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.

Q&A from SageCircle’s “Introduction to Twitter for AR” webinar – Firm handles, retweet, protocols and more

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgAt the four sessions of the “Introduction to Twitter for AR” webinar held in August, there were some interesting questions that came up. Here are answers to some of the questions.

Shameless Marketing – If you missed the webinar, you can schedule a SageCircle “AR Briefing” on Twitter for you and your colleagues. Click here for a brochure or contact us at 650-274-8309 for more information.

Q: What about firms that follow you? Do you recommend letting them follow you? (e.g., Gartner)

A: Firm handles (e.g., @forrester, @Gartner_inc and @the451group) are typically used to promote the firm. For example, @the451group is used to announce research note publications and @Gartner_inc is used by the Gartner PR team as a press release wire. @forrester is often used at Forrester events to facilitate info to attendees and accept questions during sessions. There is little or no downside to letting them follow you. On the other hand, you should carefully consider whether you should follow them. Because they are marketing tools, they could add clutter to your timeline without necessarily giving you useful information.

Q: Why retweet? To pass along a tweet to others?

A: Retweets are used for a couple of purposes. One is to give your reply some context by including […]

Answering “10 Questions Analyst Relations Have on Social Media” Part 2

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgRecently Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst that covers social media, spoke to a group of AR and PR professionals at a large vendor in the Silicon Valley about the use of social media. Of course, Jeremiah being Jeremiah, he posted about the meeting in 10 Questions Analyst Relations Have About Social Media. The post is interesting in that Jeremiah did not try to answer the questions he recorded, so SageCircle is going to provide our take on the answers.

The following questions were answered in part 1:

  1. Is social media a medium to influence the influencers?
  2. Are influencers impacted by social media usage of clients, vendors, and media?
  3. Now that many are creating their own messages is message control realistic?
  4. Can AR and PR benefit from listening to social media?
  5. Can AR and PR benefit from using social media to talk?
    .
    Now to questions 6 – 10
    .
  6. How do AR folks, who are traditionally accustomed to deep, often in-person relationships benefit from this? Relationships today are built on more than in-person meetings. This is especially true as both analysts and AR staff become more geographically dispersed. Social media can provide intelligence, insights and actionable information about the analysts that provides the basis for […]

Answering “10 Questions Analyst Relations Have on Social Media” Part 1

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgRecently Jeremiah Owyang (bio, Twitter handle), a Forrester analyst that covers social media, spoke to a group of AR and PR professionals at a large vendor in the Silicon Valley about the use of social media. Of course, Jeremiah being Jeremiah, he blogged about the meeting in 10 Questions Analyst Relations Have About Social Media. The post is interesting in that Jeremiah did not try to answer the questions he recorded, so SageCircle is going to provide our take on the answers. 

Some of the questions are addressed to “influencers,” not necessarily only analysts. For our answers we are going to focus on the industry analysts, thought SageCircle does think a lot about the broader influencer landscape (e.g., see Fog of Influence).

  1. Is social media a medium to influence the influencers? Yes, but “influencing” is too narrow an approach. Social media can be great tools for engaging analysts, educating them on important issues, building personal relationships, getting feedback from analysts, and so on. AR teams need to think less that social media is something “special” and more that it is just part of the overall communications toolbox to be used where appropriate depending on the specific task and analyst.
  2. Are influencers impacted by social media usage of clients, vendors, and media? This depends on the analyst. Some are ignoring the whole social media phenomena because they think it is a passing fad, not relevant to their clients, or does not fit into […]

Social media as a channel for analyst conversations

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgFreeform Dynamics analyst Dale Vile (Twitter handle) has an interesting post, The importance of the back channel, on the Open Reasoning blog. In the post, Dale discusses the value social media can play in moving public conversations into private channels. Money quote:

“Consider, for example, that while it is obvious when a blog post or a tweet on Twitter sparks an open conversation in public, it is not so obvious when it prompts a private exchange via email, instant messaging, the telephone, or some other mechanism. Indeed, it is quite common in my experience for two related threads to be running in parallel, one in public and one in the private back channel. More commonly, however, the back channel exchanges are spin-off conversations that have their roots in the public discussion, but take it down a different route.”

However, social media is a channel in and of itself for some analysts. Jeremiah Owyang (blog, Twitter handle) from Forrester in a post on Edelman AR pro Jonny Bentwood’ Technobabble 2.0 blog explains:

“I’ll be very clear on this as an analyst. If you want to influence me, be in a conversation and dialog with me, in person, online, and wherever I go.”

Jeremiah is heavy into conversations via comments to his blog and Twitter tweets.

AMR Research disruptive technology analyst Jonathan Yarmis […]

Analysts need to chill out and don’t get so emotional about “tiering”

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Note: An earlier version of this post showed up as a comment on ARmadgeddon, which was later elevated to a full post. Then I posted a version on my former employer’s corporate AR blog. However, this is a topic that still generates heat so we are now posting it on the SageCircle blog to stimulate discussion.

AR and analyst blogs that begin with vigorous discussions about tiering often end in flame wars. The loudest protesters are usually smaller analyst firms and single practitioners who believe that the practice of tiering slights and excludes them.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

There is no generally accepted definition of what “tier” means in the context of the analyst industry, so let me offer some points to get the discussion started and lance the boil of negative emotions around this concept.

At SageCircle we promote the best practice of “rank then tier” industry analysts. This is a two-step process. An analyst list is ranked based on relevance to […]

Redmonk Michael Cote on dealing with analysts

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Interesting set of slides from Redmonk analyst Michael Cote. Click on the graphic to visit Michael’s blog post. SageCircleSince 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue. sagecircle.com

Why AR Matters – Analysts can get your company on short lists that you were excluded from

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icon-dollar-euro.jpgMost analyst relations (AR) professionals are in an environment where they have to continually justify the relevance of the industry analysts and AR. One of the best arguments for justifying the investment in AR is the impact analysts have on the company’s sales opportunities. Usually the easiest to find examples are negative, such as when an analyst’s commentary has caused a vendor to be removed or excluded from a short list, because a sales rep will be howling in anger. However, with some investigation AR can turn up positive impacts of the analysts, e.g., when an analyst has been your advocate by getting your company onto a short list.

In Reality Check: Sales reps matter more than product on the Software Insider blog, former Forrester analyst and current VP of Research at SSPA John Ragsdale illustrates how an analyst with a simple question can help a vendor get placement on a vendor short list. 

“…Over the last year I have become increasingly aware of something and wanted to share it with a larger audience. When I have conversations with companies about a pending software purchase (usually CRM or eService), they tell me the core business problems they are trying to solve, then give me the list of vendors they are considering. And almost every time, I hear a little jingle from Sesame Street in my head:

     “One of these things is not like the other
     One of these things just doesn’t belong
     Can you guess which thing is not like the other
     By the time I finish this song?

“Why? Because the obvious vendor(s) who are specialists in their problem are not on the list, and they are selecting from a group of vendors who all do something else. So I ask, “Um, why isn’t Vendor X on the list?” And here is the universal reply. ‘Oh, we started with them, but […]

When talking about partners, avoid the dreaded “shaking hands” clipart

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Two of the hoariest clichés used in PowerPoint presentations for analyst briefings are a slide full of partner logos or using clipart showing shaking hands as a sign of partnership.

The partner slide is an important component of many presentations made to IT industry analysts. Unfortunately, too many vendors use these clichés and miss the opportunity to communicate real information that supports key messages.

A better way to design the partner slide is to use text names instead of logos and organize the name listings in a way that adds information (see the second figure). The organization of the names should support the key strategic messages of the current briefing. A key message-centric slide is much richer than a logo-centric slide and more partners can be listed. In addition, by organizing […]