A comment on my previous post suggested Twitter mentions as a possible measure of vendor market presence. That had in fact occurred to me, but I hadn't bothered to check because I assumed the volume would be too low. But since the topic had been raised, I figured I'd take a peek.
The first two Twitter monitoring sites I looked at, Twitscoop and Twitterment, seemed to confirm my suspicion: of the three most popular vendors, Eloqua had 6 Twitscoop hits and 3 Twitterment hits; Silverpop had 2 on each; and Marketo had 3 on Twitscoop and none on the other. No point in looking further here.
But then I checked Twitstat. In addition to having a slightly less childish name, it seems to either do a more thorough search or look back further in time: for whatever reason, it found 152 hits for Eloqua, 65 for Silverpop, and 133 for Marketo. Much more interesting.
Alas, the numbers dropped down considerably after that, as you can see in the table below. Everything else is in single digits except for two anomalies LoopFuse with 22 mentions and Bulldog Solutions with a whopping 217. Interestingly, both those sites also had exceptionally high blog hit numbers on IceRocket. The root cause is probably the same: one or two active bloggers or Twitter users (which seems to be the accepted term; I guess we can't call them Twits) are enough to skew the figures when volumes are so low. More particularly, LoopFuse gets a lot of attention because some of its founders are closely tied to the open source community. Bulldog Solutions just seems to have a group of employees who are serious into Twitter. In fact, I now know more about their lives than I really care to (although there was nothing indiscreet in the posts, I'm pleased to report).
A couple of side notes:
- the very short length of the messages does make them easy to read, which paradoxically means you can actually gather more information from Twitter than by scanning blog posts, because reading the blog posts takes too much time. Of course, when we're dealing with such tiny volumes, there is no way to generalize from what you read: Twitter is strictly anecdotal evidence, and perhaps even dangerous for that reason.
- there seemed to be several Tweets that were purposely sent for marketing purposes. Nothing wrong with that, and they were quite open about it. Just interesting how quickly some firms have picked up on this. (OK, not so quickly: Twitter has been around since 2006 and very popular for about a year now.)
Still, the bottom line for the purposes of measuring demand generation vendors is still the same as for blogs: too little volume to be a reliable measure of relative market interest.
Twitterment | Ice Rocket | Alexa | Alexa | |
twitter mentions | blog posts | rank | share x 10^7 | |
| Already in Guide: | ||||
| Eloqua | 152 | 286 | 20,234 | 70,700 |
| Silverpop | 65 | 188 | 29,080 | 30,500 |
Marketo | 122 | 229 | 68,088 | 17,000 |
Manticore Technology | 0 | 56 | 213,546 | 6,100 |
Market2Lead | 5 | 5 | 235,244 | 4,800 |
Vtrenz | 8 | 53 | 295,636 | 3,600 |
Marketing Automation: | - | |||
Unica Affinium | 6 | 43 | 126,215 | 8,500 |
Alterian | 5 | 145 | 345,543 | 2,500 |
Aprimo | 6 | 139 | 416,446 | 2,200 |
Neolane | 5 | 64 | 566,977 | 1,690 |
Other Demand Generation: | - | |||
Marketbright | 9 | 167,306 | 5,400 | |
Pardot | 4 | 33 | 211,309 | 3,600 |
Marqui Software | 2 | 19 | 211,767 | 4,400 |
ActiveConversion | 2 | 12 | 257,058 | 3,400 |
Bulldog Solutions | 219 | 43 | 338,337 | 3,200 |
OfficeAutoPilot | 2 | 5 | 509,868 | 2,000 |
Lead Genesys | 1 | 5 | 557,199 | 1,450 |
LoopFuse | 22 | 43 | 734,098 | 1,090 |
eTrigue | 1 | 1,510,207 | 430 | |
PredictiveResponse | 1 | 0 | 2,313,880 | 330 |
FirstWave Technologies | 0 | 11 | 2,872,765 | 170 |
NurtureMyLeads | 0 | 5 | 4,157,304 | 140 |
Customer Portfolios | 0 | 3 | 5,097,525 | 90 |
Conversen | 1 | 0 | 6,062,462 | 70 |
FirstReef | 0 | 0 | 11,688,817 | 10 |
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