Communications Insight

For one of my enterprise software clients I’ve recently been spending a lot of time ramping up their analyst relations program. In this particular case, they’ve had a long term program built around briefing a few targeted analysts at key product launch intervals. Recently the company decided to invest more time in the AR function with the objective of providing more sales support through analyst references.  They asked me to come in and help them kick-start the program.

This has caused me to do some thinking about the question, how important is the AR function in today’s world?

As you might know if you’ve followed the tech marketing domain for any period of time, the analyst services industry has consolidated over the past several years and there are now two dominate firms: Forrester and Gartner, and a scattering of boutiques focused on specialized areas.

Let’s focus for a minute on enterprise software only, large pieces of relatively complex software that is typically sold with a direct sales force or perhaps through a SaaS solution. Large corporate IT departments often have relationships with either Forrester or Gartner, or both, to advise them on   their IT purchases and deployments. The idea behind analyst relations is to educate and influence analysts to provide some “air cover” for enterprise sales, either through discussions that analysts have directly with prospects during the sales cycle or through research reports that the analysts may write and publish.

Although we all know the general field of communications has changed dramatically over the past several years, it’s my observation that analyst relations has changed very little.  It is still basically a job of building long-term relationships and understanding with those key analysts who follow your selected market segments. This means using the traditional educational channels of briefings, inquiries, strategy days and occasionally attending conference and meeting face-to-face.

And, yes, for enterprise software companies, particularly those selling in the traditional direct sales model, a proactive, objective-driver analyst relations program is fundamental to success. It’s worth the investment in time, resources and marketing budget.

I’ve been meaning to post about some recent articles that are worth reading:

This one, “The Art of the Pitch: Inspiring Media Relations” by Courtney Boyd Myers, posted earlier this month at TNW: Media,  is a wonderful summary of where we are today with PR and storytelling.

And, this second one, also published earlier this month, is from The New Yorker. A well-wroth reading feature on branding “Famous Names” by John Colapinto, takes us behind-the-scenes of Lexicon, one of the most famous branding companies. For any one interested in brands and the art-of-branding, this piece is worth reading.

Happy Reading!

A few weeks ago one of my favorite clients, game company PlayFirst, released their hit-game Diner Dash, for Facebook. It was an exciting day marking a lot of very hard work by the team at PlayFirst. They celebrated with this awesome cake, homemade by the wife of one of the lead developers. She replicated Flo’s Diner in sugar fondant, which, as many of you probably konw, is not an easy task. The cake is amazing and so is the game, already 2,000,000 MAU’s and growing, over 30,000 reviews with an average five star rating. Check it out!!

Okay; I know we’ve barely started the new year.

But, why is it I keep hearing one word over and over, and why is that word ….drum-roll please…wonky? Can it be that wonky is the IT word of 2011?

Or, at least for January 2011?

Already, in the first 24 days of the year, I’ve heard wonky used more often than I ever remember hearing it before. One of my client CEO’s wrote about a piece of content, “….it looks great except the formatting is abit wonky…”. Another one of my marketing VP’s said, “….the analysis was wonky…”.    And, I’ve heard and seen it used repeatedly in the national media.

Did you know that the word Wonky is primarily Bristish in orgin, and dates back to 1918? This according to Merriam-Webster.

What does Wonky mean? Unsteady, shaky, awry and….wrong.

Here’s to a well…wonky….2011.

I was so sorry to see the news earlier this week about the sale of BusinessWeek by McGraw-Hill.

Of course, I’ve been a career-long subscriber and reader, and worked with many, many of the excellent journalists at BW.  I do consider BW to be one of the very best business pubs, week-in and week-out providing thoughtful analysis and commentary on breaking news. Often uncovering stories that others do not report.

Well, I guess desperate times means desperate measures. We can only hope that BusinessWeek finds a good home. That some publishing company will see the value of the brand and scoop it up, invest the money that is needed to bring it to full life on the web.

If you haven’t checked it out, the BusinessWeek Exchange is worth exploring. I blogged about it here. It’s a combination community/crowdsourcing service that ties in with BW editorial. This attempt at providing extra value in web content is very well-done, IMHO, and hopefully will be of some additional value to BW prospective buyers.

Miquel Helft, technology reporter at the New York Times, wrote a nice summary of the progress Microsoft is making with it’s new search engine, Bing, published in today’s paper. http://tinyurl.com/kmrspf

Personally, I’ve been a fan of Bing’s from the first time I saw it debut at the All Things Digital conference (sponsored by the Wall Street Journal) in late May. I absoluately love the Bing home page–the stunning color photography almost takes me to a new place and is such a visual relief after the monotony of the Google screen. That alone, irrespectively of the more useful search results, was enough to get me using Bing.

The hardest part for me, and probably for legions of others, is breaking the Google habit. When I need to do a search, I just automatically start typing  the G-word. I’m conciously trying to change that behavior and start with Bing.

I do like the Bing search results better. I find that they are more tuned to business use; there is less stuff to wade through. I also like the organization of sub-listings, and the breakout in the left-hand sidebar. Overall, I find my searches are more efficient and productive with Bing, which in my business is a  big deal. I’m all about efficiency here at Team Julie!

P.S. Yes, I’m using Bing to find the links for this post…

Today I was fortunate to attend a great panel discussion hosted by Churchill Club and PRSA Silicon Valley. The topic was “How PR Can Succeed in a Down Economy”.

There were about 150 attendees; mostly corporate communications folks with several of the major agencies represented and the typical smattering of vendor attendees.

 Panelists included Andy Lark from Dell, Peter Shankman of HARO,  Mark Hampton of Blanc & Otis, Steve Astle of FICO, Arati Shah of PR Week and Karen Kahn of Sun, or Snorkle as she put it.

The mood in the room was quite upbeat. Whenever a group of communications experts get together you can expect a noisy room and today was no different. There was a lot of excited jabbering going on before and after the program.  I talked to quite a few agency execs who noted that they are experiencing a slight uptick in new business activity; that’s a good thing and an indicator that marketing purse strings are loosening.

The panel itself was interesting with, as you would expect,a  substantial amount of airtime devoted to discussing social media—how to best manage it, who within the corporation should be involved (just PR or everyone or somewhere in-between), and how to measure (no good ideas for that).

The only complaint I heard was that the panel was too focused on large corporations with very large marketing budgets. The audience would have liked to have heard tips and techniques employed by the little guys. Also, heard comments that the panel was too enterprise -centric; would liked to have had a consumer tech player represented. All good ideas.

All in all another excellent program! Good times had by all.

Hi–I’ve been exploring both of these services, trying to get familiar with how to use them and how they might be helpful to me and/or to my clients.

I joined the WSJ community several weeks ago and at first was enthusiastic, then haven’t had time to go back and really work with it. Just recently joined BusinessWeek Exchange.

Are any of you actively using either of these services? If so, what’s your experience with them? And, do you recommend for others? Any stories to share?

Soon I hope to have time to do a comparative look at both of these.

Thanks! Julie

The other day I was talking to my very smart client, Chloe Jackson, over at WaveMaker. WaveMaker has an easy programming environment for app development for the cloud.

Chloe has been with the company for several years and is very well-versed in all things-cloud related. She and I started talking about companies that are recession-friendly and of course, that lead to a discussion about how marketeers today can really take advantage of SaaS tools and services to cut their own costs and stretch their dollars.

Five ways to do this are:

1. Blogging. Blogging is incredibly time-intensive but incredibly cheap. Especially these days when we seem to have more time than money, blogging to build brand community is a no-brainer. Chris Keene, the CEO of WaveMaker, is a great example of a CEO who has done an excellent job of using his blog to build a following. Some of his techniques are worth mentioning: he only blogs when he really has something to say, his post are short, well-written and full of good conent, and he’s timely; his posts are tied-into what’s au courant.

2. Use Social Networks. Of course, everyone is talking about this and that’s because their is truth behind it. You can get the word out about your brand, your cause, your company through building presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like. You don’t want to do it in a way that amounts to spamming or posting annoying advertising-like information, but you do want to be there in a clever, humorous, helpful way.

3. Comment, comment, comment. Another easy way to get your “voice” to be heard is through the ability to comment on others’ blog posts. I encourage my clients to comment whenever they see a post that is relevant to their business and I advise them to post real content, again, not fluff, or annoying promotions. The tone should be informative, not defensive; helpful not snarky.

4. Learn about new ways to interact with the media. We are all aware that the “traditional” media outlets are transitioning to the web, and as they so, they are investing in ways to interact with their readers. Both the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek have, over the last several weeks, rolled out community-based forums. At BusinessWeek this is called Exchange and it’s a place where you can exchange ideas with other readers, editors, and the at-large BusinessWeek community. I highly recommend getting involved in these communities. Again another great way to stay connected and it’s “free” except for your own time investment.

5. Lastly, explore and find SaaS based tools that help you in your job. Services like Basecamp from 37 Signals, LegalZoom and many others, are much more affordable than traditional desktop-based applications or outsourced services. And, their “scalable”, meaning you only use and pay for what you need today. That’s a great benefit for a limited marketing buget.

Do you have any tips to share for SaaSy, recession-proof marketing?

Apparently last year Pepsi reportedly spent over $1 million dollars to redesign its logo, hiring the Arnell Group to do so. Yesterday, Gawker, made public an internal document, supposedly written by the design team to explain/justify their redesign.

The 27-page document, which very well could be an Internet hoax, explains how the logo redesign is based on such things as magnetic fields, feng shui, the Renaissance and indeed, calls it “breathtaking design”.

Hmmmm…creative writing 101? What do you think?