Category: 4. Align – AR adaptation

Alignment is the adaptation and control stage of the IDEAL model. It supports the adaptation of communication to meet the changing information needs of analysts, in particular by selecting use cases and language that are most engaging.

Influence is not a zero-sum game so analyst influence is not necessarily diminished by the rise of bloggers

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgA common thread in blog postings is that because bloggers are becoming more influential, analysts have to becoming less influential. Also, not a week goes by where we hear that some vendor executives – who often loathe the communications and tech industry analysts – have said that analysts and AR are less relevant due to social media. The common underlying idea is that influence must be a zero-sum game where there is a finite and fixed amount of influence in the universe. If one group increases their influence then other influencers have to see their influence decrease. Nonsense. 

The amount of influence is not fixed, but can grow and morph over time as we pointed out in the SageCircle’s Fog of Influence. For instance, the […]

Social media inputs need to be added to analyst opinion monitoring programs

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgAnalyst opinion monitoring is a critical AR task because it contributes to AR planning, rapid response to sales impact, relationship management, message management, internal politics, and overall metrics programs. In the past, savvy AR means focused on the spoken word – using the SageCircle spoken word audit technique – in addition to the usual written word tracking, typically press quotes and written research. The 21st century raises the bar for what is required to be best-in-class savvy because AR now has to track analyst opinion as expressed in social media.

At this point in time, the analyst opinion monitoring program needs to add analyst podcasts, analyst Twitter streams, analyst blogs and […]

SageCircle Survey — The tech industry analysts on Twitter

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgTwitter is an interesting example of micro-blogging, i.e., broadcasting very short messages to a set of “followers.” Tweets can be very personal and trivial in nature (e.g., what the person is having for lunch) or can be used for business purposes (e.g., snap polls). In Adding Twitter or other micro blogging tools to the AR tool box, we discussed some potential ways that Twitter might be used by analyst relations (AR) professionals to interact with the industry analysts. That post led to some interesting comments on the blog post, e-mails, tweets, Twitter DMs (aka direct messages) and the SageCircle Analyst Twitter Directory (at the top of the left navigation menu under “Pages”). The response has been interesting, but what do the analysts think? Do they want AR to use Twitter or other micro-blogging techniques?

To find out what the analysts think, we conducted a SageCircle Survey of the analysts to get their opinions and see if they would like AR to use Twitter or would it cause them to run screaming from their keyboards. The target population was the 28 analysts then in the Analyst Twitter Directory (a few more have been added in the last week). We have received 15 responses to-date from all types of analysts in terms of their research coverage and size of firm, from single practitioners to the largest firms. We were pleasantly surprised by the volume of responses as well as the analysts’ in-depth and thoughtful comments. Obviously this early into microblogging, there is healthy skepticism about the business value of Twitter for AR. The analysts definitely saw some potential uses of Twitters, but also see it as a potential fad and waste of time.

One point that came up in almost every response and subsequent conversations is the fear that […]

The organizational challenges of managing AR, CI and MR [Practitioner Question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpgWe often are asked about the differences in management techniques when AR is organizationally under corporate communications or marketing as compared to a when it is part of a strategy group.  How you deal with analysts, and the need for strategic interactions as compared to product-level briefings, will be altered based on the client base you are attempting to serve.

Analyst interactions also occur in the Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Market Research (MR) groups.  They are also often the keepers of the major analyst contracts and the “repository” of the purchased analyst data, reprints, and commissioned research.  In addition to providing research for the product and strategy teams they contribute to the sales organization with share numbers and competitive bullet points.

Sometimes these groups are in very separate parts of the company (e.g., AR in corporate communications, MR in product management and CI in field sales) while at others, especially in smaller vendors, one person does it all.  In larger companies these functions may be so organizationally separate from AR as to require processes for enhancing the communications and collaboration, despite the fact that you are all dealing with the same analysts.

From time-to-time, companies make organizational changes with AR being told – sometimes over AR’s reasonable objections – to take responsibility for the CI/MR teams. Incorporating the CI/MR teams with AR can prove to be an interesting challenge for the AR manager because […]

Analysts should let vendor AR teams know that they want AR blogs

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgIt’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation: AR is not using blogs until analysts say they will read AR blogs, but analysts are wanting AR to start blogs but not asking them to which means AR postpones launching a blog… You get the idea.

Last week at IDC Directions in San Jose, analyst Rachel Happe (bio, blog, Twitter) stated in one of her presentations and in private conversations that she wishes that more vendors would use social media like blogs to interact with her. It is true that Rachel covers social media and thus has a predisposition toward it.  However, her comments were more around “I’m so busy and get so many e-mails that going to a blog is […]

Doing unto analysts what they do unto vendors

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgIn an example of how social media can turn the tables in the analyst ecosystem, Sam Lawrence (bio, Jive blog, Twitter), the esteemed Chief Marketing Officer for Jive Software (enterprise collaboration software), in his personal blog Go Big Always gives Forrester a B and Gartner a C- in Gartner and Forrester’s Report Card (so far). Sam evaluated the firms’ coverage of his market, client service and amount of attention paid by analysts. Well worth the read.

What makes Sam’s post so interesting is that he is in essence commenting about the analysts in a manner similar to what analysts do with vendors, especially in those brief news flashes analysts put out. It is important to note that […]

Will you get analyst opinions in a briefing if you are not a client? [AR seminar question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpgYes… if you give them a chance to actually speak and if you take the time to ask correctly.

There is a common (mis-)understanding that analysts will only provide opinions if you are a paying client of their firm.  So can you get their opinions during a briefing? For the most part, analysts are more than happy to comment on what they hear in a briefing. The primary reasons why they don’t express their opinions are […]

AR managers do not like surprises, which mean they are a little annoyed at blogging analysts

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgObviously SageCircle is a big proponent of social media and the potential for positive impact on the analyst ecosystem. However, that view is not shared by all AR professionals. I recently had an interesting conversation with an AR manager who was more than a little irritated with major firm analysts who blog. Are these normal growing pains in the evolution of the AR-analyst relationship or is this a nascent backlash?

A big part of this person’s annoyance was centered on the lack of discipline and rigor in the analysts’ […]