The industry analyst business is no stranger to M&As. Generally, most of the dust settles within a few weeks or months. However, there are rare occasions when the business integration takes so long that everyone forgets they’re waiting for closure. We’ve got one of those rare cases today: the official integration of Analysys, Mason and Catalyst into Analysys Mason.

The official integration was unveiled today. Datatec announced plans for it back in August 2004. Almost four years in the making.

The new Analysys Mason footprint uses what’s becoming the universal analyst business org chart: analysts on one side of the aisle, consultants on the other. On paper, this model benefits research and consulting clients alike.

For prospective clients and the rest of us, the new brand means less confusion at last between Analysys and Analysys International.

Much about Analysys does not change. I continue advising prospective research buyers to look into Datatec, the majority owner of Analysys Mason, as part of the analyst selection process. I’ve never heard a single criticism stemming from the Datatec ownership since the acquisition. However, what’s the point of demanding transparency if you don’t take advantage of it? Make sure you’re informed and comfortable. Datatec puts its subsidiary holdings into perspective in a handy menu.

Best of wishes to all at Analysys Mason.

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.

Brian Clark, who writes Copyblogger, put together a great post on The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging. It’s good advice. It reminds us that there’s more to an influential blog than a famous author or a Technorati ranking.

Brian also touches on a point about persuasion that deserves attention: whether the style of writing prompts action.

By tradition, analysts who address best practices write copy intended to prompt action. Analysts focused on market and technology analysis are less likely to do so. Instead, these analysts write copy designed to educate readers or persuade readers to agree with their opinion, be it positive, negative, or neutral. Both types can be influential. The difference is the outcome.

Blogs eliminate many traditions, including analyst writing styles. Like everyone else, analysts can exercise greater personal choice in how they express themselves in their blogs. Their blogging voice is not determined by their employer or their other publication channels. There’s only one way to figure out what kind of persuasion — if any — is at work in an analyst blog: you read it.

For more on persuasive writing techniques, check out Clark’s other post, Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques. It summarizes techniques associated with personality as much as style.

What do you think? I’d like to develop this idea further. I’ll come back from the New Communications Forum (April 22-25 in Sonoma) with more on this idea. Catch up with me there (contact me for special Tekrati discounts), or link/share your thoughts here.

Analyst relations managers can make good use of the social media release, as shown this week by Visible Technologies. The company announced on Tuesday that it has been selected as one of Gartner’s Cool Vendors for 2008, in the High Performance Workplace category. They also pushed the news through the company blog.

For comparison, check out LucidEra’s traditional press release. They were named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management category.

Both releases are written well. Both conform to strict Gartner requirements. Both go beyond the bare bones minimum for approved content. Yet, the formats make the releases come across quite differently.

I’ll be pigeonbuttonholing some of the A-listers on using new media for industry analyst relations and industry research promotion at the New Communications Forum, beginning April 22nd in Sonoma. If you’re interested in learning more too, why not attend? Contact me for info on my special media sponsor discount.

Check out Johnny B’s April 1st post, ““IDG to merge IDC with Gartner?”

I’d put money on the global analyst relations community reacting something like this.

Dave Rossiter has navigated the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) blog into an ongoing discussion about analyst ethics and independence. The post more or less recounts the usual assortment of issues and war stories, and then poses the perennial question:

“As analyst relations professionals, we face a challenge. What responsibility do we have for ensuring these practices are stamped out? Are we proactive or do we just refuse to support them? Do we have a ‘quiet word’ in the right ear? Do we out the bad apples in public?”

Whether the IIAR is truly sinking its teeth into the issue — or simply jumping the shark — remains to be seen.

The IIAR needs to focus attention on where it can make a positive impact. If you look closely, David does bring up one area where the IIAR could make an impact: the misuse of briefings as sales calls.

This is actionable because it’s a specific business practice, it’s commonplace, each occurrence is obvious, and each occurrence is easily documented. As an added bonus, there’s no “objectivity” rhetoric around it to make AR practitioners uneasy: an analyst sales pitch is attached, or it’s not.

Plus, a precedent exists. ESOMAR’s guideline, “Maintaining Distinctions between Marketing Research and Direct Marketing,” addresses similar issues within the context of consumer market research:

“Whenever researchers are acting in their capacity as researchers they must not be involved in carrying out direct marketing or other non-research activities. Such activities are by definition incompatible with Rule 4 of the International Code which safeguards the confidentiality of respondents’ personal data which have been collected for marketing research purposes and prevents these from being used for any non-research purpose.

“This Rule does not prevent researchers, when they are acting in a different capacity (e.g. as a general information manager), from being involved with the operation of marketing databases. However, in such a case they must clearly differentiate such an activity from their work as a marketing researcher and avoid any confusion arising between the
two types of activity.”

Of course, the IIAR would need to clean up some questionable AR practices around briefings, as well.

During February, I added 9 blogs to Tekrati’s Directory of Analyst Blogs, and archived 1.

February adds

Some are new, some are newly discovered.

Company: FAO Research
Lisa Ross formally announced her first blog, Outsourcing Perspectives. It debuted with quite a bit of content and comment.

Company: Forrester Research
The title says it all: George F. Colony’s Blog: Counterintuitive. He launched the blog with several posts about Davos — personal takes on the who and why, a bit about his own agenda there. The blog will feel familiar to fans of his long-running “My View” columns and newsletters.

At this point, Green IT Sourcing by Euan Davis and Christopher Mines, is added as a vote of encouragement. Don’t let this one die.

Also, check out Wicked Flavory, a personal blog on local/organic foods, by Kerry Bodine. Hat tip on that one to Jeremiah Owyang, who solicited coworker blogs and faves for submission to Jonny Bentwood’s Top Analyst Blogs.

Company: Greentech Media
Scott Clavenna and (primarily) editor Daniel Englander have been busy blogging at Green Light, an extension to the company’s cleantech/greentech industry media and research.

Company: Guidewire Group
The original company blog has been replaced with The Guidewire, written by CEO Chris Shipley and analyst Carla Thompson. Also, check out Carla’s personal blog, Sharp Skirts.

Company: Jupiter Research
At last, a Jup analyst with a personal blog. John Lovett’s personal blog, Musings on Web Site Technologies and Operations, came to my attention when he criticized and linked to one of my posts.

Company: RedMonk
Greenmonk Associates, a blog by RedMonk James Governor. Hat tip to Jonny Bentwood’s Top 100 Analyst Blogs, for finding this one.

Blogs archived in February

Just one: Chris Shipley’s Guidewire Connection, replaced by the new blog.

This is a community directory. Please help.

On February 29th, the directory contained 267 blog listings. Those with valid feeds are also included in Tekrati’s blog rolls and the directory OPML.

The Tekrati Directory of Analyst Blogs and OPML is a freely available service.

Please support this effort by sharing tips on blogs/bloggers that are missing, acknowledging your use of the directory/OPML as appropriate, and spreading the word.

Thanks!
Barbara

I’m a fan of analyst firms that market their data through interactive tools. Examples include interactive calculators and animated trending charts embedded into websites. These kinds of web apps can make research data relevant and easy to understand.

Plus, adding an interactive research tool to a web page is about as close to “sticky” and “viral” marketing as most industry analysts can get, short of donning a chicken suit.

Interactive technologies are already finding their way into the research products. You’ve seen them as weighted vendor short listing tables and other decision support tools. By comparison, adding simple interactive web apps to websites and blogs is easy. So, why isn’t everybody all over this as a marketing tactic?

Analysts I’ve spoken with generally share the same 3 challenges:
1. What to aim for (concept)
2. How to build it (design, program, test)
3. Finding time for #1 and #2

A quick way to start tackling the first challenge — concept — is to spend a few minutes reading UIE expert Jared Spool’s post, “Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com”. Spool highlights what he likes best about the New York Times’ recent use of web apps. An excerpt:

… represented as a table, this data would have hundreds of rows and dozens of columns. It wouldn’t be interesting and it would be hard to discern interesting patterns.

Yet, as an interactive map, it becomes a different story … Using color, shape, location, and a clever fly-over display, the team has taken a ton of variables and presented them in a more useful format.

It seems likely that interactive web apps also deliver benefits beyond the data presentation itself. What about attracting more inbound links, reader comments, and reader ratings? Improving visitor conversion rates? Or, giving RSS readers a compelling reason to click through to the mothership.

Jonny Bentwood, an Edelman employee who blogs at Technobabble 2.0, has issued his quarterly ranking of the “Top 100 analyst blogs”. The ranking is based on his own system of points, applied to the Tekrati analyst blogs directory plus additional blogs that he identifies.

This time around, the top honors went to Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah. This is the first ranking published since Jeremiah joined Forrester Research.

In browsing the rankings, I’ve spotted 3 blogs not listed in the Tekrati directories:

The Net-Savvy Executive by Nathan Gilliatt, of Social Target (ranked 31)

Greenmonk, an open source / cleantech community founded by James Governor, Redmonk (ranked 65)

Holway’s HotViews by Richard Holway, until recently an active icon in the industry analyst community (not ranked)

The Top 100 also includes some blogs no longer appearing in the Tekrati directory.

Props to Jonny Bentwood for outstanding work! Props to every blogging analyst, on the list or not!