Thom Erbé and I met yesterday to get the ball rolling for the 2014 AR Forum in September. We’re starting earlier than last year in order to consult more widely about the agenda for the event. The first part of that involves appointing an international advisory council. Several leading AR professionals are being approached to…
For several years in the 1990s I shared a household with an old golden retriever named Murphy. Murphy had ESP. He’d know exactly where one of us would want to be in five minutes. He would position himself right there, in the way. It didn’t matter if the place was the refrigerator, the best chair…
The CFA Institute is best known worldwide for its rigorous chartered financial analyst (CFA) curriculum and examination program. It’s an interesting expression of the lack of openly-accepted best-practice guidance for AR professionals that it has been left to this organisation to publish a guide for AR, even if their guide focuses on the interests of…
On March 3rd 2014, Kea Company announced its purchase of SageCircle. It’s great news for the analyst relations profession, and I am excited that Dave Eckert will be joining our advisory board. I’m looking forward to Kea’s role in developing SageCircle’s contribution. The press release explains that SageCircle has developed an immense reputation: “The integration…
In 2013 the Analyst Relations Forum started drilling down on social AR. We’re delighted that Stephen Loudermilk and Michael Myers agreed to join Jonathan Yarmis and me in our webinar on leveraging Social AR. All are seasoned AR professionals who’ve seen how leading-edge ‘powerhouse’ firms make the most of social media – and understand its…
A recent post on the HFS Research blog focusses on some independent analysts as “pay to play”. It’s a useful post, but that key point doesn’t fit with our annual Analyst Value Survey, which suggests only a slight correlation between firm size and independence. In the survey, the largest 26 firms got an average score…
Teresa Cottom, my former Ovum colleague who is now Founder & Chief Strategist at Telesperience, had made some very useful criticism and comment (here, and well worth a read) about our recent chart of the Analyst Value Survey data on analyst independence. Her most challenging point is that it’s not possible to measure independence and,…
Analysts firms vary massively in their independence. That’s one finding of our 2013 Analyst Value Survey, which shows the opinions of 352 users of analyst research. Ovum, NelsonHall and Redmonk stand out as firms widely seen as highly independent, with strong scores for 451 Group, Pierre Audoin Consultants, Saugatuck and TBR. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of…