Over 300,000 tweets later: Six notable AFOTY14 winners

The first 24 hours of Influencer Relations’ Analyst Firm Awards for 2014 (AFOTY14) have been huge. Our #AFOTY14 hashtag had over 300,000 social media impressions, according to keyhole. This website had a month’s visits in one day, and we had a lot more subscribers. But actually my strongest memories are of the discussions I had last night at the IIAR’s holiday drinks, and what people had to say about some of the winners.

• CEB/Tower Group has now clearly positioned itself as a leading force in the US market. What does it need to impact the rest of the world?
• Digital Clarity Group has made an huge impact in a small amount of time, and that’s really because of the very high value it is delivering. Very few firms come close to the sort of customer experience that DCG seems to be delivering.
• Gartner people were also celebrating yesterday. Given the firm’s scale, it’s not surprising to see that it’s number one, but what the rankings don’t show is the huge lead it has in the data, from the Analyst Value Survey.
• Greyhound Group, which is almost unknown outside Asia Pacific, has clearly been working very hard over the last few years. I suspect it will have little trouble defending its market share against Western competitors.
• HfS Research, like Greyhound, has vindicated the impact of quality content distributed via freemium. Many of the firms which have done well in the awards have improved readership and usability (NelsonHall stands out there too) but HfS is producing more than valuable insight: it’s producing fun, entertaining copy as well. That is, of course, something that more straight-laced firms will find hard to imitate.
• Ovum, for me, was the sad story of the awards.  The ongoing culture war against Ovum seems to be grinding down quality. Ovum’s move from its Fitzrovia office into a hotdesking corner of the vast Informa Business Information desk farm says a lot: the failed Goldman Sachs trading floor has several hundred desks, yet still can’t fit all the Ovum team in.