Gartner and Forrester's leftovers

Analyst Equity wrote a post last month on picking up the money Gartner and Forrester leave behind. As these two leaders concentrate on the big boys, the other analyst groups are focusing on their weakpoints: the smaller and medium sized businesses and the verticals. In my experience, Gartner, on the content side, is blown away by some of the other analysts, in the Financial Services space; but they still are the winners on the buy side.

The Value of Customer Case Studies for Analysts

One of the most successful analyst relations strategies for a vendor is to use a customer case study or "success story". When you talk to an analyst you can suggest the possibility but be very sure that your customer has been fully briefed before and will deliver the success story to the analyst. Jonny quotes one of my favorite analysts at Gartner, Massimo Pezzini on this with his post on : Customer Evidence and the Source of Credibility.

Using Analysts for Market Intelligence

Another great post from Jonny at Technobabble on using Analyst Relations for Marketing Intelligence. A new site for me: http://www.alltheanalysts.com/ gives you a list of all of the analysts reports on your topic. It is free but does not go into the reports themselves as does http://www.itanalystreports.com/.

In addition, I encourage my clients to ask the analysts for introductions to specific people in potential customer or partner organizations which helps on the sales and biz development side of business also.

Some Cool Tools to Measure your Positioning Power

I found a neat website: www.marketingnpv.com that focuses on the financial return from marketing process. It offers articles and practical tools, with tutorials to help measure your ROI on your marketing efforts such as : Perceptual Mapping, Bass Diffusion Tools, Markov Chains, Decision Trees, Simulation Tools and Competitive Radar Tools. You do have to register to get access but it is free. Check it out.

More Best Practices and Tips for AR Professionals

Another good post which lists several good articles on Best Practices and Tips for AR professionals.
http://www.johnsimonds.com/2007/08/good-links-that-analyst-relations-professionals-should-read/

This is one of the best ones with some good tips from a former analyst. The bottom line is that, as with any other target audience, it's about building relationships.

http://armadgeddon.blogspot.com/2006/11/ar-classics-series-seven-ingredients.html

Mapping out Social Media

This is a great post on social media illustrated with maps of : the world of social media, online communities, and an internet trend map.

http://technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/social-media-maps/

The map of social networks shows the international spread of the sites including one I have never heard of: http://www.hi5.com/ which is considered the most international of all and on their home page gives you options for: english, french, spanish, dutch, german, portuguese, italian, dutch and romanian.

The Impact of Blogging on PR

I went to a seminar on Blogging yesterday by Alan Weinkrantz in Tel Aviv and came away thinking how powerful the blogsphere is becoming and how PR has to adapt to the new media ecosystem. In this new world, the bloggers get briefed sometimes before the media does and the bloggers get the news out faster sometimes than any other channel--and that's power.

Steve Rubel from Micropersuasion posted an older (yet still relevant) Presentation on PR and Emerging Communication Channels which analyses the new ecosystem and gives you 3 Steps to get started if you want to join this world (do we have a choice?). Step 1: Listen--he suggests tools to investigate what is out there; Step 2: Reach Out to other bloggers and create relationships; Step 3: Participate--become part of the conversation

Deborah Schultz also gave a lecture a few months ago in Herzilya on Blogging and she inspired me to go out and create my own blog (and here we are). She explained that Blogging is like a big party where you can invite people to join you at any time. So far the party just keeps getting bigger and more fun.