Northern Light Launches Research Portal to Track IT Analysts' Opinions through their Social Media Postings

BOSTON, Dec. 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com) today launched Listen from Northern Light, a research portal that offers a single point of access to 1.5 million social media posts from over 2,000 analysts at more than 200 information technology (IT) industry research firms such as Forrester and IDC. By incorporating analysts' blogs and tweets into a single portal, Northern Light enables IT analyst relations professionals, competitive intelligence professionals, product managers, and marketing communications managers to research and track IT analysts' coverage of companies, technologies, and industry developments through social media, where the coverage first appears.

IT analysts often use social media, such as blogs and tweets, to publish their opinions months before they cover the same topics in their reports. If a company waits for an analyst report to be formally published, it will experience a significant blind spot or lag in knowing what analysts are saying about it and its competitors. Listen from Northern Light gives the earliest look into analyst opinions and exposes users to the broadest range of applicable analysts. Most companies only subscribe to reports published by a few of the more than 200 firms that Northern Light tracks, so this  portal makes visible what the analysts they don't subscribe to are saying, as well. 

Users can search IT analysts' blogs and tweets, and can easily set up alerts to monitor any company or topic. In addition, the new Listen from Northern Light search portal contains Northern Light Business News, which has 40,000 news articles per day from 5,000 business-focused sources; a collection of IT industry white papers from 600 IT product and services companies; and a calendar of IT analyst events. The events calendar includes information about more than 1,000 conferences, webinars and podcasts planned for the next year by IT industry research firms. Listings include the event date, location, sponsor, title, focus area, contact information, and a link to the relevant website.

All of the content in the Listen from Northern Light portal is linked from the search results; a researcher can click the link to see the full posting on the website of the originating analyst firm or publisher. The portal also contains Northern Light MI Analyst™ text analytics, which automatically analyzes documents found in search results. MI Analyst can analyze documents using IT industry-specific concepts and concept categories including IT Technologies and IT Markets as well as general business facets such as Company Names, Corporate Strategies, and Product Marketing Strategies.

"Because industry analysts are such influential thought and opinion leaders in the IT sector, it is critical that companies with a vested interest in IT markets, products and trends have a means to quickly discern analysts' publicly-available views on a wide range of topics," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "IT analysts can strongly influence which products are purchased and which ones are not, so it is mission-critical for IT products and services companies to have a substantial amount of published content from the analysts available to them. In addition, our new portal integrates analysts' insights with other Web-based news and industry content to create a single, complete, and very affordable research tool."

Listen from Northern Light is available for immediate subscription. Access can be licensed on an annual basis, starting with a minimum of one seat and increasing in graduated layers, up to an enterprise-wide license.

For organizations that need additional content sets and customization, Northern Light offers its SinglePoint™ Strategic Research Portals. SinglePoint can be tailored to the look and feel of the client organization; can integrate diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence; and can selectively populate or extract information from Microsoft SharePoint sites or other enterprise content repositories.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996.  Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 100 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique content aggregation partnerships with more than 150 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, and, along with Lockheed Martin, is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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Sheri Larsen                                        
Northern Light Group LLC                  
(617) 674-2074 ext 6                          
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Domeshek Strategic Communications
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SOURCE Northern Light Group LLC