Incorporating social media into your measurement program

icon-social-media-blue.jpgA critical success factor for best-in-class analyst relations (AR) programs is an appropriate measurement program. A measurement program can help AR managers demonstrate the business value of AR, generate information to improve day-to-day operations, and harvest intelligence valuable to the Sales organization. As social media matures into a regular part of the business communications environment AR managers will need to start incorporating data from blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, podcasts and so on into their measurement programs. However, because social media is just another form of communications, AR teams should not get too stressed about the implications of this step. Rather, they should just consider this step the logical and not too burdensome evolution of AR measurement. Ways in which social media might fit into an AR measurement program include:

Analyst Opinion Monitoring – This item is the most important because […]

Random notes on Twitter

icon-social-media-blue.jpgThe Analyst Twitter Directory is now up to 60 entries with more analysts added every week. It is interesting that this is one of the most visited pages on the SageCircle blog.

Edelman’s Jonny Bentwood (Twitter) has done another crackerjack piece of research with Top analyst twitters / micro-bloggers. He has come up with an interesting framework to rank the analysts who use Twitter. The criteria are:

  • Followers – the number of followers each analyst has
  • Updates – frequency of updates
  • Conversation- how many […]

Social media should not be a “special” activity for AR, just part of the overall AR plan

icon-social-media-blue.jpgYou do have an AR plan, don’t you?

Your strategic AR plan, the one with the charter and objectives, lists of all interactions types to be used for each purpose, service levels by analyst tier, calendar and priorities?

Ok, unfair question as many AR teams are so under the gun that a plan is often considered a luxury. The main point is that social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter, podcasts, wikis and so on) should not be considered something big and special, but merely just more forms of interactions to add to the mix.

Obviously, the various types of social media are still new to many individuals and AR teams. As a consequence, there is a learning curve to climb and a process you will need to go through to adopt these new forms of interactions. However, social media are not “special,” just like e-mail is not special. Oh, those folks that have been around for awhile will no doubt remember when there was heated debate whether e-mail was an appropriate form of interaction with analysts.

SageCircle Technique:

  • Educate yourself about […]

Social media is a multi-facet opportunity for major industry analyst firms

icon-social-media-blue.jpgMajor analyst firms like AMR Research, Gartner, IDC and Ovum are rightly criticized for being slow out the gate when it comes to addressing and using social media. The one major firm that has done the most to leverage the potential of social media is Forrester, but even Forrester has not been as aggressive as it could be. Here are some ways that major analysts firms should be involved with social media tools:

Research it

Social media should be a topic of research.  We think this is quite obvious, but with the exception of Forrester none of the major firms have done any in-depth, systematic research on the topic. No doubt some of the firms will say that […]

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

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

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

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 […]

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

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 […]