One of the things we tried to do to influence analyst relations is to add new tools.  Now I readily admit that video is not a new tool, but using it is another bullet in the gun, so a tool that is expanding in our A/R arsenal at events.

Special thanks to Cote of RedMonk who did all the work here.  At the bottom is his interview of me, so have at it, I can take a joke.

Jamie Thomas on RSDC

Grady Booch on Multi Core UML

Scott Hebner on Rational Team Concert, SaaS and Jazz thinking

Laura Bennett on alphaWorks and developerWorks

Telelogic

Ashok Reddy on Rational jazz

Mike Orourke on Rational Team Concert

Dave Klavon on Testing

John Simonds, yes yours truly on Blogs, Tags, and Twitter in Analyst Relations

Recently, I’ve updated my sidebar with a few decorations. Why, something to do I suppose.

You will now see my recent twitter tweets, support for Denmark against terrorists, a donation button to paypal (gratuitous in the first degree.

Today I added the OR code for my blog which you can see. To get your own secret decoder OR code, go to the code generator site.

I guess someone has to keep it.  Here is the ongoing list of blog rankings by Wikio of the influential bloggers.

Most are either technical or political.

H/T to Pamela at Atlas Shrugs, who is higher on the list than I’ll ever be.

Literally, is it killing people? Well, there is two sides of any story.

It was widely reported that two men died allegedly because of blogging. An except of the story from the NYT (hat tip via Protein Wisdom and Dr. Helen:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet….

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.

The other side of the story Dr. Helen rightly points out though, is that she already had a heart attack prior to becoming a blogger, and is married to prolific blogger Glenn Reynolds, or Instapundit. If that volume won’t give you a heart attack, nothing will.

So is it therapeutic, who knows, it depends on the person.

Is it a killer app. in the industry context? As the analysts at RedMonk who based their business model on blogging and being open. Or look at Judith Hurwitz who’s blogging relevance has shot up the charts. In these cases it is a killer.

Well, it could kill your career at some companies.  At least blogging is going to be protected (or going to be) by congress soon.

For me, it has upped the relevance of what I do at IBM as we care about the various forms of communication. Plus, I get to rant when I want in an IBM unconventional way. Sometimes it let’s me jump to (near) the top of google searches.

Maybe.

I had a conversation recently with one of the major firms recently who asked me why I did what I do on my blog. Being transparent, I told them my motives, my objectives and my expectations. Let me stop and say that I fully expect them to be reading this post. I’ve been asked to present blogging as a best practice for analyst relations to a group of my peers. I do believe that it is a best practice as I accomplish many things through blogging (I’ll concede that competitive eating is pretty much motive-less, except for the spectacle of it). Mostly I was taken back that anyone would care a hoot about what I write, but I seemed to have mis-judged the audience. I know why I do what I do, but it seems that others are interested and the firm I spoke to thinks it could help the greater A/R community.

Blogging should be about transparency, but as I’ve noted before, I hate to lose. I clearly use my blog to speak to analysts as I learned well that the R in A/R doesn’t stand for reports. Yes, I write that often, so that phrase is brought to you by the department of redundancy department, but I digress. Back to hating to lose, I find that blogging gives me an additional line of communications with analysts, which I’d need to disclose to all, and it gives me a one up on the competition. I even have relationships with analysts through the blog that I don’t work day to day with.

It became clear in the conversation that I’m not going to worry about it that much as the discussion quickly came to the point that blogging is passion, you either are going to do it or your not. Most that do it are like the people at the gym after New Years. Here today, back at the buffet line tomorrow.

It also became clear to me who I felt were better bloggers than I, which I would point out in such a presentation, should I get asked to actually do it. But a lot comes down to whether I would discuss it or would I hold the keys to the safe of A/R tactics.

Maybe I just have delusions of adequacy?

My guess, I’d probably do it if asked to as if we can make our profession better, why not? And to answer the question is a blog influential to analyst relations, for me the answer is definitively yes…..both reading and writing.

Hat tip to Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit.

Here they are and here is the full article from buzzfeed:

The 10 rules to blog by:
1. Check your facts.
2. Avoid virtual vendettas.
3. Obey the law.
4. Weigh promises.
5. Reveal secrets selectively.
6. Consider what you copy.
7. Learn recording limits.
8. Don’t abuse anonymity.
9. Shun conflicts of interest.
10. Seek legal advice.

Bob Costas was the guest speaker. What was impressive was his ability to present impromptu….I was watching his teleprompter and he had relatively no text, just keywords like Bonds-Ruth/Steroids, Olympics broad strokes…something left to the professionals.

Claim to fame was Bob Uecker, a comedy transition. He mentioned a Sox fan who predicted a World Series win in ‘92 as Sox win the world series after a Russian revolution. He said Patriots might be the single best team in history. His job is to highlight and separate what is important from the barrage of information. He gets reams of information which are just facts prior to a broadcast, old school tools, but are not that helpful, just information…like hard copy encyclopedia.

Insight and interpretation have lasting value, those are good old school tools. Relevant facts are teams that beat winners are significant like this years Pats. He pointed out that my team the 72 Dolphins, the only other perfect team didn’t have as tough a schedule, but they were still my team. Loyalty is important.

Here’s one example, steroids make inauthentic stats of today’s home run records.

He transitioned to Lotus - lots of information is out there, but when you look for a fact, are you just going to get a fact, or knowledge, truth, context, insight and information.

On what he’s going to say about the Olympics? Human rights abuse of Chinese were exposed by the internet….The Chinese took his comments at the 1996 Olympics as representative of the US Government, as the media is controlled by the state in China.. The key question, are these Olympics a postive force to showing the world that they have come a long way, or does it embolden them to be not as happy and productive as the rest of the world. He will time this into his comments during his interpretation of the Olympics. That is why he is like what Lotus does.

Mike Rhodin - today’s tools are revolutionary, not evolutionary. Facebook is out in the open as a tool. If we don’t provide the tools, the world will seek out collaboration tools. Profitable growth via cost savings is harder.

It is easier to bend systems to people than people to systems, like the Blackberry announcement with RIM…it’s flexible, adaptable and open…..and not in my pocket. Unfortunately, it now works on the iPhone, which is in my future…looks like they got me either way.

SAP Atlantic announcement, having Lotus software work together for contact management, management tools and other extensions. Levels of detail from non notes applications and subscriptions are now integrated into the user experience. This is big, btw SAP is a Partner

Notes is on Linux, Ubuntu and Mac…Security, reduction in bandwith, storage and cpu consumption…and starts 46% faster….at a lower cost per user.

Widgets are now drag and drop,,,,,I love this new stuff.

Notes 8.5 had much I didn’t understand, but 35% reduction in attachments and storage management, and anti spam and anti virus did resonate to me. The other announcements were administrator specific….and got the only real claps and shouts in the crowd

I will note a Web 2.0 (bingo Ed Brill, and Rob Novak) is in the new Domino.

Here’s what I liked, lots of partners are onboard.

Sametime Entry now works with outlook….they have everything covered. Including secure public IM…take that politicians.

Sametime unified telephony can figure out how contact you, I might as well surrender to the crackberry now…except I love the iPhone and Mac capability.

Oh, and since it also covered Symphony, there was a symphony with one of my favorites…The Barber of Seville here at YouTube.

But here was the best talent of the show. Click to see this larger.  Here is a good video of her from Dailymotion in full performance prior to the keynote.

What is very interesting is that I’m conversing with Judith Hurwitz electronically while I’m blogging about the show, she’s somewhere in the audience ….both of us are liveblogging as is Ed Brill and others.

I’m watching the integration of communications disciplines including media, analyst, internal and executive relations in order to overlap messaging. This intrinsically makes sense to me for the purposes of consistency, message development, speaker execution and most of all….clear communications about your company.

The issue came up about media relations having difficulty getting their arms completely around bloggers, both in terms of influence and keeping track of them. Like teenagers, handling us is analogous to nailing jello to a tree. Not that I’m going to claim any grand knowledge of bloggers and blogging, but part of the success and proliferation of it is a voice more trustworthy than the media. Thousands of fact checkers rather than one reporter getting three sources is an overwhelming numbers game. Also, we do it because of passion, the key blogger trait I find among those that are successful.

There are some phenomenon’s that blogging can take credit for, like the rise of Howard Dean in the 2004 election and the fall of Dan Rather. More close to home is the rise of businesses like RedMonk who base their business on this model. Or this little tidbit…today is the anniversary of Matt Drudge breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. Tell me that isn’t influence in many ways. Now not only did I have to explain to my children the birds and the bee’s, I have to tell them what a Lewinsky is when it was joked about on the radio (true story).

So being non traditional, or bucking the trend is part of the blogging effect or maybe just another phenomenon. Further, it allows bloggers to connect faster, and determine what is the buzz. For example, if something is noteworthy, I’ll have read about it in more than one blog before I see it on the news in my reader(s), and I’ll know it matters, I don’t have to be told by the MSM.

In the quest to reach the traditional media, the issue has come up as to using blogs to influence them.

Which brings me to the point of the title, why not make your announcements on your blog? The answer is I’m not going to sell out to a process (traditional media tactics) that are not as effective or as accurate. While it’s true that I’ve noted some products that interest me from my company, that was the reason I wrote about them, not to shill. In the spirit of this thought, I love my iPod and a lot of other technology and am pretty open about moving to a Mac as soon as I can (sorry Stephen). So I will write about an announcement, but for the appropriate reason.

After spending umpteen years in media relations, it’s not like I don’t know them or identify with the influence problem. You have to constantly up your game or change it to meet the conditions. Handling bloggers or integrating their influence is just the next step in this game. But being asked to post a press release on your blog or make an announcement is out of the question…..unless I think it’s cool, then it’s my interpretation of what I think about it. I imagine that others are like me (I do note that is is not a new topic, but it arises over an over again) and their content is well….their content.

So in essence, blogging is a better mousetrap than the traditional news tactics and sources. If it weren’t, why are they now blogging (or trying to catch up), and trying like heck to report the news as quick (and yet not as accurate) as the blogosphere? Now it’s up to corporate communications to nail that jello to the tree and understand how to influence them. I’ve got a hint, that ship left the port and won’t return….so new tactics are needed, just don’t ask me to post a press release.

So in the spirit of this conversation, let me post this press release:

NOT!

First, a recap of 2007 by JibJab.

Next, a list of what I hope for.

1. A 3G iPhone. In case you didn’t know, I hate Sprint and this is my year to dump them.

2. SaaS from IBM, in a big way…..soon.

3. Fun from me on the election, the political cycle is as anti blog friendly or anti-PC as you can get, but it’s all kinds of fodder for me.

4. Google, Oracle, SAP, Yahoo and Microsoft shooting at each other instead of us for a change, again…fodder for me.

5. More video as I took a hint from Churbuck on the Flip video camera.

6. More fishing.

7. More hunting.

8. Less drug enhanced sports.

9. STOVL for the bad guys.

10. Many more things, but I’ll keep it simple for now.

Technobabble 2.0 lists the top 100 analyst bloggers. I’m wondering what they think of it? I’ve noticed a slowdown in blogging by most of the bloggers so I’m wondering how that adds to the complexity of the rankings?

This is a good reference blog for being able to find those that the industry considers the top bloggers. It is important to look at the content as some that are not at the top are actually quality bloggers in their area, and some get traction just for who they work for.

Nevertheless, I’m keeping it and I’ll be following it to see how it changes.

Update: DVR bulletin tells the story better than I do