You go bear hunting with the proper tool.
So it is when you are dealing with different constituencies, in this case the analysts and the press. This is actually a lengthy and deep discussion when you understand the differences, so I’ll break this up and speak to it from time to time. Unfortunately, the people most likely to read this are the choir, not the intended audience, but if you wish to chime in on your experiences, I’ll see that it gets to the right audience.
First, I want to address the company side of the equation. If one doesn’t understand that they are fundamentally different, you have already penalized your effort to succeed. There are cases where there might be a constriction requiring the same team to handle both. Perhaps the company is so small that communications is a one man job. That person had better be talented. I did this for a company in the 80’s and learned through the school of hard knocks and mistakes.
There are cases where using an agency is an option, albeit rarely a good one. Agencies are designed for dealing with the press, with analysts being an afterthought. Having also worked at an agency, I observed that most don’t do the press side as effective as they could. I’ve heard from analysts who uniformly detest an agency as the front man or communications vehicle. Microsoft is an example I’ll call out with WaggEd handling it in the past (I believe this to have changed). We could routinely count this as a victory in our court knowing they were handling A/R for an engagement (I did multiple joint announcements with Microsoft, all being similar to the cold war, all better handled by IBM or the company I was working for).
This points to hiring the right people to do the job of analyst relations. While communications skills, personality and the ability to nurture a relationship are common between them, plugging a PR person into an AR position, then asking them to deal with the other constituency without training is a mistake. Big disclaimer here, I went from years (17) of PR work to analyst relations, but I went to training, understood the differences and was mentored. I also was a programmer, ran technical support and was company spokesperson for mass storage, tape backup modems, RAID and networking. I’ve spoken to hundreds of reporters and analysts from the hot seat.
Understanding that Analysts and Press are different and require different handling is just the start. I’ll write on this further, but suffice it to say the depth of understanding of the product, service or offering you represent requires a far deeper understanding on the analyst side. Pitching a story to a reporter requires a script, 20 seconds of intro that will hook the reporter and a good sense of timing are what you need to get a story written.For AR, you don’t have to be the patent owner for the product, but being able to discuss the technical implications, the market conditions for acceptance, competency of the competition and many other items are vital to being able to differentiate yourself from being a secretary to setting up meetings. This is quite different than pitching a story to the beat reporter and forwarding a release. Again, no disrespect to the PR side, I’ve done both, but it is a different set of skills.
There are use different levels of detail, different timing’s and other considerations relevant to the audience. An analyst isn’t on deadline to write a story. They care far more about what it is, why it matters, how it competes, the business value (all over time) and many other aspects. One has to appeal to what the analyst cares about and their field of interest. Taking some time to know who they are by, get this, reading their blogs helps one to understand if they care or not.You will be held accountable for things said. If you go back to the comment (all over time), if you commit to having something in 6 months, the analyst briefing in 6 months will have the question, “did you release the product?” as an issue.
Why is this important? While I’ll get into it in a later post, it’s about time value. I ask the question, what was the leading story 3 years ago, three months ago, three weeks ago? Most can’t remember. An analyst opinion or report while not timeless, keeps a company accountable for at least a year.
I’ll close with the onus being on the company to staff the position of analyst relations with a person who is capable, trained as to why this is important and understands that dealing with analysts is different than dealing with the press.
Next time, I think I’ll talk about the differences between reporters and analysts.
