industry research

Identify emerging sectors Scan multiple geographies

Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all best-practice criteria

2 Perform 360-degree research

Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline

Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners

Assess candidates’ fit with best-practice criteria

Rank all candidates

Matrix positioning all candidates’ performance relative to one another

3

Invite thought leadership in best practices

Perform in-depth examination of all candidates

Confirm best-practice criteria Examine eligibility of all

candidates Identify any information gaps

Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates

4

Initiate research director review

Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles

Brainstorm ranking options Invite multiple perspectives

on candidates’ performance Update candidate profiles

Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper

5

Assemble panel of industry experts

Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders

Share findings Strengthen cases for

candidate eligibility Prioritize candidates

Refined list of prioritized award candidates

6

Conduct global industry review

Build consensus on award candidates’ eligibility

Hold global team meeting to review all candidates

Pressure-test fit with criteria Confirm inclusion of all

eligible candidates

Final list of eligible award candidates, representing success stories worldwide

7 Perform quality check

Develop official award consideration materials

Perform final performance benchmarking activities

Write nominations Perform quality review

High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes

8

Reconnect with panel of industry experts

Finalize the selection of the best-practice award recipient

Review analysis with panel Build consensus Select winner

Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria

9 Communicate recognition

Inform award recipient of award recognition

Present award to the CEO Inspire the organization for

continued success Celebrate the recipient’s

performance

Announcement of award and plan for how recipient can use the award to enhance the brand

10 Take strategic action

Upon licensing, company may share award news with stakeholders and customers

Coordinate media outreach Design a marketing plan Assess award’s role in future

strategic planning

Widespread awareness of recipient’s award status among investors, media personnel, and employees



About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth

and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's

Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined

research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation

of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages almost 50 years of experience in

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