Several bloggers have been talking about industry analysts and high tech startups. Brings back the dotcom days, when startups rolled down 101 in their stretch limos, on their VC and analyst tours. Everybody needed a nod from Gartner or Forrester to clinch that next round of funding. Much has changed. Some suggest the changes include a more mature view of where analysts fit in startup strategies:

Carter Lusher suggests the analysts as more important than PR for startups. He sees analysts as almost a sales lead generation/conversion resource. He’s got a case study where the entire marketing budget went to Gartner to Gartner and a customer reference program.

Raj Kanaya and John Oh advise startups to look to at least two customer-focused advisory analysts — smaller firms in particular — to help offset the typical bootstrap shortage of product marketing expertise as well as market data. (Hat tip to Duncan Chapple for pointing to their blog.)

It’s good advice, but analyst sales reps should size up the obstacles. The biggest: getting startups to look past the nearest Gartner Magic Quadrant or Cool Vendors list. The other biggest: convincing startups and their boards/VCs that they should part with cold cash for analyst services.

Free is a very attractive idea. Selling analyst services to startups is not a walk in the park. There are lots of indicators out there that the “zero marketing budget” mindset of the old open source software crowd is about to come back even stronger on the wings of social media and community based conversation.

Of course, analysts could turn this momentum to their advantage. Chris Kelley suggests that analysts interested in the early adopter markets could use microblogging tools like Twitter to slash overhead and boost loyalty.

Interesting ideas.

The ReadWriteWeb reviews a tool many market watchers will crave and therefore every industry analyst should study: Trendpedia. It represents a new approach to promoting market research:

The service, now out of beta, lets you scan the blogosphere for trends to see what’s getting buzz. Trendpedia also lets you compose visualizations of those trends as charts and graphs, which can then be shared on the social web.

I can see in Trendpedia a template for a topic-specific trend watcher tool. Instead of searching against blogosphere buzz statistics, imagine searching against an analyst’s statistical data for trends in something that matters to you — be it virtualization or outsourcing or cellphone vendor rankings. Imagine using this kind of simple form for on-demand insights from some — or, on a paid basis all — of an analyst’s statistical knowledgebase.

For me, Trendpedia proves that you can make some types of research data fun and relevant. It’s a great way to stimulate User Generated Content around market data. It’s a natural for gaining visibility through company blogs/sites, media partner sites, and social media platforms, like Wordpress, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I suspect this sort of application would be fairly easy to mobilize, as well.