Conversations about industry analyst influence often swirl around how analyst visibility in the media does — or does not — count. That’s an important conversation. Yet, focusing on the value of clips might make you miss what might be the most important change taking place: analysts adopting media as a bona fide content distribution channel.
Media has always been an important strut in the analyst machinery. Media visibility generates street cred and prospects. Behind the scenes, media alliances can be crucial in research panels and speaker placements.
This is different. This is firms breaking down the traditional visible distinctions between “media” and “analyst” content. For them, media is not a tacked-on, opportunistic publicity tool; it’s a strategic content distribution channel. I went back and forth on some of the pro’s and con’s with Freeform Dynamics’ Dale Vile a few months ago.
In the latest Valley View Ventures newsletter, Fred Abbott offers another take on this discussion. Here’s an excerpt, courtesy of Fred:
Packaging to Fit a New Distribution Channel
Media visibility is one part of a new analysis delivery model. Embracing the media to distribute their insights requires analysts to rethink how they package those insights. An increasingly influential group of successful IT analysts disaggregate deliverables so that the information will flow through various value-added distribution channels without disintegrating in the process. Conceptually, this is like how small retailers learned to display and package their deliverables so that they could be shipped and arrive safely in their satisfied customers’ hands.
Packaging of IT analysis has gone through metamorphoses before. In the early eighties, Gartner revolutionized the IT market research business by introducing short research notes (450 words) to compete against competitors’ multi-page research reports. Until that point, brief reports were considered too short to convey valuable information. Today IT industry analysts gifted at communicating insight in the context of short vignettes, wrapped with business perspective, are breaking new ground in how to communicate with a broader and better informed audience.
In the B2B spaces, it’s early days. Analyst best practices — and even what’s at stake — aren’t all that clear. Yet.
Meanwhile, analyst relations people need to keep an eye on this. It further complicates decisions around that gray, mushy overlap area in media-analyst Venn diagrams. Reclassifying analysts probably won’t help. Rethinking output categories and metrics might.
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