Category: 3. Engage – AR implementation

Engage is the implementation stage of the IDEAL model. It primarily means planning and conducting tactics that support the strategy that drives the program. It also means collecting some of the data needed for evaluation.

Blogs as part of the AR tool box — Is there a chicken-or-egg issue?

Posted on by

icon-social-media-blue.jpgWhile blogs have been around for a number of years, they are seldom used by communications and IT vendor analyst relations (AR) teams*. I have found only Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM** and Sun. This is too bad because blogs can be a valuable tool for communicating certain types of information in a less formal manner.

Now it is important to realize that a blog is not the end all and be all of analyst interactions. For one thing, blogs are usually not password protected, so nothing remotely confidential can be the topic of a blog entry.

There are a number of reasons why AR has avoided blogs:

  1. The AR team cannot get permission to launch a blog because their company has not developed a blogging strategy and policy yet
  2. AR is simply overworked and cannot add another task
  3. AR perceives that it does not has the right skills to create blog content
  4. AR believes there is no demand for a blog because the analysts are not asking for one
  5. AR thinks there are not enough interesting topics for them to consistently blog

Items #1 and #2 are show stoppers. Items #3 and #4 are what I call chicken-and-egg issues. For instance, […]

When hype can go overboard and hurt credibility

Posted on by

SageCircle on the danger of vendors overhyping

Updated September 9, 2008 — In response to a tweet, a number of analysts have left new comments about specific types of marketing language that vendors should avoid.

Updated September 10, 2008 — Compiled a list of terms to avoid. Look for them after the “Bottom Line.”

While the US Federal Trade Commission in the Lanham Act said that puffery is “harmless exaggeration or colorful hype” and is not prosecutable as false advertising, too much hype can severely damage a vendor’s credibility. This was reinforced the other day when I participated in a Twitter conversation (right, click to enlarge).

Redmonk’s James Governor (“Monkchips”) in response to a marketing statement by a vendor about its product said “sorry but a. how can i take the statement seriously,. and b. what does it have to do with customer value?” Later another analyst, Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics (jonno), joined in with the scathing “don’t think (products’) scalability issues are totally behind them either, a minor inconvenience to marchitects ;)”. While you might dismiss this because it is happening on Twitter, think again.

  • This Twitter chat represents the visible tip of the iceberg. Think about how many other chances these analysts have to convey this opinion to the press, other analysts, IT managers and the like?
  • Reporters are starting to follow analysts’ micro-blogging like Twitter so this can become a PR problem as well.
  • Don’t assume that “nobody is following Tweeting analysts” because their followings can be quite large (e.g., Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang has over 3,300 followers with new ones everyday).

However, the focus of this post is not on Twitter but on the issue of hype. SageCircle has identified hype as one of the five “analyst hot button” issues that can needlessly derail a vendor-analyst briefing. The big problem is that analysts really listen to […]

Are you guilty of monologuing and death by PowerPoint?

Posted on by

One of the top annoyances of IT industry analysts are vendor briefings where the spokesperson is talking at the analysts instead of having a conversation with the analysts. Not only does this annoy the analysts, it causes vendors to miss the opportunity to find out if their message and content is getting through. We have heard analysts often say: “If they had only stopped to take a breath and asked us what we thought, we could have eliminated the misunderstanding right upfront!”

One of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of a briefing is to dump the 64-slide, 153-build PowerPoint presentation and engaging in a real and candid dialogue.

SageCircle Technique:

Illuminata’s Gordon Haff on four things AR teams should be doing to be more effective

Posted on by

photo-gordon-haff.jpgCarter ran into Gordon at the Redmonk 5th Birthday Party in San Francisco. When asked about what AR could do to become more effective, Gordon immediately came up with four suggestions:

#1 – Don’t use Webex or virtual rooms.

#2 – PR agencies should understand analysts’ coverages and not […]

Adding Twitter or other micro blogging tools to the AR tool box

Posted on by

icon-social-media-blue.jpgAnalyst relations (AR) has a number of tools available for interacting with the IT industry analysts ranging from prehistoric-based face-to-face meetings to the 19th century telephone to the 21st century TelePresence by Cisco. Social media (e.g., blogs, communities, wikis and so on) represents just the latest technology to come along to enhance the AR interaction tool box. While social media should be considered an opportunity, many AR teams see it as a challenge because they perceive that that cannot add one more item to their to-do list (see Why social media scares the analyst firms and vendor AR teams). However, if approached correctly, social media does not have to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

One of the new social media tools that could be very useful is the micro-blog (e.g., Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce). Micro-blogs are easy to learn, simple to experiment with and, best of all, free. Micro-blogs could be a constructive one-to-many communications tool, especially for fast-breaking […]

Know your analyst – Novice, Luminary or Sage

Posted on by

For IT vendor analyst relations (AR) teams, a critical success factor is treating each IT industry analyst as an individual, not some faceless member of a crowd. For example, knowing that an analyst loathes PowerPoint presentations can be an important “ah ha!” to improving a briefing by eliminating an irritation. Similar “ah ha!”s can be gleamed by knowing where an analyst is in his or her career. There are three major stages in an analyst’s growth cycle which will impact how you deal with them: Novice, Luminary and Sage. Each stage has specific motivators and the analyst comes into discussions with vendors with specific ideas, techniques, and needs.

While critical for AR teams, it is also important for research consumers – end user or vendor – to understand if the analysts they are reading or doing inquiries with are Novices, Luminaries or Sages. Each growth stage can provide different types of insights and advice.

The Novice Analyst – Motivated by knowing what their clients don’t know

Being a Novice analyst should not be considered a negative by any means. Novice analysts generally have strong industry experience – usually focused in one segment; have a sharp intellect; can be very […]

Tips from analysts about how to interact with them more effectively (new tips added 2/19/08)

Posted on by

(Editors Note:  Robin Bloor’s tips # 6-8, two by James Governor, two by Jeremiah Owyang and one by Charlene Li  added on 2/19/08)

I have been running across a number of interesting blog posts by analysts providing tips to the AR community. This is very useful information for AR professionals, both to improve their AR execution but also to get insights into one of their analysts. Here are the blog entries I have found […]