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.

Word cloud generator by Wordle

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From the website: “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” And a cool toy it is.

Obviously, SageCircle really, really focuses on AR and the analysts (click on the graphic to the right to enlarge).

However, Wordle is not just a toy, but potentially a useful tool for analyst relations professions with analysts that blog. Now you can in a minute with only a simple cut-and-paste of a URL get a feel for the most frequent – and by extension, most important – words in an analyst’s blog. For example, the word cloud to the left is for  […]

Best practices for partner collaboration on AR

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This best practice comes from guest contributor Gerry Van Zandt (Twitter handle), AR manager with HP Services.

Joint product, service, or customer announcements with partners are a common part of the marketing repertoire for large and small companies in the technology world. But far too often these “announcements” consist of two names or logos at the top of a press release, with only modest coordination between the PR teams of the two companies (mainly securing approvals and edits to press release text) and then shot-gunning the news release out on the newswires.

As always, AR teams should assess the potential benefits of joint announcements and engage in the process early to help shape content and key messages. To maximize effectiveness of important joint announcements, AR also should coordinate closely with AR counterparts (or resources handling AR) at partner companies and jointly plan an analyst engagement strategy and timeline, executed by both companies. By doing this, analysts get informed about the upcoming news in advance, and learn its context and significance to both companies. This also gives them the knowledge to accurately comment if called by a reporter as a third-party story source.

When engaging with AR counterparts at partner firms, AR should:

  • Identify appropriate AR and marketing resources early at the partner firm. When AR is called into a project, they should as early as possible inquire with […]

How to track a lot of analyst blogs and Twitter streams without spending a lot of time

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgOne of the side effects of the growing use of social media by IT industry analysts and analyst relations (AR) is a pending sense of doom that we are going to get overwhelmed by too… much… stuff. This certainly came out in discussions at the US Forrester AR Council panel I was on and in blog posts like When do we get work done? I certainly have felt that way in the past, but slowly and surely I have picked up techniques that permit me to monitor a fairly large number of social media streams (110+ blogs and 140+ Twitter streams) without spending hours a day doing so. In this post I will share these tips.

Note: These tip and tricks are not necessarily the absolutely best-in-class, merely ones that we have found to-date. Nor are the tools mentioned the results of systematic research and evaluation, merely ones that we have played with and decided to use. As we continue to expand the portfolio of tips and tools, we will make sure to share them with you.

The main tips are to use an RSS reader and to organize your feeds in folders*. This saves you the time of checking individual blogs that might not have any activity. The following example explains […]

Tip: create seating charts for analyst summits

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Jonathan Eunice (LinkedIn) sent along a tip about a seating chart creation tool called Simple Seating. A quick scan reveals several similar tools, often aimed at party panners or educators. We recommend seating plans as a really useful tool for those in charge of planning an analyst event. We think it is a best practice[…]

Avoid like the plague – Using pseudo-Magic Quadrants in your analyst briefing presentations

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After completing the in-depth Magic Quadrant series I was going to give this topic a rest for awhile. That is until I saw this tweet:

 

jowyang is the twitter handle of Forrester social media analyst extraordinaire Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah joined Forrester only last October and already he has seen so many vendors use a pseudo-Magic Quadrant that he is commenting on it. Can you imagine how bored and annoyed with this graphic other analysts that been around longer must be? I have seen pseudo-MQs that I swear were built on the idea of who is the leading vendor among left-handed IT managers who buy technology on Tuesdays in Guam.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the competitive landscape slide should be a component of almost every presentation made to IT industry analysts. There is no better opportunity to […]

Nifty idea for raising awareness of vendor staff at an analyst summit

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One of the quandaries I’ve had at analyst summits is how to introduce the analysts to on-site staff so they know who to go to for assistance and with questions. Seth Godin in his post Saying thanks in a conference presentation has a simple technique that can be applied to this purpose. It does not require the AR manager to use time during the opening “welcome” presentation and frankly is much more effective than simply verbally listing the names of AR team members and other support staff. Here is an extract from Seth’s post:

“The solution is pretty simple, thanks to Powerpoint and digital cameras.

Prepare for the talk by taking pictures of each person. If they’re shy, you can even do photographs in groups of two or three. Good photos, clever photos, funny photos… photos that are interesting are best.

Then, create a new presentation. Put each photo on its own slide, preferably with a well designed ID below it (it should be on […]

Redmonk TV interviews IBM’s John Simonds on using social media for AR

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In John Simonds on Twitter, blogs, & tags in Analyst Relations Redmonk analyst Michael Coté (Twitter, blog) interviews IBM analyst relations manager John Simonds (Twitter, blog) on how John uses social media for his AR work. Interesting and well worth watching. Tip: If the video stops/starts and is jerky, hit the pause button. It will[…]

Kleenex, Frisbee, and Magic Quadrant – what do they have in common?

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Have you heard your spokespeople make the following statement when briefing the analysts or presenting to a group of analysts on a teleconference: “… also if I reflect on the way you put us, whether it’s your magic quadrants or …” Probably the executive was using “magic quadrant” as a generic label for analyst research graphics, much like people use Kleenex for facial tissue, Frisbee for a flying disc toy or Xerox for photocopying. 

Using Magic Quadrant as a generic label is dangerous for any vendor’s relationship with the analyst community. Analysts at firms other than Gartner bridle at Gartner’s dominate mindshare in the market. Referring to the Magic Quadrant is adding salt to their wounds. Gartner analysts, on the other hand, are extremely touchy about what they feel is the misuse of their signature research deliverable by the vendor community. So for vendors this is a lose-lose situation.

This situation also applies to other high visibility analyst deliverables like the Forrester Wave and Gartner Hype Cycle.

SageCircle Technique:

  • Brief your executives* on the best practice for referring to […]