I use and even define that term fairly frequently, so I decided to create a URL where I explain it once and for all.

Due to their mind-numbing, vacuous repetitiveness, Barney announcements can be highly irritating to press and analysts. I understand that the original Barney has a similar effect on people.

1.  The terms “ethics” and “ethical” are used somewhat inconsistently, along a spectrum from:

There are procedural rules of good behavior, and if you violate them that’s bad. That’s the essence of ethics.

to

Unless the motive was impure, an act was not unethical.

Either extreme, in my opinion, quickly leads to nonsense.

2. Actually, I think calling that a spectrum is a bit misleading. I’d prefer to say an act is unethical if:

• It is (too) likely to have bad effect AND
• The perpetrator was guilty of bad behavior in not acting differently.

Thus, somebody can make an error in the area of ethics and still be fully ethical if, upon realizing it, they straightforwardly correct it. On the other hand, a pattern of such “errors” can suffice to convict them of unethical behavior.

3.  In particular, I stand by the following views from the post and comment thread that set this all off:

• Oracle behaves unethically by repeatedly foisting off sponsored analyst content as independent research.
• Merv Adrian is a fine, ethical guy.
• One reason I believe Merv is an ethical guy is because when I pointed out a screw-up to him, he characterized it as an oversight (I believe him) and said he’d move quickly to correct it.
• Commenters in that thread who suggested I shouldn’t even have mentioned Merv’s error were out of line. When you make an innocent mistake, you may suffer some embarrassment as a result.

4.  Merv’s analysis of white paper ethical issues was excellent, and supersedes mine. Continuing the oneupsmanship , I’ll now try to synthesize by saying: 

• White papers should never give a misleading view of the analyst’s opinion. Therefore:
  • They should always be prominently labeled as to sponsorship.
  • They should never be quoted out of context (a longstanding rule of mine that Merv thankfully also enforces).
  • They should always be clearly dated (a point I forgot to mention before).
• Merv points out that many companies have the same specific failing I lambasted Oracle for. While I think Oracle is particularly egregious, I don’t dispute his general observation. What’s more, since a white paper has many possible routes to get to an individual’s desk, the only reliable protections are those embedded within the paper itself.

5. In my post on white paper ethics, I confessed that I knew little of practices in sponsored podcasting. Eric Kavanagh helpfully filled me in on how he does it, tweeting

DM Radio is not pay-2-play; sponsors get leads & commercial but no editorial preference; enforced by tag team of me & Ericson.

and

Several rules: no product promotion; we talk business, tech, architecture, how-why-when stuff; I do a pre-call with ~all guests.

and

The policy is unscripted dialogue; in the pre-call, I tell guests to think of 3-4 key points they’ll make; no questions banned!!

6. I am generally appalled by the behavior of certain companies toward analysts, and their efforts to control what analysts say. Practices include:

• Demanding a review cycle on anything the analyst writes about them, sponsored or otherwise.
• More generally, heavily tailoring access not just according to an analyst’s importance (by whatever measure of importance or influence makes sense to them) but also pliability.
• As noted above, mischaracterizing the nature of analyst research.
  

Oracle is generally reputed as the worst offender, but while I agree with the criticism in general, I’m somewhat mellowed by the fact that I, personally, still have good access to key Oracle product people at important times.

As for Microsoft, on the other hand … well, let’s just say the best insight I’ve gotten from my back channels to date has been to find out exactly what falsehoods were being circulated about me in internal Microsoft communications. I also frankly am steamed at the moment that a Microsoft exec had the nerve to tell me that I shouldn’t post about ethical issues (a dictum I obviously have no intention of adhering to).

7.  It absolutely is possible for companies to change their analyst relations practices, both for better and for worse. The most dramatic positive change I recall is when, in the mid-1990s, Sybase went fairly quickly from utter dishonesty to having one of the best analyst relations guys ever (Dave Taber, when he had that role for them). In a slower evolution, IBM — which once filed a $7.5 billion lawsuit naming a Gartner Group analyst as co-defendant — has become pretty reasonable (even if large and bureaucratic) to deal with.

However, a couple of comments on that post took me strongly to task. Perhaps not coincidentally, one came from a vendor, and another from somebody whose main role in the “analyst” community is to produce and publish – you guessed it! – vendor-sponsored content. One option was to just blow those comments off as nonsensical, since they weren’t really responsive to the actual post. But I think those rather surprising remarks also suggest it is time to reopen the subject of vendor-sponsored analyst research.

Vendors typically pay for white papers, webinars, podcasts, in-person speeches, etc. for some combination of five reasons:

1. They want to connect with sales prospects. If Merv or Claudia Imhoff or I speak on a webinar, registration will be higher than if only company execs spoke. Similarly, you can capture more registration information from prospects who want to download a white paper if it was written by a third-party analyst.
2. They want general endorsement from the analyst. If a well-regarded analyst is associated with a firm, that’s good for the firm’s image.
3. They specifically want endorsement from the analyst for their marketing claims. Many of the ethical challenges with vendor-sponsored research or other content lie in this area.
4. They want the analyst to do a better job of explaining something than they think they could do themselves. This is the ethically purer version of the prior point. Realistically, they often can’t be separated. E.g., most vendor-sponsored white papers will involve a combination of the two. The same could be said for webinars such as the ones I did for Aster Data last year.
5. They want to give the analyst some money to enhance the relationship, and this way they get something other than advice in return. Personally, I won’t do content-creation business with a vendor unless they first buy actual consulting services (via the Monash Advantage), but I’m in the minority, and in fact didn’t always have that policy myself.

In my opinion, #1, 2, and 4 cause relatively little in the way of ethical problems. #5 is an unavoidable fact of life. But #3 raises problems that can and should be addressed head-on. 

There are three forms of bias that could arise in a white paper or even a blog post, whether or not that content is paid for by a vendor. The author could:

• Say what s/he does not believe. That’s obviously a worst practice for analysts. Sadly, it is not entirely extinct.
• Omit what s/he believes. That happens all the time. If a vendor sponsors a white paper, you’d better believe that the analyst has omitted references to 1. Doubts/drawbacks and 2. Competitors. Even without payment, people to varying degrees are careful as to what they say, but the level of care goes way up when there’s money changing hands.
• Adjust tone or emphasis. If somebody’s paying you, it’s natural for your praise to be hearty and your doubts, if any, to be expressed in the most measured of tones. Again, this form of bias need not stem from immediate payment, but rather from a general desire to maintain good vendor relations. Sometimes my only quarrel with the work of analysts I otherwise admire is that they’re a little too consistently upbeat, even in their free-to-everybody blogs.

Different kinds of sponsored content tend to have different levels of bias. For example:

• White papers are commonly written with multiple cycles of vendor review. In some cases (not all), the vendor actually gets to approve or reject the paper before the writer’s payment is assured. Bias in white papers is typically rather heavy. I wrote white papers for some years, fighting off many of the pressures for bias, and it was pretty wearing, which is one reason why I’ve published only one new white paper in the last three years, and none in the last two. On the other hand, payment is commonly > $1,000/page, so I’m not going to look askance at other analysts who routinely pocket those fees.
• Lecture-style speeches and webinars can be quite independent. In the extreme case, the vendor just expects you to show up and give your standard talk from your standard slide deck. Netezza once criticized me for not slamming them ENOUGH in speeches I gave at their traveling user conference. And even when there are review cycles on the slides or whatever, those tend to be quick and gentle; about the biggest change I recall making recently under such circumstances was honoring the request “Could you please not mention our competitors by name in your PowerPoint deck?”
• Interview-style podcasts and speeches are also fairly common (especially where the analyst is the interviewer). But since I never listen to them, I can only guess what they tend to be like. (Presumably, they’re more toward the Larry King end of the interviewing spectrum than the Sam Donaldson one …)

So what would be some best ethical practices for sponsored white papers? My list starts:

• The analyst must believe everything s/he writes. Duh.
• The vendor must not have final approval over the contents of the paper. The analyst must be the final arbiter of what is said. Sure, the sponsor can decide not to publish it, and deciding that might make them less inclined to do other business with the analyst in the future. But there should be no immediate financial penalty to an analyst who refuses to say what the vendor wants.
• Sponsorship should be prominently disclosed at the front of the paper. Website disclosure is insufficient. White paper readers may get their copies from vendor salespeople or from other colleagues, and have no way of knowing the paper is sponsored if the paper itself doesn’t say so. And since people’s approach to long documents is often to check out the beginning and then – maybe – skim or sample the rest, any disclosure must be big and up front to be sure of coming across.
• The vendor should at no time state or imply that the white paper is as independent as an unsponsored one. Frankly, that’s a stretch goal, and will remain such for as long as salespeople get commissions. Even so, there’s no excuse for Oracle-level deceptive practices in this regard.

Some day, I’ll probably write another sponsored white paper. When I do, you can be assured that I’ll abide by the first three precepts, and pressure the sponsor to abide by the fourth. I’m confident that the more ethical of my analyst compatriots will do the same. I wish that I could be more optimistic that they all will.

In the traditional model of IT analysis, vendors and users alike buy subscriptions to published research that are bundled with a certain level of retainer-like consulting. You can also buy additional consulting from analysts on an ala-carte basis. Indeed, analyst relations gurus suggest it’s a best practice to do so, both because you might learn something and because the process of your doing so might strengthen your relationship with them, in reality and euphemism alike.

In the 1990s I subverted that model somewhat. Anybody could buy my subscription newsletter for $347/copy/year. Only two vendors that I recall (Oracle and Informix) ever bought > 10 subscriptions at once. In addition, I had some faxed published product that frankly didn’t add all that much to the newsletter. But it was part of a $15,000/year service – almost always sold to vendors only — that also included a day of consulting and related prep and follow-up, a price point I stumbled into and later in various ways validated.* Big companies like Oracle and Microsoft were encouraged to buy, say, one unit of service each for the DBMS and application development tools groups. If one group wanted more service, they could pay 2X as much, while getting the same faxed reports. Thus, in most ways but not all, I separated out my subscription business ($347/seat/year) from my consulting business ($15,000/episode for vendors, custom-priced for users) even then.

*Institutional investors got their own price points, and a truly retainer-like service model. But as my old customers in that area fell off through usual turnover-related churn, I got almost no new ones, and it eventually became a minor part of my business.

In the blog-friendly 21^st Century, I’ve taken those principles further. Substantially all my research is free-to-the-public. Most of what I sell is directly packaged as some form of consulting. (The exceptions would be sponsorship for the research and its distribution, most commonly in the form of paid speaking engagements). For vendors this is retainer consulting only. For users it is project consulting only. For investors I would be flexible on retainer vs. project, if I had any remaining investor clients. But one way or the other, it’s all consulting. In my “freemium” analyst business model,

the research is the “free” and the consulting is the “ium”

But enough about me! While the market opportunity for hard-core analysts is fairly limited (there isn’t much point in trying unless you think you can become acknowledged as a top expert in one or more fields), it’s in fact a business best practice for almost any consultant to show off expertise by blogging or some other kind of publication. Now, not all of this expertise-parading need be on subjects general enough that we’d recognize it as being a form of what we generally call “IT analysis.” But much could be or is. Therefore,

many consultants are or should be part-time analysts

If you go back to my tentative taxonomy of influencers, I’m looking at people who fit into Bucket #4 (minor bloggers or forum posters), but might transcend that to seep into Buckets #1 or 3 (two groups of “analysts”). Obviously, these aren’t the only kind of rising influencers. For example, a top blogger in my sphere is Daniel Abadi – he’s a professor, but if you can get him to take the time to behave as an analyst vis-a-vis you, something he only rarely does, you probably should. And then there’s Dave Kellogg, CEO of a vendor, on the board of others, and clearly not always objective – but usually interesting and insightful even so. More common in the future, I think, will be examples like Todd Hoff – a consulting programmer with an excellent and widely read blog.

Today, if a user or other techie tells me I have “one” of the best blogs in the (database or perhaps unspecified) field, and I ask them what the other top ones are, the answers I expect to get back are Hoff’s and Abadi’s. Of the two, Hoff’s sends more visitors to my blogs, so I’m guessing it’s the better-read. Vendor business types might cite Dave Kellogg’s or Merv Adrian’s instead.

The implications of all this for influencer outreach efforts should be pretty clear. I’m still trying to think through what it means for analyst business models. Stay tuned.

]]> http://www.strategicmessaging.com/blurring-analyst-consultant-line/2010/07/28/feed/ 2 http://www.strategicmessaging.com/blurring-analyst-consultant-line/2010/07/28/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/StrategicMessaging/~3/rmmHVtr-bzk/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/so-what-is-an-analyst-anyway/2010/07/25/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:42:50 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.strategicmessaging.com/?p=98 Recently, there have been several high-profile (at least within the independent analyst community) posts and initiatives relating to analyst business models. Each at least implicitly suggests a definition of what an “analyst” is. Interestingly, no two of the definitions seem exactly the same – even though similar people are involved in several of the efforts. Notwithstanding my well-documented skepticism about category definitions, I think it might be interesting to pull some of these ideas together in one place.

The post that kicked this all off, by Gideon Gartner and Barbara French, basically asking whether and how small analyst firms could rise to challenge the big ones like Gartner Group and Forrester Research. An extremely rich comment thread ensued. Implicit in the original post was a definition of “analyst” work that seemed to include both proprietary published research and quick-hit advisory services, fitting the traditional big-firm subscription model. More diversity, however, was shown in the post comments.

Long ago, Gideon probably based his model on his prior career at stock research firms, which to this day model their business somewhat like big IT analyst firms. Some of the main differences are:

• Payment levels and services provided sort of just happen, rather than being precisely negotiated.
• Payment style is wonky, mainly consisting of a certain share of a client’s high-margin rather-commodity-service stock trading business.
• SEC regulations insist that you not say anything material in personal advisory services you haven’t first put out in writing (there’s been decades-long uncertainty as to just what is or isn’t “material”).

Note: I used to be a stock analyst myself. Indeed, I once was ranked #1 on the Institutional Investor All-Star Team. This may be only the 3^rd year in the past 29 that I get $0 revenue from investment research – and it’s not over yet.

My immediate reason for writing this post is that Ray Wang of Altimeter Group asked me to retweet his post on the best way to set up a new analyst firm, broken down into “7 Tenets”. The implicit model he’s using of analyst firm seems to be one that does a lot of advisory services, probably sells subscriptions, has “proprietary IP”, and gives a lot of research away via blogs and other public outlets. I.e., it’s similar to Gartner/Forrester, but not quite as rigid. Anyhow, I know Ray isn’t really that dogmatic, because – as he tweeted recently – he’s exploring a possible “trade association” of independent analyst firms, and I’ve talked with him about who might be in or out.

In my own business, I follow a more extreme form of the “freemium” model. In line with my stock analyst background, I feel anything I know that’s sufficiently important should be published openly, technology insight and general methodology alike. Advisory services are for:

• Teaching people how to use the information.
• Being the middleman for 1-to-1 NDA vendor/user discussion.

I’ve figured out how to offer quasi-subscription retainer vendor services even so, but find it easier to sell user services on a project basis.

Of course, I don’t really publish EVERYTHING openly, for three main reasons:

• Nobody has time to write up everything they know.
• Much of what I know is NDAed.
• My best advice is reserved for my paying customers.

But that held-back advice is not apt to be a market trend or analytic methodology. Rather, it is likely to be a more specific “Due to threat, opportunity or trend X, you should do Y,” where X is something I’ve actually been writing about publicly for a while.

Jonny Bentwood, meanwhile, goes to the opposite extreme from Gideon et al., defining an analyst by

if someone is independent and directly influences technology procurement then they are an analyst

That leads, for example, to him ranking Dennis Moore as a top-100 analyst tweeter. Now, I have no problem with mentioning “Dennis Moore” and “top-100 analyst” in the same sentence. But if Dennis has any analyst business model at all, it’s one of the stealthiest ones in the whole IT industry.

Finally, there was a webinar by French, Bentwood, Ray’s partner Jeremiah Owyang (who’s #1 on most of Bentwood’s lists, except for the ones Ray’s #1 on), and Carter Lusher on analysts’ use of social media. I haven’t listened to the recording, but two of the four bullet points listed below it say analysts can or should:

Develop personal networks, career brands, that carry with them further than reports under an umbrella brand.

Finally realize they are also media in addition to their traditional roles.

I agree, and in fact believe analysts are a huge part of the media ecosystem, already now and even more going forward.

So what are the implications? If you’re a vendor, I think:

• Analysts (defined broadly) are an increasingly important part of the overall set of influencers. In particular, as traditional media business models collapse, we’re playing some of the role trade press reporters used to.
• You need flexibility in how you deal with influencers. Everybody is different. (Quick worst-practice story: Oracle tells me it won’t give analyst-relations support to anybody who doesn’t let it see what they write before it goes out – a process they use both for fact-checking and general last-ditch opinion-lobbying. But I know they enforce that rule selectively. And I’m not getting good PR support from Oracle these days either.)
• Understand that different analysts can give you good advice in different ways. E.g., numerous clients tell me that they go to Gartner to find out what mainstream enterprises are saying, and to me for actual marketing or strategy advice. (Conveniently, that lets them also be giving money to and getting attention from what they judge to be two of the top influencers in their area.) Other analysts might assist them in yet other ways, even beyond general influencer-relations value.

If you’re a user, please note that:

• There are numerous good providers of free information and insight.
• Many (not all) providers of free information can also be hired as consultants.

Sorry if those bullet points at the end — or for that matter the rest of the post –  sound a bit self-serving, but this overview is in fact informed by thinking about my own business.

Or, to put it another way:

• What I think about the analyst business in general
• How I structure my own business in particular

are, for rather obvious reasons, closely in alignment.

Obfuscate clearly!

Actually, I have not succeeded in finding the edition in which I recall seeing that phrasing. Probably it was the second, which I presume Paul Kedrosky also had. But in a a subsequent edition somebody (presumable White, as Strunk was long deceased) wrote similarly in their name:

Be clear.

Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. … since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”

Clarity, clarity, clarity.

What makes me think of this dictum most often is not marketing collateral per se, but rather product naming and description. Worst of all can be the names of particular portions of a marketecture diagram. Now, I am on record as believing that all product category names are flawed. But while some vagueness or ambiguity may be unavoidable, there is no reason for names to be meaningless or downright misleading.

ENTERPRISEDB CEO ED GOES WITH THE BUFFET AT LOCAL SIZZLER FOLLOWING SPEECH AT OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS CONFERENCE

SAN FRANCISCO — EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian rejected a wide array of fixed, rigid, printed menu options at a local Sizzler this week in favor of the restaurant chain’s sprawling buffet.

“It was clear that the open, free, unconstrained nature of the buffet was the right choice,” Boyajian said.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. I really received that email a couple of weeks ago. True, it was a spoof, and came from somebody unaffiliated with EnterpriseDB. But the real EnterpriseDB press release it was spoofing was almost as bad, starting

EnterpriseDB CEO Selected to Speak at Open Source Business Conference 2010
Ed Boyajian to deliver session on open source disruption in the database market

WESTFORD, Mass., March 15, 2010 — EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, today announced that President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Boyajian will deliver a presentation at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2010.

I happen to be a non-fan of EnterpriseDB, both for its stewardship of Postgres and its attitude toward business obligations. But in fairness, I should note that many other vendors put out similar press releases; this kind of idiocy is distressingly widespread. Issuing press releases that absolutely nobody outside your company cares about is always a bad idea, yet a large fraction of all press releases are of exactly that kind.

Recalling my recent taxonomy of five kinds of PR — which of the following goals is advanced by issuing a press release about an utterly predictable, interesting, and ephemeral fact?

A.  “Sell” to the press.
B. “Market” to the press.
C.  Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects.
D.  Market through influencers to other influencers.
E.  Market to potential buyers directly.

or

F.  None of the above?

I’ll go with “F”, which is also the grade that should be assigned to any PR person who allows such a release to go out over his or her still-living body. Nobody cares that you bought yourself a conference speaking slot. Nobody cares even if you didn’t buy it. Not one extra person is going to attend your talk because the press release was issued. It might be vaguely interesting were you to be selected to keynote the Davos Conference, present an Academy Award, or address the UN General Assembly. But even then I’d suggest saving the press release for after the event (or the day of it), when it’s actual news.

• As a consultant to the technology industry
• As a target of public relations myself

Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.

This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.

There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:

• “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
• “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
• Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
• Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
• Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.

In my capacity as a target of PR, I can tell you that clumsy or excessive “selling” of stories creates a backlash. There are a number of us who are LESS likely to write favorably about companies that waste our attention and time pitching inconsequential stories.  You may get ignored (especially in the traditional press or if you’re a larger company).  You may get mocked (especially in blogs and if you’re smaller outfit). Either way, you probably won’t be happy about the result.

In my capacity as a consultant, I can tell you why you should have realized this all along — unless carefully managed, most salespeople will burn their employer’s long-term interests in order to show short-term results. Outside PR agencies on short-term contracts are particularly guilty of this. What’s more, when they are honorable or astute enough to push back against unrealistic management expectations — as is fairly often the case, or at least so they claim — outside PR folks are commonly ordered to produce-or-else nonetheless. The consequences of such bullheadedness are sad.

One of the top trade press reporters covering enterprise technology keeps telling me that he fears for our country if people seriously think that the trivialities he’s hard-pitched are news. Less hyperbolically, he’s given me names of VERY big companies who get less coverage from him than they would if they sent fewer lame press releases. And when he gives me examples of what he hates, I generally agree, except in cases when I can tell him that a terribly-written press release has obscured what is actually an interesting announcement.

A great selling-style PR person can be invaluable, just as a great salesperson is. Those are the ones who know a few target “customers” really well, who are trusted by those “customers,” and/or who know how to listen to what the “customers’” preferences or needs are. Some people like that can be found inside companies.* But they’re almost nonexistent at agencies these days, at least among those folks who pitch me.

*See, for example, Dian Terry’s organization at Teradata. Ditto Rita Shoor, who despite technically being independent might as well have been an Intersystems employee for the past decade-plus.

If most pure “selling” is bad, then what should you do in PR? The answer is “market”. This post will be long enough without me trying to distinguish among the various kinds of marketing — awareness-building, positioning, competitive de-positioning, lead generation, and so on. But I would like to at least point out that there are different categories of people to market to.

In an earlier post, I distinguished among eight different kinds of influencers. For the purpose of this one, it should suffice to highlight three different categories of PR-centric marketing:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. E.g., instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so. When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity. I put quality ahead of quantity because ever more buyers don’t focus on news streams at all. Rather, they go out and search for information when they feel they need it, and when they’re doing that you want them to see a reasonable quantity of highly favorable commentary, even more than you want them to find a large number of decent mentions.
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. When addressing specialized “expert” influencers, you should have two end goals — quality of online mention and quality of word-of-mouth mention. This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one for multiple reasons, including:
  • Specialist/expert influencers have a wider good-to-bad spectrum of commentary than theoretically unbiased reporters do.
  • Even if you don’t see that in print, it certainly happens in private conversation.
  • Their followers are apt to be focused enough to notice what tone the commentary takes.
  • If they have a high opinion of you, quantity will often take care of itself.
  • You probably couldn’t measure word-of-mouth quantity if you tried (although mass consumer markets may be an exception to that rule).
• Reaching out to the broad market directly.  Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles. And a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.

With all that as background, let me now turn to the specific tips that started this all off.

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies.
• If you must use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, for a conversation that BOTH sides want to have, that’s OK. It’s not ideal, but it’s less likely to actually damage you than some of the alternative approaches to PR are.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea. Indeed, it’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will oversell and burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you.  (On your payroll or otherwise.) Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be. The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be.
• Review pitch emails just as you review press releases. If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch email writes itself. Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched. A bad pitch email can piss off an influencer even more than a bad press release does, because it often consumes more of their attention. (Vendors really fall down on this point.)
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process. This is an extension of the previous point. If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better.
• And here’s what I REALLY think: Just treat press releases as documents your post online. Press releases get picked up in various places online.  And sometimes they even appear in venues (mainly online) where they look like they’re press articles. So you’re not actually going to stop issuing them. (Sigh.) But the writing you do for your generic online audience is very different from what you should do for reporters and other influencers.

To reach the latter group, the right model is something that’s at least quasi-personal, quasi-straightforward, and quasi-in-depth. In other words, it’s a lot like a blog — or else like a series of truly personal email correspondences. But, given how long this has already become, that’s a subject for another post.

*There actually are a couple of vendors who drown me in press releases without pissing me off. Why? Because those press releases have instantly comprehensible headlines and topic paragraphs. (Typically they’re user success stories without breathless fluff.) I know what I’m ignoring, without having any work to do to ignore it. The reason I mentioned Rita Shoor’s work for Intersystems above is that she’s great at that kind of thing. (Look around my blogs; you’ll see that it’s really rare that I write a story like this one that Rita induced.)

Getting a favorable mention in a couple of prominent blogs should not be the be-all, end-all of your launch strategy.  Rather, you should be laying the groundwork for getting enterprises to place significant bets on your unproven technology.  Eliciting the “I’m interested in that if it works” reaction is only a very small part of your overall marketing challenge.

Related links

• A layered messaging model
• Always be marketing

1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual.  … The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit.  … Agreed.

2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past.  True but overstated.  There are three golden rules of social media marketing:

• Make your messages robust.
• Train and trust many of your employees to deliver the message, implicitly and explicitly.
• Trust your employees to show their own personalities without hopelessly undermining the “personality” of your enterprise.
  

The first two have actually been good management practice for decades, and the third one frequently worked as well.

3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually.  A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes. Agreed.

4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated.  It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own.  But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. Agreed. I have clients who ask me to review a large fraction of their individual blog posts. I think that’s a great use of my time … but then, I think the same thing about press releases.