Illuminating the Future:

Analyzing the Analysts

"Have you ever wondered who is whispering in the ears of your customers? Who has their confidence? Who is influencing their decisions?"

Those are the questions posed by Bill Hopkins, founder and CEO of the Knowledge Capital Group, at the start of his new book, Influencing the Influencers: Best Practices for Building Valuable Relationships with Technology Industry Analysts. As the book goes on to discuss, industry analysts -- firms such as Gartner, Inc., Forrester Research and International Data Corp. (IDC) -- are critical influencers in the trillion dollar world of information technology.

They are far more powerful than the press. They are second only to executive peers in terms of the value that technology buyers place on their advice.

What makes them influential -- some of them, at least -- is their power to advise clients on their technology options. They short-list technology vendors and feature them in their research. The words of a respected analyst can make or break a technology vendor. In fact, technology buyers -- in the Fortune 500 and beyond -- now rely on analysts as an insurance policy (or "Kevlar underwear" as the book colorfully puts it). Big ticket IT decisions are simply more defensible when a recognized third-party such as Gartner blesses them.

That powerful influence arguably is growing. “The IT decisions that CIOs and their direct reports are making today are more complicated and more important to the business than ever before,” says Dale Kutnick, founder of Meta Group, which was recently acquired by Gartner. “There are more variables to consider. The financial ramifications of right or wrong decisions are more compelling than they were 10, 15 or 20 years ago... We are an insurance policy. We are a risk management or mitigation policy for the user environment because they are making multi-million dollar IT decisions."

With this in mind, Hopkins helps the reader understand the intricacies of the influence game and weigh the relative impact and importance of various analyst firms. All analysts, it should be said, are not created equal.

Gartner and Forrester, for instance, are generally more influential than others because they derive most of their revenue from technology buyers (the "end-users"). They are considered "Deal Makers or Breakers" in the book. However, other firms such as IDC, AMR, Tower, Ovum are recognized as "Point Players" that are influential in specific markets. 

Thought Leadership: A Simple Formula

In research for my upcoming book on thought leadership, I recognized just how personal the issue has become.

While companies now want to be recognized for their insights and perspectives, the term "thought leadership" is perhaps most commonly used in press releases announcing the arrival of some new executive. In other words, your career elevation depends on being perceived as a thought leader. 

In a recent article, Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, offers a simple formula: 1) build expertise and 2) get people to recognize it. He says he is living proof that the formula works.

At Deloitte Consulting, my rise from post-MBA consultant to chief marketing officer was accelerated by my "getting slightly famous" in the fields of re-engineering and customer relationship management. Then it was sharing my marketing acumen that helped me land jobs as CMO of Starwood Hotels and CEO of a computer games startup, as well as founding my own sales and marketing consultancy, Ferrazzi Greenlight.

He offers five simple steps (which he attributes to former Deloitte colleague Bo Manning) for becoming a thought leader:

1. Talk about your expertise with everyone you meet.
2. Prepare a formal, one-hour talk with a deck of slides.
3. Write an article.
4. Write more articles.
5. Write a book.

As Ferrazzi acknowledges, this is tough work. By doing the last four of those behind the scenes to help my clients become thought leaders, I have made it significantly less arduous on them. But it's still a tremendous commitment. One has to have the ambition, energy and courage to assume a role of leadership in the first place.

Of course, one of the best ways to elevate ourselves is by elevating others. Many of the people I work with are focused on turning the senior executives in their firms into thought leaders.

All that said, I share Ferrazzi's view that this is the best way to rise above the market noise and become a respected authority in one's field or industry. The rewards come in powerful new roles and promotions, escalating compensation, and the high esteem of one's colleagues and customers.

Stories and Scenarios

Best-selling books are a key factor in the world of thought leadership. After all, you never know when your CEO is going to pick up a good book in the airport and have what I like to call an "airplane epiphany."

The success of a book, however, often is highly influenced by who praises it on the back cover. Big name testimonials -- from Oprah in fiction or Seth Godin in marketing or Tom Peters (!) on just about anything -- matter quite a bit.

So it was interesting to hear Geoffrey Moore, who is most famous in high-tech marketing circles for his book Crossing the Chasm, speak recently about book blurbing in the Wall Street Journal. As he explained:

There are three reasons you'd do a blurb. The first is you know the author and are completely in support of their agenda. Then, there are publishers and agents and others -- sometimes they do favors for you, and periodically you should probably do favors back. The third reason is when I don't know the author, but know they are addressing an issue that is really important.

He says he gets asked to blurb about six to eight books a year and usually blurbs about three to four. I'm not sure he actually reads them though. "I am not a big reader of nonfiction," he tells the interviewer. "I read a lot of fiction and a lot of science books. Now I'm reading a lot about the biology of the cell."

I guess we all can understand just how fascinating the biology of the cell can be in your off hours. But why does he read so much fiction? Does he spend time with fiction, he is asked, because it is fun to read or relevant to business?

For both reasons. If you think about how problems get solved at a strategic level in a business, it's all around some version of scenario planning. And if you ask, "What is scenario planning?" It's story telling. What you're trying to do is come up with plausible stories that represent in your mind the best distillation of the economic currents and competitive dynamics you've been witnessing.

So there you go. It comes down to story telling. You want to win in the marketplace? You want to cross the chasm? You want a blurb from Geoffrey Moore? Tell a great story.

Podcasting or Plodcasting?

Call me a skeptic -- about podcasting anyway.

When I was interviewed for a recent article in WhitePaperSource Newsletter about the podcasting "craze," I simply couldn't bring myself to hop on the hype and celebrate all the wonderful marketing possibilities. I felt like a reality check might be more useful at this point. As I noted in my comments:

The operative word is craze. Gartner, the influential IT research firm, talks about the concept of a "hype cycle." From that perspective, podcasting is now experiencing what they call the "peak of inflated expectations." It's easy to grow from a small base, but the expectations are simply too high. What's next? Right on cue, podcasting will fall into the "trough of disillusionment" when it fails to meet all these unrealistic expectations. Fortunately, it will probably find a sensible place in the marketing mix and rise back up as a productive tool. 

Marketers, as I see it, need to take a sensible perspective toward iPods and other media such as blogs, wikis and whatever. As I explained in that piece:

Smart marketers will recognize that podcasting is merely one stock -- or security -- within the marketing portfolio. Assuming that podcasting matches the needs and interests of the targeted audience, they will manage it with discipline as part of the portfolio. They will watch it, measure it and determine how much attention it truly deserves. My concern is that podcasting is a slow, linear, plodding medium in an era of dynamic, non-linear, hyper-linked learning and knowledge acquisition. I think of it as "plodcasting" at this point. If podcasting is to become truly valuable, then we are going to need better and faster ways of navigating the audio content in order to find what we need.

Podcasting is generally too boring as it is. Few marketers are pulling it off -- and, as I said, I am not sure it can be pulled off in the absence of better content navigation.   

I'm not sure at all that podcasting matches the preferences and priorities of the target -- whether that's a prospect, customer, analyst, journalist or stockholder. Without the context of a specific situation, it's impossible to say how valuable podcasting is -- or isn't.

One thing I do know is that this temporal obsession with a particular medium -- one day it's search, next it's blogs, then it's podcasting -- suggests a certain immaturity and drift toward attention deficit disorder among those who get caught up in the hype.

If we are to be successful in the complex, ever-changing arena of B2B marketing, we need to step back and keep our cool.

Impress the Press

Thought leadership is not only about forward looking insights. It's also about influencing the market conversation.

If your ideas are not getting picked up by the third-party influencers who frame the conversation, you will never be perceived as a thought leader. With that in mind, it's critical to understand how to manage influencers such as the press and media.

"Like it or not, we need each other. You need us to cover the products you're responsible for, whether they're your own creations or you work for a public relations firm responsible for getting coverage for your company's products," writes Esther Schindler of the Internet Press Guild. "We need information from you in order to get our stories done."

"If you want our attention, please recognize that we writers are inundated with information," she adds. "Professional magazine and trade newspaper writers get dozens of press releases every day; sometimes hundreds of them, during busy times like the weeks before Comdex (or other events in our specific slice of the market). If you want to work with us effectively, fit yourself into our way of working -- or at least do your best to understand it."

In the case of the press, it's particularly important to look at how they like to be contacted. According to the public relations firm Bennett & Company's annual media survey, eighty nine percent (89%) of all journalists surveyed preferred email as the main way to receive information, followed by regular mail (6%). Only one percent (1%) said they preferred to be contacted by phone.

Personalized addresses are also important. Fifty percent (50%) of the media polled said they respond more readily to a personalized address and 4 percent (4%) said that a general editor address will do. The remaining 46 percent (46%) did not have a preference. Many noted that while they do not have a preference, personalized communications reach them quicker.

Multimedia is also an attractor. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of media polled said that the availability of multimedia (photos, charts, graphs,audio and video) does enhance the chances of a story being used. That suggests companies must not only think about developing a compelling story, but ensure that it is presented in compelling ways.

Of course, it isn't all about how you communicate. Relevance is particularly critical to PR success. PR maven Nettie Hartsock (who conducts an insightful seminar called "Impress the Press") warns against inundating journalists with useless press releases about mundane subjects.

Instead, she urges PR professionals to "really research what the journalist covers and email something about your client if they can serve as a good resource expert for that journalist or if there is a timely news story."

Great advice. Take the time to get to know the journalists (and other influencers) you need to know. As I've written elsewhere, it's preferable to reach the right press rather than the most press. To reach the right press, you need to know who they are, what they write and what they want to know from you.