We have recently raised the issue of how to relate to analysts who are bloggers with a few of our peers. We wanted to see if the situation has moved on much from Tim’s PR Hype Cycle, and it has. Quite a few of them seemed to be concerned with the move towards more reporting…
How should analyst relations relate to top executives’ growing concern about corporate reputation? Corporations have supported the establishment of research centres focussed on corporate reputation at a number of prestigious universities, including Oxford and Henley. Yesterday I visited the head of the largest of these centres, which is part of my undergraduate alma mater, the…
A hat-tip goes to Rob Hilsen for pointing out “The Value of Quality”, a recent study out of USC’s Marshall School of Business which looked at the business impact of positive and negative product reviews, including 421 reviews from Walt Mossberg, a technology writer at the Wall St. Journal. Rob writes “The analysis of Mossberg’s…
One of the most stressful events for analyst relations managers is working out what to do when analysts attack. This is a topic we’ve discussed a lot over the past few years. AR managers often find that as well as focussing on the external relationship with the analyst, they need to manage the internal fall-out…
Our concerns about the evenness of role-based research are deepened by Forrester’s latest AR research AR’s Graveyard: Unmet Sales Commitments. Forrester’s guidance is that, because most AR teams struggle to show how they contribute to their firm’s bottom line, they should focus on marketing and not attempt to support the sales function. Our view is…
The last twelve months have been an especially exciting time for technology across the Arab world. There is increasing, and unsatisfied, demand for analyst insight and opinion, especially in the Gulf states. That has created the opportunity for a few research and analysis houses to set up in the region, probably the most credible being…
The PR industry has stopped growing. The annual PR Consultants Analysis, which reviews the top 1000 PR consultancies, is an annual study whose 2006 findings were also depressing. The 2007 report states that average sales growth has fallen to zero. Pre-tax margins remain around 4%. Roughly two companies in five experienced falling sales last year….
CMP’s magazine for CIOs, Optimize, has surveyed its readers and concluded that most of them find Gartner to be the most influential firm. This is what they say — add up the numbers with me. “A full 73% of more than 1,000 Optimize readers surveyed ranked Gartner as the most-influential analyst firm. Competitors lagged significantly:…