Is the penny dropping for AR professionals?

Carter Lusher and Skip MacAskill two long-standing Analyst relations professionals, both ex-Gartner, now heading up AR at HP and Cisco respectively. I recently linked to Carter’s post on influence here.

Skip’s recent post on influence is important because he states a belief that “the traditional business models that analyst firms have employed for years will become less relevant within the next three to five years.”

He also thinks that the “traditional” firms won’t disappear completely, but they will be hard pressed by emerging information delivery models and processes – along with a new breed of alternative influencers – that are fast-moving and in-the moment.

Finally, Skip believes that “that the number of users that buy a product or invest in a technology off the back of a traditional Gartner, Forrester or Yankee report will significantly decrease over the next five years.”

These are important comments from the AR perspective, notably so because AR stands to lose as much as analyst firms. As Skip notes, “I don’t welcome that development with any type of mirth or glee – as an Analyst Relations guy, I’m quite interested in things like job security and my function’s own continued relevance – but I definitely sense a shift in the air.”

I think that the way forward for AR is for it to broaden out into a wider understanding of where influence is actually applied, beyond analysts to encompass consultants, academics, bloggers, procurement bodies, financial authorities, regulators, government agencies, consumer groups, and the rest of the influencer community.

The difficulty is, most vendors have no idea who really influences their customers and prospects, and wouldn’t have anything to say to them if they did know. That’s why I wrote a white paper on the subject a year ago, to shake vendors out of the “Analysts equal influence” mindset. It is still pertinent today.

The question for AR now is, do you take note of what senior AR pros are saying on the shake up of influence and act on it? Or ignore it and hope for the best?

Analyst influence diminishing further…?

A couple of months back we published a White Paper entitled Analyst Influence is Diminishing. What was remarkable about the paper’s reception was its wide acknowledgement as fact, apart from one or two AR blogs. Most marketing directors and AR people we spoke to were pleased to have their views confirmed, but weren’t hugely surprised by our promouncement. So much for being controversial.

One of the points we made was the dissipating influence of analysts, due to erosion of credibility. ARmadgeddon is running a poll on analyst “unpredictions” and has already recorded some examples where Gartner gets it wrong, mainly around its magic quadrant.

Our view is not that analysts are losing their influence. It is that analysts are having to share influence with other influencer types, that may be less obvious but just as important. Analysts have got predictions wrong for ever – at Ovum we used examples of poor predictions in our forecasting courses (politeness forbids naming offenders, except that one of them is me!).

Still, we enjoy with schadenfreude the current cycle of criticism…

The influence of blogs

At the recent Unicom conference on Social Network Tools, I showed a chart illustrating the declining influence of analysts and journalists on IT decision makers (ITDM). The chart also showed the recent increase in influence of bloggers. The chart caused a bit of a stir.

Our research shows that the average ITDM apportions no more than 45% of influence to analysts and journalists. The remaining influence is spread over numerous influencer types. Bloggers show the biggest increase, from zero in 2004 to 8% in 2006.

Stowe Boyd, a blogging guru, claimed in the conference that in the US the influence of blogs now exceeds that of analysts and journalists. Can this be true?

Firstly, there is some overlap between the two communities. For example, Forrester’s Charlene Li and Business Week’s Stephen Baker have highly rated blogs. It will be interesting to watch the transition from traditional analyst/journalists media (reports, newspapers, etc) to blogs.

Secondly, from my (so far, limited) look at blogs, the main audience for bloggers is … other bloggers. Are ITDMs reading blogs? Do CEOs read blogs? Or are they still influenced by more traditional sources? Clearly it depends on the individual and the market. But my thinking is that the influence of blogging is limited, other than within the blogosphere.

Finally, are we seeing the emergence of a truly new type of influencer – the blogger? Or are we seeing the use of a new medium (the blog) which allows existing influencers to become more obvious?

My sense is that blogging and other social networking tools are similar to the worldwide web in the mid-1990s. Those businesses that colonised the early web pioneered the new media, worried the old guard and promised to the change the business world (remember the “New Economy”?). But most early adopters failed, and the web became a mainstream tool for all – nearly every business now has a web site.

So blogging will, in time, be done by everyone (or every business). It’s this interim, disruptive time that makes blogging interesting now. Geoffrey Moore would say that blogging is in “the chasm,” – blogging is about to climb out into mainstream adoption. And its distinct influence will dissipate accordingly.