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Technobabble 2.0

Rants and musings on technology, AR and social media

Making the most out of SymposiumOctober 28 2008

With Symposium just next week, people often attend without thinking ‘how can I make the most of this opportunity. Here are a few of my tips…

Gaining Analyst Mindshare

·         Conversations prior to the conference to influence the position of a vendor is vital to the outcome and discussion with their presentations to attendees. Inquiries, customer briefings and SAS days from June are critical to getting on their agenda. Also it might be worth a quick call to some of your analysts this week simply to touch-base.

·         Positive engagements on-site during the week will likely get reflected in the analyst’s presentation.  If it’s front of mind for them, they’re more likely to represent that when they’re up on stage.  Thus, meetings with them before their sessions and especially immediately before the session (and even sitting in the front of the room during the session) are high value influence opportunities.  

·         The key to effective competitive AR is to infiltrate the messaging of our competitive vendors.  Not only will you miss an opportunity to influence competitive positioning at the event when the anal

Social media holiday over - back to blogging (about AR 2.0, social media books and defining an analyst)October 17 2008

Several weeks ago I went on holiday to Spain with the family and took a much needed rest from blogging. No longer was WordPress the first app that I opened in the morning, no longer did deem it essential to load Twitter and check out what the community was up to and then I returned with a list of things to write about but without the motivation to start.

It seems that my indifference was not alone - James Governor found that too much of the conversation was taking place in Twitter and ended up not posting in over 3 weeks. Nevertheless, I’m now back with a passion and have plenty to share with you. Here’s a little summary about some of the things that I have been pondering lately:

Josh Bernoff, Dean Bubley and Jon Collins speaking at the IIAR meeting about AR 2.0
In an environment where AR pros are increasingly worried about the increased amount of work they have to do, asking them to engage with analysts in yet another channel is both difficult from a time perspective but also from a process

Event: AR 2.0 at IIAR meeting with Josh Bernoff (Forrester), Dale Vile (Freeform Dynamics) & Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis) - Sept 17, LondonAugust 18 2008

Over the past few months, I have been debating the issue of how AR pros should use social media tools to enhance their analyst relations. Whilst it is clear that there is indeed a huge momentum of the use of blogs, twitter, wikis, facebook etc, what is unclear is whether it is AR’s job to be involved.

For example, does an analyst really want to be ‘friends’ with you or should the line be clearly drawn between what is an acceptable location for AR and analysts to interact? Indeed who’s job is it to comment or engage with analysts within social media? Is it the role of the senior execs or AR… or PR?

Another issue of course is content. Can AR use social media to influence analysts or at least understand what they are thinking? And what about when things go wrong - whilst it may be quite clear what the escalation path would be if a vendor disagrees with something that is written in a report - what process should we follow if we disagree a blog or a twitter post?

What is clear, is that there is a great deal of confusion about AR’s role within social media.

The next IIAR meeting hopes to address this and are delighted that social media experts Josh Bernoff (Forrester), Dale Vile (Freeform Dynamics) an

Forrester buys JupiterAugust 1 2008

Exciting times in the analyst world again as Forrester acquires Jupiter for $23m.

The last time this happened (when Giga was acquired) there was initially quite a lot of hope followed by quite a few analyst movements. Time will tell what the outcome of this move will be - however, if we follow George Colony’s reasoning (as mentioned in the earnings call yesterday) we can be hopeful. He states the reasons for this as:

including the opportunity to add content and data, access to new clients for cross-selling opportunities and the cultural fit between the two companies.

Technobabble View

Looking behind the hype it is clear where the value of this move lies. Forrester intend to place Jupiter firmly within the Marketing & Strategy Client Group. This is a sound move and backs up Forrester’s previous statements of moving from Information Technology to Business Technology. The main difference this time is that it is not just empty rhetori

Top analyst twitterers / analyst twitter indexJuly 30 2008

Over the past three months the number of analysts that use Twitter has increased dramatically. When I first started ranking them only 49 analysts used this tool - this has now jumped dramatically to 122 (no doubt by the time I publish this, it will have increased again).

Amongst AR pros, there is still a considerable debate regarding just how useful Twitter is. My view is rather simple: as long as the analysts that are important to me take part in conversations on Twitter then so will I. If they move to another medium (such as LinkedIn, Jaiku etc) then I will move to.

The reason why I believe that ranking the analysts is important is based on the fact that I (like most people) have only limited time and resources and I want to ensure that whatever time I do put to one side to monitor these people, it is focused on those with the greatest impact.

My assumption is that influence can be measured (not by working out their popularity) but by how many people engag