February 28, 2010

Five kinds of public relations

I comment about public relations from two different standpoints:

Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.

This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.

There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:

Read more

April 4, 2009

Merv Adrian’s threads on analyst blogging

Merv Adrian offers two well-commented posts on analyst blogging.  I think the whole thing was (probably not intentionally) framed in terms of large-firm analysts, leading to a lot of Golly gee whiz! Blogs aren’t the same as subscription analyst reports. Harm can occur when people forget this! And that led to various calls for things like industry-wide codes of how analysts should and shouldn’t write, etc.  (Merv himself was the lead offender on that one.)

Grrr!! Any suggestion that there’s one right way to communicate rubs me the wrong way.  Indeed, I’ve been arguing that there’s an evolving information ecosystem that will ever more depend upon there being healthy occupants of many different niches.  Most particularly — and few vendors have yet wrapped their minds about this — it will increasingly be the case that primary news sources are analysts with NDA obligations. And yes — every once in a while it is important to be the one who breaks the story. Read more

April 4, 2009

Paul Gillin on influencer marketing

Paul Gillin offers a pair of posts that in my opinion are spot-on about influencer marketing.  Highlights include: Read more

April 3, 2009

Hilarious April Fool’s send-up of the analyst business

I’m not clear on who wrote it, but there’s a hilarious send-up of the analyst business.  See in particular the “Magic Kingdom” graph, whose four quadrants are Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Fantasyland, and similar spoofs of the Forrester Wave and Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm graph.

September 8, 2008

Do influencers think along the lines of the layered messaging model?

I originally came up with the more techie version of the layered messaging model

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way? Read more

September 8, 2008

Enterprise IT marketing — a layered messaging model

Two things matter about marketing messages:

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

Many marketing consultants, me included, would phrase the core messaging challenge in terms such as:

What’s the most compelling claim you can make that people will actually find credible?

Read more

August 6, 2008

I’m not the only one who thinks vendors underdisclose

Here’s a real-life example of something I talk about all the time — the need to not just tell a story, but to give simple and persuasive reasons why it is true. David Raab is a huge fan of QlikTech’s QlikView, as both a reseller and blogger. Precisely because he is such a great advocate, he is frustrated by the company’s lack of technical specificity and disclosure. To wit (emphasis mine): Read more

May 19, 2008

Restoring sanity to technology news embargoes

Technology news embargoes are a mess.

Basically, a custom that worked fairly well in the age of heavily staffed weekly and monthly print media has not been adapted well to the up-to-the-minute, fragmented online age.  Here’s what I propose to at least partially fix things. Read more

May 16, 2008

How to pitch me

In a good new trend, analysts are putting up explicit “How to pitch me” notes. (Carter Lusher has links to some of them.) Here’s mine. Read more

March 6, 2008

Know your audience

I just had one of the most ridiculous meetings I’ve had in a long time. A vendor about whom I and various other press/blog/analyst outlets had already written asked to meet with me. Three top executives schlepped out for a loooong dinner. Unbeknownst to me in advance, the company expected to hold the meeting under embargo. When I asked at the end of the meeting “So, what about that is embargoed”, they responded (in effect) “everything” — notwithstanding that they had received substantial coverage already, and that in 3 hours we hadn’t talked about any details of the sort that normally would be NDAed. No customer names, no product announcements, nothing. They just didn’t want coverage until their “launch date” 3 weeks hence.

Despite that investment of time in meeting with me, they’d obviously done little or nothing to prepare. Read more

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