If you work in influencer relations in Silicon Valley, you want to be at the Churchill Club this Monday March 1st for an evening event featuring John Byrne, Richard Edelman, Paul Bergevin, Peter Diamandis and Frank Shaw.

The event comes on the heels of the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global opinion leaders study mentioned in my last post. The Trust Barometer is freely available. Bring your toughest questions or just show up for a great evening of discussion, debate and networking.

I’ll be particularly interested to see how this year’s discussion compares with the 2008 event (my comments).

See you there!

What:
What the Public Believes: New Trends in Corporate Reputation Management
Corporations are in the combat zone, struggling to build back trust among all of their stakeholders in the midst of the global economic crisis. Faced with an overall meltdown in confidence, how is corporate leadership—including marketing, PR, investor relations and public affairs—to respond? How should companies retool their communication strategies and address the right stakeholders with the right issues and strike the right tone? This panel of thought leaders speaks out on the most current trends and strategies for managing corporate reputation and sharpening stakeholder engagement.

Cost
Individual Churchill Club event tickets run $58 - $90, and normally it’s a cash bar. Reg, more info.

Twitter
Hashtag will be #churchillclub.

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Gartner’s planned acquisition* of AMR Research sparked some vibrant conversation this week. Alex Williams posting on it at ReadWriteWeb Enterprise asked my perspective. With his OK, I’m sharing our offline exchange, which focused on enterprise supply chain decision makers.

Enterprises have been putting up with quite a bit of churn and staffing reductions among their analyst firms during this recession, and AMR Research is no exception. Still, AMR Research merging into Gartner signals the loss of yet another independent voice in the enterprise tech marketplace.

Gartner is not simply buying AMR Research business contracts. Gartner is buying the attention and trust that enterprise decision makers invest in AMR Research. That’s what will determine the lifetime value of the AMR Research clients. Attention and trust are the stakes.

The difficulty supply chain decision makers face is that they can’t easily transfer their trust in AMR Research to another analyst firm. Their biggest obstacle is limited choice. Few analyst firms come close to AMR Research in terms of size, expertise, track record, culture and clientele. The choices are:

• the giants — Gartner, Forrester, Informa/Ovum
• a few companies with dedicated teams, such as ARC Advisory and IDC Insights
• a sprinkling of qualified supply chain experts among the hundreds of small analyst firms and one-person shops

Companies comfortable with the AMR Research company culture will need to think about chemistry as much as content when considering Gartner, Forrester Research, ARC Advisory Group and IDC Insights.

The small and one-person consultancies already include several former AMR Research analysts. Decision makers comfortable with betting on the jockey, rather than the horse, will find familiar faces in this group.

What about replacing AMR Research with advisors who do not wear an analyst badge? Most decision makers already listen to several types of experts, at least in the early stages of their decision process. So in reality, this is a question of whether to direct more attention and trust to current advisors whether they be peers, consultants, etc.

My advice to AMR Research clients and partners: take a fresh look at your decision support ecosystem while you’re on honeymoon with Gartner. Assess everyone who has your ear, not just the analysts. It’s a good time to ask, “who are the smartest people on the kinds of supply chain issues we have, and do we confer with them?”

* Tekrati news coverage: joint Gartner financial release, AMR Research commentary, Gartner AR webcast

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Influencer programs can be a lever for building and sustaining trust. How well this works depends largely on how we enable influencers to build and convey trust in our brands. This is especially true given the global economic climate.

We know that influencers are trusted advisors. The question is, how are we enabling them to develop and convey trust in our brands. What kinds of stories, facts and insights are we sharing with them? Are we sharing the right points and conveying them in a compelling, repeatable and remarkable way?

Edelman last week released a mid-year update to their Trust Barometer. The study measures public trust in business and government. This latest survey finds an upswing in trust across the board in China, France, Germany, India, the UK and the US. It also hints at what adds up to trust in informed circles:

“Informed publics attribute increased trust in business to tangible actions that companies have taken in the past six months, giving the highest marks to repaying bailout money (81%), reducing CEO pay (80%), and firing non-performing management teams (78%).

“When asked what companies could do to rebuild trust in the long run, survey respondents put a mix of “hard and soft power” items at the top the list: treating employees well (94%), having transparent business practices (93%), and communicating frequently and honestly (91%) — along with maintaining quality products and services (93%), all of which far surpass increasing shareholder value (66%).”

Do a little of your own market research — whether surveys, focus groups or point conversations — to make sure your influencer program is aligned with the way your market thinks about trust.

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ZDNet blogger Paul Greenberg ran a poll last week asking who his readers trust most — analysts, journalists, institutional analysts, bloggers, others — “when it comes to a good, clean honest look at the enterprise technology industry… especially around traditional and social enterprise software (CRM, ERP, social network platforms) and technologies associated with it”.

With 171 votes to date, the most popular answers are “Ventana Research” (18%), “I don’t trust analysts” (16%), and Gartner (13%).

At least a few readers took issue with Paul mixing analysts such as Gartner with the likes of journalists, bloggers and institutional analysts. I agree with Paul in this instance. The traditional “analyst” role is part and parcel of the work performed by many journalists and bloggers. Plus, the overlay with institutional analyst reports is just as strong today as at any time in the past.

As I noted in the comments to Paul’s post, informed decision-makers bet on the jockey, not the horse. The results would be different if the poll presented a dozen enterprise analysts and journalists rather than company names like Gartner, Forrester and Frost & Sullivan.

As an aside: It looks as though Ventana put some effort into turning out their voters. It’s too bad they don’t work for the state of California. We could have used them for last week’s special election.

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