To follow the IIAR Webinar with ARInsights and Huawei “Tracking Analyst Influence: Is there an easier way?” on the 29th May 2014 this describes the systems used by Huawei and a case study of their experience. The full document, presentation and recording from the webinar are all available here.
Several IT buyer surveys have established that industry analysts are the second biggest influence on technology buying decisions, behind peer groups but well ahead of consultants. Analysts influence through a number of different avenues – by direct phone conversations, by creating a broad media buzz through subscription research, media quotes and in social media such as blogs and the rapid fire of Twitter.
Intuitively, most AR professionals know that they need to track what analysts are saying via all these outlets, but are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task. Shouldn’t it be easy in the age of “GOOGLE” to find anything that exists on the internet? Technically, YES! Although, when you are monitoring more than a handful of analysts across their research, blogs, Twitter and media quotes, things can get a little hectic.
See also the following IIAR Best Practice papers (membership required):
- An Introduction to Measurement and Evaluation in Industry Analyst Relations
Author: Ellie Warner (LinkedIn, @elliewarner) - The AR Compass (post) (paper on Huddle – Members only) (slideshare presentation -public)
Authors: Charmaine Chan (@CharmaineChan, LinkedIn), Ludovic Leforestier (@lludovic, LinkedIn)
Two comments –
One – Google is all but useless monitoring research inside the firewall particularly at Gartner. RSS feeds are the same. Neither contain complete vendor names or enough words to judge tonality. Without keyword constraints most big vendors will just drown your numbers.
Two – unless you align top individual analysts (5-10) and competitors (3-5) to each part of your product line you will never see the wood for the trees. A list of lists approach to targeting drives good metrics.
We spend ten times more time on designing metrics “grids” and on learning how to get the most out of firm’s own search engines than actually counting stuff and assigning tone, for all our major metrics clients.
See the lest KCG White Paper (ping me for a copy – sengland at knowledgecap.com.)