In the traditional model of IT analysis, vendors and users alike buy subscriptions to published research that are bundled with a certain level of retainer-like consulting. You can also buy additional consulting from analysts on an ala-carte basis. Indeed, analyst relations gurus suggest it’s a best practice to do so, both because you might learn something and because the process of your doing so might strengthen your relationship with them, in reality and euphemism alike.

In the 1990s I subverted that model somewhat. Anybody could buy my subscription newsletter for $347/copy/year. Only two vendors that I recall (Oracle and Informix) ever bought > 10 subscriptions at once. In addition, I had some faxed published product that frankly didn’t add all that much to the newsletter. But it was part of a $15,000/year service – almost always sold to vendors only — that also included a day of consulting and related prep and follow-up, a price point I stumbled into and later in various ways validated.* Big companies like Oracle and Microsoft were encouraged to buy, say, one unit of service each for the DBMS and application development tools groups. If one group wanted more service, they could pay 2X as much, while getting the same faxed reports. Thus, in most ways but not all, I separated out my subscription business ($347/seat/year) from my consulting business ($15,000/episode for vendors, custom-priced for users) even then.

*Institutional investors got their own price points, and a truly retainer-like service model. But as my old customers in that area fell off through usual turnover-related churn, I got almost no new ones, and it eventually became a minor part of my business.

In the blog-friendly 21^st Century, I’ve taken those principles further. Substantially all my research is free-to-the-public. Most of what I sell is directly packaged as some form of consulting. (The exceptions would be sponsorship for the research and its distribution, most commonly in the form of paid speaking engagements). For vendors this is retainer consulting only. For users it is project consulting only. For investors I would be flexible on retainer vs. project, if I had any remaining investor clients. But one way or the other, it’s all consulting. In my “freemium” analyst business model,

the research is the “free” and the consulting is the “ium”

But enough about me! While the market opportunity for hard-core analysts is fairly limited (there isn’t much point in trying unless you think you can become acknowledged as a top expert in one or more fields), it’s in fact a business best practice for almost any consultant to show off expertise by blogging or some other kind of publication. Now, not all of this expertise-parading need be on subjects general enough that we’d recognize it as being a form of what we generally call “IT analysis.” But much could be or is. Therefore,

many consultants are or should be part-time analysts

If you go back to my tentative taxonomy of influencers, I’m looking at people who fit into Bucket #4 (minor bloggers or forum posters), but might transcend that to seep into Buckets #1 or 3 (two groups of “analysts”). Obviously, these aren’t the only kind of rising influencers. For example, a top blogger in my sphere is Daniel Abadi – he’s a professor, but if you can get him to take the time to behave as an analyst vis-a-vis you, something he only rarely does, you probably should. And then there’s Dave Kellogg, CEO of a vendor, on the board of others, and clearly not always objective – but usually interesting and insightful even so. More common in the future, I think, will be examples like Todd Hoff – a consulting programmer with an excellent and widely read blog.

Today, if a user or other techie tells me I have “one” of the best blogs in the (database or perhaps unspecified) field, and I ask them what the other top ones are, the answers I expect to get back are Hoff’s and Abadi’s. Of the two, Hoff’s sends more visitors to my blogs, so I’m guessing it’s the better-read. Vendor business types might cite Dave Kellogg’s or Merv Adrian’s instead.

The implications of all this for influencer outreach efforts should be pretty clear. I’m still trying to think through what it means for analyst business models. Stay tuned.

]]> http://www.strategicmessaging.com/blurring-analyst-consultant-line/2010/07/28/feed/ 1 http://www.strategicmessaging.com/so-what-is-an-analyst-anyway/2010/07/25/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/so-what-is-an-analyst-anyway/2010/07/25/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:42:50 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.strategicmessaging.com/?p=98 Recently, there have been several high-profile (at least within the independent analyst community) posts and initiatives relating to analyst business models. Each at least implicitly suggests a definition of what an “analyst” is. Interestingly, no two of the definitions seem exactly the same – even though similar people are involved in several of the efforts. Notwithstanding my well-documented skepticism about category definitions, I think it might be interesting to pull some of these ideas together in one place.

The post that kicked this all off, by Gideon Gartner and Barbara French, basically asking whether and how small analyst firms could rise to challenge the big ones like Gartner Group and Forrester Research. An extremely rich comment thread ensued. Implicit in the original post was a definition of “analyst” work that seemed to include both proprietary published research and quick-hit advisory services, fitting the traditional big-firm subscription model. More diversity, however, was shown in the post comments.

Long ago, Gideon probably based his model on his prior career at stock research firms, which to this day model their business somewhat like big IT analyst firms. Some of the main differences are:

• Payment levels and services provided sort of just happen, rather than being precisely negotiated.
• Payment style is wonky, mainly consisting of a certain share of a client’s high-margin rather-commodity-service stock trading business.
• SEC regulations insist that you not say anything material in personal advisory services you haven’t first put out in writing (there’s been decades-long uncertainty as to just what is or isn’t “material”).

Note: I used to be a stock analyst myself. Indeed, I once was ranked #1 on the Institutional Investor All-Star Team. This may be only the 3^rd year in the past 29 that I get $0 revenue from investment research – and it’s not over yet.

My immediate reason for writing this post is that Ray Wang of Altimeter Group asked me to retweet his post on the best way to set up a new analyst firm, broken down into “7 Tenets”. The implicit model he’s using of analyst firm seems to be one that does a lot of advisory services, probably sells subscriptions, has “proprietary IP”, and gives a lot of research away via blogs and other public outlets. I.e., it’s similar to Gartner/Forrester, but not quite as rigid. Anyhow, I know Ray isn’t really that dogmatic, because – as he tweeted recently – he’s exploring a possible “trade association” of independent analyst firms, and I’ve talked with him about who might be in or out.

In my own business, I follow a more extreme form of the “freemium” model. In line with my stock analyst background, I feel anything I know that’s sufficiently important should be published openly, technology insight and general methodology alike. Advisory services are for:

• Teaching people how to use the information.
• Being the middleman for 1-to-1 NDA vendor/user discussion.

I’ve figured out how to offer quasi-subscription retainer vendor services even so, but find it easier to sell user services on a project basis.

Of course, I don’t really publish EVERYTHING openly, for three main reasons:

• Nobody has time to write up everything they know.
• Much of what I know is NDAed.
• My best advice is reserved for my paying customers.

But that held-back advice is not apt to be a market trend or analytic methodology. Rather, it is likely to be a more specific “Due to threat, opportunity or trend X, you should do Y,” where X is something I’ve actually been writing about publicly for a while.

Jonny Bentwood, meanwhile, goes to the opposite extreme from Gideon et al., defining an analyst by

if someone is independent and directly influences technology procurement then they are an analyst

That leads, for example, to him ranking Dennis Moore as a top-100 analyst tweeter. Now, I have no problem with mentioning “Dennis Moore” and “top-100 analyst” in the same sentence. But if Dennis has any analyst business model at all, it’s one of the stealthiest ones in the whole IT industry.

Finally, there was a webinar by French, Bentwood, Ray’s partner Jeremiah Owyang (who’s #1 on most of Bentwood’s lists, except for the ones Ray’s #1 on), and Carter Lusher on analysts’ use of social media. I haven’t listened to the recording, but two of the four bullet points listed below it say analysts can or should:

Develop personal networks, career brands, that carry with them further than reports under an umbrella brand.

Finally realize they are also media in addition to their traditional roles.

I agree, and in fact believe analysts are a huge part of the media ecosystem, already now and even more going forward.

So what are the implications? If you’re a vendor, I think:

• Analysts (defined broadly) are an increasingly important part of the overall set of influencers. In particular, as traditional media business models collapse, we’re playing some of the role trade press reporters used to.
• You need flexibility in how you deal with influencers. Everybody is different. (Quick worst-practice story: Oracle tells me it won’t give analyst-relations support to anybody who doesn’t let it see what they write before it goes out – a process they use both for fact-checking and general last-ditch opinion-lobbying. But I know they enforce that rule selectively. And I’m not getting good PR support from Oracle these days either.)
• Understand that different analysts can give you good advice in different ways. E.g., numerous clients tell me that they go to Gartner to find out what mainstream enterprises are saying, and to me for actual marketing or strategy advice. (Conveniently, that lets them also be giving money to and getting attention from what they judge to be two of the top influencers in their area.) Other analysts might assist them in yet other ways, even beyond general influencer-relations value.

If you’re a user, please note that:

• There are numerous good providers of free information and insight.
• Many (not all) providers of free information can also be hired as consultants.

Sorry if those bullet points at the end — or for that matter the rest of the post –  sound a bit self-serving, but this overview is in fact informed by thinking about my own business.

Or, to put it another way:

• What I think about the analyst business in general
• How I structure my own business in particular

are, for rather obvious reasons, closely in alignment.

ENTERPRISEDB CEO ED GOES WITH THE BUFFET AT LOCAL SIZZLER FOLLOWING SPEECH AT OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS CONFERENCE

SAN FRANCISCO — EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian rejected a wide array of fixed, rigid, printed menu options at a local Sizzler this week in favor of the restaurant chain’s sprawling buffet.

“It was clear that the open, free, unconstrained nature of the buffet was the right choice,” Boyajian said.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. I really received that email a couple of weeks ago. True, it was a spoof, and came from somebody unaffiliated with EnterpriseDB. But the real EnterpriseDB press release it was spoofing was almost as bad, starting

EnterpriseDB CEO Selected to Speak at Open Source Business Conference 2010
Ed Boyajian to deliver session on open source disruption in the database market

WESTFORD, Mass., March 15, 2010 — EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, today announced that President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Boyajian will deliver a presentation at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2010.

I happen to be a non-fan of EnterpriseDB, both for its stewardship of Postgres and its attitude toward business obligations. But in fairness, I should note that many other vendors put out similar press releases; this kind of idiocy is distressingly widespread. Issuing press releases that absolutely nobody outside your company cares about is always a bad idea, yet a large fraction of all press releases are of exactly that kind.

Recalling my recent taxonomy of five kinds of PR — which of the following goals is advanced by issuing a press release about an utterly predictable, interesting, and ephemeral fact?

A.  “Sell” to the press.
B. “Market” to the press.
C.  Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects.
D.  Market through influencers to other influencers.
E.  Market to potential buyers directly.

or

F.  None of the above?

I’ll go with “F”, which is also the grade that should be assigned to any PR person who allows such a release to go out over his or her still-living body. Nobody cares that you bought yourself a conference speaking slot. Nobody cares even if you didn’t buy it. Not one extra person is going to attend your talk because the press release was issued. It might be vaguely interesting were you to be selected to keynote the Davos Conference, present an Academy Award, or address the UN General Assembly. But even then I’d suggest saving the press release for after the event (or the day of it), when it’s actual news.

• As a consultant to the technology industry
• As a target of public relations myself

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:

• “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
• “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
• Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
• Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
• Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.

In my capacity as a target of PR, I can tell you that clumsy or excessive “selling” of stories creates a backlash. There are a number of us who are LESS likely to write favorably about companies that waste our attention and time pitching inconsequential stories.  You may get ignored (especially in the traditional press or if you’re a larger company).  You may get mocked (especially in blogs and if you’re smaller outfit). Either way, you probably won’t be happy about the result.

In my capacity as a consultant, I can tell you why you should have realized this all along — unless carefully managed, most salespeople will burn their employer’s long-term interests in order to show short-term results. Outside PR agencies on short-term contracts are particularly guilty of this. What’s more, when they are honorable or astute enough to push back against unrealistic management expectations — as is fairly often the case, or at least so they claim — outside PR folks are commonly ordered to produce-or-else nonetheless. The consequences of such bullheadedness are sad.

One of the top trade press reporters covering enterprise technology keeps telling me that he fears for our country if people seriously think that the trivialities he’s hard-pitched are news. Less hyperbolically, he’s given me names of VERY big companies who get less coverage from him than they would if they sent fewer lame press releases. And when he gives me examples of what he hates, I generally agree, except in cases when I can tell him that a terribly-written press release has obscured what is actually an interesting announcement.

A great selling-style PR person can be invaluable, just as a great salesperson is. Those are the ones who know a few target “customers” really well, who are trusted by those “customers,” and/or who know how to listen to what the “customers’” preferences or needs are. Some people like that can be found inside companies.* But they’re almost nonexistent at agencies these days, at least among those folks who pitch me.

*See, for example, Dian Terry’s organization at Teradata. Ditto Rita Shoor, who despite technically being independent might as well have been an Intersystems employee for the past decade-plus.

If most pure “selling” is bad, then what should you do in PR? The answer is “market”. This post will be long enough without me trying to distinguish among the various kinds of marketing — awareness-building, positioning, competitive de-positioning, lead generation, and so on. But I would like to at least point out that there are different categories of people to market to.

In an earlier post, I distinguished among eight different kinds of influencers. For the purpose of this one, it should suffice to highlight three different categories of PR-centric marketing:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. E.g., instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so. When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity. I put quality ahead of quantity because ever more buyers don’t focus on news streams at all. Rather, they go out and search for information when they feel they need it, and when they’re doing that you want them to see a reasonable quantity of highly favorable commentary, even more than you want them to find a large number of decent mentions.
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. When addressing specialized “expert” influencers, you should have two end goals — quality of online mention and quality of word-of-mouth mention. This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one for multiple reasons, including:
  • Specialist/expert influencers have a wider good-to-bad spectrum of commentary than theoretically unbiased reporters do.
  • Even if you don’t see that in print, it certainly happens in private conversation.
  • Their followers are apt to be focused enough to notice what tone the commentary takes.
  • If they have a high opinion of you, quantity will often take care of itself.
  • You probably couldn’t measure word-of-mouth quantity if you tried (although mass consumer markets may be an exception to that rule).
• Reaching out to the broad market directly.  Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles. And a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.

With all that as background, let me now turn to the specific tips that started this all off.

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies.
• If you must use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, for a conversation that BOTH sides want to have, that’s OK. It’s not ideal, but it’s less likely to actually damage you than some of the alternative approaches to PR are.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea. Indeed, it’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will oversell and burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you.  (On your payroll or otherwise.) Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be. The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be.
• Review pitch emails just as you review press releases. If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch email writes itself. Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched. A bad pitch email can piss off an influencer even more than a bad press release does, because it often consumes more of their attention. (Vendors really fall down on this point.)
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process. This is an extension of the previous point. If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better.
• And here’s what I REALLY think: Just treat press releases as documents your post online. Press releases get picked up in various places online.  And sometimes they even appear in venues (mainly online) where they look like they’re press articles. So you’re not actually going to stop issuing them. (Sigh.) But the writing you do for your generic online audience is very different from what you should do for reporters and other influencers.

To reach the latter group, the right model is something that’s at least quasi-personal, quasi-straightforward, and quasi-in-depth. In other words, it’s a lot like a blog — or else like a series of truly personal email correspondences. But, given how long this has already become, that’s a subject for another post.

*There actually are a couple of vendors who drown me in press releases without pissing me off. Why? Because those press releases have instantly comprehensible headlines and topic paragraphs. (Typically they’re user success stories without breathless fluff.) I know what I’m ignoring, without having any work to do to ignore it. The reason I mentioned Rita Shoor’s work for Intersystems above is that she’s great at that kind of thing. (Look around my blogs; you’ll see that it’s really rare that I write a story like this one that Rita induced.)

Getting a favorable mention in a couple of prominent blogs should not be the be-all, end-all of your launch strategy.  Rather, you should be laying the groundwork for getting enterprises to place significant bets on your unproven technology.  Eliciting the “I’m interested in that if it works” reaction is only a very small part of your overall marketing challenge.

Related links

• A layered messaging model
• Always be marketing

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.

I don’t even like the idea that there be rules about fact-checking, error-correction and the like, for a couple of reasons.  First, that kind of thing can lead minimum standards to also be regarded as sufficient care. Second, such things can easily be framed in a way that sets up vendors as arbiters of who does a “proper” job of writing about them and, even worse, who will be given enough information to be able to write about them.

Oracle once evaded my requests for information about app servers for 18 months and then called me “unprofessional” for writing about Oracle’s app server without a recent briefing.  Unsurprisingly, I was eventually proved right.

But all my caveats notwithstanding, I highly recommend that pair of posts to at least be skimmed through.

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

That’s all very true in the technology world in general, in the enterprise IT world in particular, and very particularly in my own experience. For example:

• I blog for pay for two of the three major tech publishing groups, IDG and TechWeb.
• I am quoted quite a bit by some of the remaining true tech reporters.
• Those quotes can be delivered on the phone (least likely), by email, or just in one of my blogs (usually DBMS2).

To [bloggers and the like], their online outpost is a display of their passion for the topic that they cover.  They care deeply about the subject matter and they usually know at least as much as the PR person who contacts them.  Often they know quite a bit more.

In the longer form of that, Paul lumps in analysts with overworked and necessarily-superficial journalists rather than thoughtful, reviewer-like bloggers.   I wouldn’t wholly endorse that, in that I think the best analysts can combine large aspects of the old-style analyst and new-style blogger worlds.  But otherwise, I agree with what he’s saying.

You’d better come prepared to this engagement, because some influencers will take lack of knowledge on your part as an insult.  This can capsize junior agency people who aren’t prepared for the depth of questions they will get or the scorn they may endure if they can’t answer.

I’d say that a mouthpiece who pretends more depth than he has — whatever level that may be — is the one who’s in trouble. If you use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, that’s fine.  And if you go into a call or meeting unaware of how the influencer wants to to engage — which, realistically, happens a much larger fraction of the time than it ideally should — you’d better be prepared to adapt quickly.

While journalists are expected not to share any biases, bloggers often do what they do precisely because they have opinions to share.  Fortunately, a little advance reading can often clue you in to someone’s agenda and even help you decide if they’re worth contacting all.  You don’t want to come in with a strong Windows pitch, for example, to a blogger who’s passionate about the Mac.  You also don’t want to be blindsided by someone who has made his or her opinions clear and who is offended by the fact that you don’t know them.  Again, 15 to 20 minutes of reading can save you a lot of aggravation.

Amen! Worst is when somebody insistently tries to “educate” me on something I already — often visibly — know, or even disagree with. or perhaps just don’t care about.

Unlike journalists, [influencers are] probably not interested in analyst quotes or customer case studies.  It’s more likely they’ll want to talk to the VP of engineering or the CEO than to the head of marketing.

Paul overstates that point a bit.  However:

• Few things companies do annoy me more than when they present quotes from my competitors as some sort of authority or, worse, suggest I call those competitors to be educated.
• I absolutely want to talk to somebody who actually understands the technology, rather than being relegated to people who are in “Well, this is what I’m told by the techies” mode. (Ditto “I’ll check on that and get back to you” — that’s a guarantee of obfuscation and lack of opportunity for follow-up.)

The right influencers have as much credibility in their community as product reviewers or analysts.

I’m not sure analyst-vs.-influencer is even a meaningful distinction any more.

Related link

• An example-laden interview with Paul Gillin

• Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
• A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong.

Advertising is only a shallow part of marketing. Classic PR is only a shallow part of marketing. And for the same reasons, the same is true of isolated social media initiatives. Marketing efforts need to span multiple channels, and use them to tell an integrated story.

To see why, please consider two of my major themes in this blog. First, successful marketing requires telling a multi-layered story. In principle you can do that entirely through social media, specifically a blog. But if you try, you have to be very careful to sound — Buzzword alert! — authentic. And for most sets of marketing messages, it’s very hard to simultaneously stay authentic, drive traffic through techniques that social media “experts” favor, and lay out the whole story.

If your whole business is selling Make Money Online! advice to fellow cyberschmoozers, please feel free to disregard the prior paragraph. In that realm, thinly-veiled inauthenticity is the message.

Second, marketing needs to reach many different kinds of people. It is rare that one channel is a good way to reach them all. But your communications with different groups, through different channels, of course have to be managed for consistency.

Anyhow, I’m not a “social media expert.” I’m just a guy who:

• By the standards of the enterprise IT sector, is a successful blogger.
• Compared to other people in the enterprise IT industry, has substantial reach on Twitter.
• Makes much of his living consulting about marketing (to the aforementioned IT sector).
• Reads a lot, including about social media.
• Writes a little bit about social media as well.

With that as background, here are some of my thoughts on how enterprise IT companies and other businesses should pursue social media.

• Publish a blog (or multiple blogs). The biggest single reason is that blogs are the least-constrained of all the communication media. You can say whatever you want in a blog, however you want to say it. All other media have unfortunate limitations.
  
• Your blog should have two main purposes — to express yourself and (optionally) to drive search engine traffic.
• Getting regular readers should not be one of the purposes of your blog. The techniques for doing that clash with too much else that you want to achieve.
• In particular, disregard the usual “rules” about posting frequency. Those are irrelevant to the main purposes of corporate blogging. What’s more, your best people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with that kind of posting frequency anyway.
• Have multiple individuals blogging. Different people in your company have the talent, knowledge, and status to be successful with different styles of blog post. If one person coordinates your blog, however, that’s fine.
• Encourage your senior customer/public-facing personnel to use their choice of personal-page sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace (blech), et al. Think of those sites as steroid-laden business cards. Those sites’ other benefits are oversold, but they truly work for spelling out who you are. Other social media use (if any) should be even more optional, and hence more tailored to your people’s individual personalities.
• Establish a corporate presence on Twitter. It’s a great way to maintain personal relationships with influencers – and to fix them, if for example the influencer is an unhappy customer badmouthing you. (For example, Dell did just that very successfully with me.) And if you’re too small for that to make sense, there’s a good chance you’d benefit just from the interaction with fellow small business folks.
• Send somebody to participate in whichever online forums, blog comment threads, etc. are most important to your target audiences.
  

As for gimmicks and glitz — well, do they have a large role in how you market through other channels too? If so, then it might make sense to get cute in social media as well. Otherwise, play it straight.

Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of

Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:

Bad jargon drowns out good.

Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.

The idea behind the “Law” is this:   If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.

“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction.   Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant.  “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.

By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented:   Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.