May marks the 1-year anniversary of the release of Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernoff’s book, Groundswell.  Several industry analysts have released books since then. I figure it’s a good time to shout out to some recent analyst authors and talk a little about why writing books can be such an important activity for market influencers and influencer relations professionals alike.

For IT industry analysts and other types of influencers, writing a book serves several purposes. Books can help create broad industry acceptance of ideas. They also elevate the status of the author as a bona fide expert, and serve as a powerful marketing tool. As a result, influencer relations programs take “author status” into account when profiling opinion-leaders. Publishing a book adds weight to the influencer’s market reach and authority.

 

Carol Baroudi, Jeffrey Hill, Arnold Reinhold, Jhana Senxian: “Green IT For Dummies” explores how businesses can save money and energy and reduce environmental waste by becoming a leader in green technology.  Carol has other “Dummies” titles to her credit, including SOA for Dummies which she co-wrote with Judith Hurwitz, Robin Bloor & associates.

 

John Blossom: Developed through a collaborative expert wiki, “Content Nation: Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives and Our Future” describes how social media changes the way businesses market products & services, influences how people interact with the government, and dictates how we communicate with one another on a personal level.

 

 

Greg Schulz: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” covers technologies and techniques for data centers trying to maximize resources such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity. It shows how to make server and storage virtualization energy efficient and still be able to support a diversity of high-performance applications without degrading application quality of service or service level commitments. 

 

 

Chetan Sharma: “Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence” (IEEE Series on Digital & Mobile Communication) explains the business, regulatory, and technology issues of the future market for wireless services. It covers broadband and the information society; drivers of broadband consumption; global wireless market analysis; broadband IP core networks; convergence; and contention and conflict. 

 

 

Jackie Fenn, Mark Raskino: Companies rush to adopt the innovation, often with a heavy investment—and then, when the promised bounty doesn’t appear as quickly as anticipated, there’s an equivalent rush to bail out. ”Mastering the Hype Cycle” lays out a disciplined, benefits-led approach to innovation adoption, drawing on company examples and Gartner’s STREET framework (Scope, Track, Rank, Evaluate, Evangelize, Transfer).

 

 

Did I miss one?  Feel free to post additions & comment on these titles. All valid influencers and all types of influencers are welcome.

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It’s that time of year again. Time to decide which industry analysts called the shots, gave the answers, and made the time often enough to earn an IT research and advisory contract for 2007. My advice to analysts this year: publish proof points showing your accuracy, timeliness, objectivity, engagement. Put forward some well researched — not just well rehearsed — reasons for us to believe.

Analyst bashups, in general, are nothing new. Historically, the most damage was done by competitive sales teams and word of mouth — the kind of thing you find in any industry. A few journalists would take the time to sleuth planned budgets or controversial practices, and that was pretty much the extent of it.

Blogs have changed the old analyst bashups. More people than ever are publishing anecdotes about smart and not-so-smart analyst opinions, research, forecasts.

Some examples of what’s out there, how easy it is to find:

• Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff apparently told the London City Show audience that he listens to Ovum’s Bradshaw, because Bradshaw knows his stuff and called it right more consistently than Gartner or Forrester. His endorsement went far beyond the back of the room. It was reported by Salesforce.com ISV Gareth Davies in his blog, Where’s the Upside?, and relayed in James Governor’s blog, MonkChips. I found it there via my FeedDemon RSS channel of favorite analyst blogs.
• Todd Defren, a principal at PR agency SHIFT Communications, spins a typical sour-grapes anecdote about Gartner Magic Quadrants into an open call for bashups about Gartner and any/all analysts at his pr-squared blog. I found it via a simple Technorati search for blog posts on Gartner and Magic Quadrants.
• Telephia suffered collateral damage in the Cingular/Sprint Nextel/Verizon cell phone network war. Blog spin of a NY Times article describing Telephia’s involvement in Cingular advertising claims (”fewest dropped calls”) included mopocket.com, and engadget mobile. As with most posts at engadget, this one was picked up by a half dozen other blogs in addition to the numerous RSS feed aggregators. Boston Globe’s story resulted in its own cascade of blog coverage, such as Joho the Blog and WebProNews.com. I found these using a Google blog search for background on the Telephia lawsuit against M:Metrics.

These are just a few examples of the reverb going on out here. This doesn’t even take into account dedicated analyst-watching bloggers, such as GartnerWatch and ARmadgeddon, or enterprise IT bloggers such as James McGovern blogging at Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership.

Plus, you’ve got all the blogs relaying that usual sprinkling of investigative reporting I mentioned earlier. A recent example: Computerworld New Zealand’s forum piece questioning research transparency and objectivity. This came to my attention via a reader who chose to remain anonymous. Talk about irony. Still, I followed the link and bookmarked it.

My point is that the critics are not just a few Fortune 100 directors on the back nine, or a band of trolls piping through anonymous proxy servers. Whether you need to see this as a tipping point or an inflection point, just get the point:

Analyst, research thyself and share thy findings.

As always, I hope you’ll voice your opinion on my opinion at the Tekrati blog.

Reprinted from Tekrati.

Editor’s note: Description of Marc Benioff comments were revised, per comments posted at Tekrati blog.

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The Analyst Strategy Group, founded by former SageCircle analyst relations consultants, offers its 2004 Tech Buyers Study and related deliverables. Visit the ASG Web site for survey highlights (display highlights by rolling your cursor over the thumbnail charts), and to download a descriptive study scope sheet. Note that ASG suggests including company executives and members of the sales leadership team when considering its option for purchasing a live 90-minute review session of survey findings. The 2004 ASG study reflects almost 500 individual responses, providing what ASG believes to be statistically significant findings for the North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific regions, as well as several vertical markets. The types of tech buyer information included:

• Analyst firm usage and the importance of individual analyst firms within each region
• Analyst and consulting firm usage and importance based on IT buyer company size
• The credibility of each of the major analyst firms, with differences noted by region and vertical market
• The role and relative impact of the media, analysts and consultants in each stage of the buying process
• Individual analyst/consultant vs. firm credibility in each geographic region

Reprinted from Tekrati

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