Saugatuck Research: Social IT Marketing and Messaging

After conducting a careful examination of websites and public marketing information from ten leading vendors of Social Business IT solutions aimed at internal collaboration, we found that very little was clear from them about what the likely business benefits would be from those solutions. Strategic Perspective 1019MKT examines some current marketing emphases of existing Social Business IT platforms and highlights the difficulties that this nascent industry is having explaining its own value.

What we don’t see is use cases that clearly articulate business benefits. There is very little relevant information about why a prospective buyer would choose any specific Social IT product. As we have previously written, there is very little competitive differentiation in this market, and feature lists do not educate the buyer or make solution or provider selection easier (995MKT, The Value in Social Business IT Addressing: Three Suggestions for Making It Work, 15 December 2011).

This dearth of information is not immediately apparent though. Most of the sites have a number of “features” listed for their software, and several perceived benefits, which even the casual observer can see are not truly valid business improvements. In a market with such little variation between products, feature emphasis cannot really function as a primary decision capability because the vast majority of features are consistent regardless of the vendor.

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