This is the second installment of this series trying to note the differences in constituencies. While it is obvious to those of us in the Analyst industry, it is not so elsewhere, thus this post.

First, the analysts have generally worked in the IT world, as a developer or struggled in a company in this industry before they were an analyst. They write about the issues of the IT world from this perspective. For the most part, the press are journalists first, who happen to write about technology, and are pressured by the deadlines and competition to publish. As my colleague Amy Loomis describes it, the press are the tip of the iceberg, and the analysts are the rest in terms of size. Please do not take offense if you are a journalist, I am merely setting the table. I appreciate the pressures and difficulties of that career, having working in PR for eons.

Briefing the two can not therefore be the same. For journalists, one must pitch the story and deliver the goods in an appealing enough way so that the journalist will consider listening longer than 5 minutes unless you are a highly trusted source. They are pitched 1000’s of times a day on how great and new a product is. At conferences we attend, a press meeting takes 30 minutes where quotes are given, material to write about a story and a few names are handed out. The qualified journalist can then turn this into an appropriate story with little trouble.

This causes the analyst relations folks no end of trouble when we deal on this timeline. The depth that we need to get to given the challenging questions we are asked by analysts take a minimum of an hour, and this is for a conference where we are time driven. For a report, MQ, Wave, Vendor Study, name it by firm….we can take days to get the proper amount of information covered, depending on the analyst.

How to do it is of course a function of style.  David Rossiter describes it this way:

1) When it comes to the presentation…less is more.
2) Know your audience.
3) KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
4) Tell me why you are different.
5) Talk about what makes your customers different.
6) Tell me where you are going to be in 3 years.
7) Passion can not be faked.

Here is another description of how to screw it up:

1. Showing complimentary quotes, market projections or assessments from competing analyst firms

2. Hounding analysts with invitations - and then not being available when the analyst try’s to make contact

3. Claiming to be the first vendor to do something, based on obscure statistics

4. Trying to rewrite analyst opinions or recommendations (correcting factual errors is fine, and completely encouraged)

5. Sending a 60 slide deck for a 30 minute briefing and / or spending the first 20 minutes of the briefing on “positioning” - in particular when asked to skip this or speed it up

6. Sending a constant stream of press releases about insignificant developments

7. Assuming all analysts live in Cambridge, Mass.

No discussion of this would be complete without a post from James Governer, who I view as excellent on messaging:

Briefing comes from “brief”, which means concise. A deck with 50 slides is not suitable for a briefing, or a one hour conversation. If you want to pay an analyst to help you with focus, then by all means come along with a hundred charts. But if its value you want, and some time to gain insights from the analysts knowledge of the market, its players and dynamics, then keep your slide deck short.

Next, what you say.  Anything said to a reporter, either off or on the record is ON THE RECORD.  This is not the case with most analysts.   There have been times that something got into print that shouldn’t have, but rarely was it malicious.  Mostly it was a misunderstanding of what was NDA or not.   They are not interested in breaking a company’s secrets, even though we tell them almost everything we are going to do.  Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?

So to the audience that I’m directing this to, and you know who you are, be clear that the press are not the analysts.  Two missions, two different depths of understanding, two different objectives….let’s treat them that way.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under analyst, ibm, screw ups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.