Pleon hosted a meeting for its UK alumni last night. This PR business of the BBDO advertising giant acquired the European business of Brodeur, where I and a few of my colleagues and former colleagues at Lighthouse formed the bulk of its EMEA analyst relations business until 2002. The firm has changed a lot: just…
Blogs don’t give their readers much of a feeling of community: even though hundreds of people stop by to read, it’s hard to get a flavour of who else shares your interests. I thought I’d share some statistics to give you an idea of the other folk who stop by this blog. This little chart…
On Friday I hosted a lunchtime seminar for several Silicon Valley analyst relations professionals to assess the challenges that the META-Gartner acquisition produces, both for analyst relations professionals and for the analysts. I took some notes of the discussion which average out the views there – of course not everyone there had the same opinion……
While the idea of a Public Relations Process Model has existed for almost 20 years, little public work has been done to discuss and develop a model for optimal analyst relations. Having a model is vital, because it offers a stronger and deeper understanding than an empirical assortment of experiences and best practices: if analyst…
I had a great comment today from an analyst in Germany, who says to me: “You point out that companies like bundles of research and consulting. At least for Germany, I’m not so convinced. We still have this “engineering culture” in many managers: they want to understand how things work and they like buying written…
Techtel’s IT spending forecasts came our way today. It’s a fascinating piece of empiricism. Techtel’s forecast averages estimates, by a panel of interested individuals, about changes in the IT environment [1]. What Techtel does is certainly easier than tracking spending itself, however the results are worthless. Their figures for 2004, for example, show average growth…
RHK, the $4.5m analyst house following the global telecom industry, has been bought by Ovum in the last hour. RHK is one of the most global of the US analyst firms, with almost half its revenue coming from outside the US, principally from Western Europe and East Asia. RHK has lost momentum in 2005 for…
Forrester’s string of successes over the last financial year has been capped off nicely. GigaWorld 2005 attracted 900 participants in Dallas and almost 700 in Prague; it marked the first time Forrester events have sold out at venues of such scale. Because of continuing demand for a ‘second voice’ of importance alongside Gartner, Forrester is…