In private conversations, Influencer Relations professionals often critique the analysts’ level of preparedness for a briefing. However, the ?IR pros are unwilling to actually say something to the analyst for fear of hurting the relationship or courting retaliation. We think that these fears are unfounded as most analysts would appreciate reasonable suggestions for how they can…
What have Box, Dropbox, Nest, Evernote, Cloudera, Palantir and Instagram in common? They where all named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in the past five years. So, what happened to the Cool Vendors?
This 2014 award for enterprise software has been superceded by the 2018 Enterprise Analyst Firm Award. AR people in the enterprise software industry need to pay much more attention to the growing influence of services analysts and freemium firms on their market. Digital Clarity Group just pipped HfS Research for third place in Influencer Relations’ Analyst…
As part of our Influencer Pitch Process research, 44 people at analyst pitches (on either side of the table) told us about times when the meetings went badly wrong. Seven mistakes came up time and time again. Indeed, everyone who commented mentioned at least one of these seven errors. Pitching in solutions that don’t relate to…
Readership of this site doubled in 2013, largely because of the Analyst Value Survey (AVS). Since renaming the site as Influencer Relations at the start of 2014, readership has grown by more than half again. As you can see from our 20 most-read pages in 2014, listed below, insight from the AVS and Influencer Relations’ Analyst Firm…
Analyst firms should be rated by their understanding of Africa, writes Johan Jacobs, a former Gartner and META Group analyst. I read a recent comment from Walter Isaacson, CEO at Aspen Institute where his #BigIdeas2015 is “The Coming Micropayment Disruption”. Interesting perspective but this is not new as we have been doing this in Africa…
What is differentiating influencer marketing from the more conventional forms of marketing? Of course there are some things that influencer marketing has in common with traditional push marketing: It will help your company establish brand awareness and drive sales by generating contact points for your brand name and your products with the target audience.
2014 was the breakout year for freemium analyst firms. It’s fundamentally ended the fantasy that only Gartner and Forrester were “deal-maker or breaker” firms. An excellent illustration of that is the chart here, which uses data from the Analyst Value Survey. It shows the companies where the demand-side and supply-side respondents gave the most different answers to…