Sophisticated Technologists

Posted by Marshall Sponder on February 21, 2010 | Link It

Just read Jeremiah Owyang’s Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Broad vs Specialized vs Do It Yourself where he mentions another way to look at purchasing web technology such as listening systems (I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at listening systems such as Radian6, Sysomos, Techrigy, BrandWatch, Biz360, Viralheat, Scout Labs, etc, etc, etc).

Didn’t occur to me to look at Radian6, for example, and say – this platform is the way it is because it’s aimed at a broad market (it has a lot of features and reports – maybe the one you want, maybe not – but it can fit in a lot of organizations) vs. something more specialized that is better at a few things but not really for everyone such as INgage (which I have no experience with – or a solution like HotGrinds.com, which is mostly for hotels and automotive businesses).

I think it’s worth categorizing the solutions I’ve talked about so far that way, as well as in the more technical comparisons between their features.

Here’s the grid that was presented in Jeremiah Owyang’s post.

Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Broad vs Specialized vs Do It Yourself

	What it is	Examples	Benefits	Downsides
Broad	Technology or service vendors that serve a variety of industries without a specific focus,	Buzzmetrics, Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Cymfony offer a range of services that can be use with any variety of industries. On the community platform side, Jive, Telligent, Mzinga, Awareness, Liveworld* can meet the needs of many enterprises.	Wide deployment ensures that the scope can spread to a large set of sites to crawl. In most cases, these companies can scale, and have a broad base of clients to learn from.	Configuration and specialization for your particular market may require setup costs and configuration efforts. While features may go wide –not all will be needed for your specific customer socialgraphic behaviors and industry usage.
Specialized	Technology or service vendors that offer vertical (or industry) specific skills, honed in on a unique market need.	In the brand monitoring space, Revinate offers specific brand monitoring for the hospitality industry, and Kickapps, Pluck, and Cisco EOS, offer solutions for the media vertical and recently rebranded INgage networks has long history of serving Government –although they are moving to the broad category.	Faster deployment and features and deployments are pre-customized for deployment. Experienced teams that truly get the nuances of your particular industry.	Vendors may not be able to go broader, feature set may become limited when it comes to scaling. Sometimes specialization increases costs of goods and services.
Do It Yourself (DIY)	Rather than rely on vendors, many companies prefer to build their own social media tools and processes and integrate with legacy CMS and WMS systems.	A variety of brands have bolted on social features to their corporate website using BBS systems, WordPress, or Drupal like platforms with extensive customization. Or, developers that build custom installations on .net, jsp, php, and other software languages and frameworks.	Reduced up front cost and custom tailored integration with existing systems. A controlled environment not dependent on the product roadmaps of other SaaS companies and increased security measures.	Constant rejiggering of features as the outside technology space innovates quickly. Often the soft costs and internal maintaince isn’t always accounted for up front, and innovating new features are often not native to corporations.