I’ve got a pretty intense schedule, in the past I’ve written about the many tasks of an analyst in the day job, and I also spend time being in the conversation by maintaining this blog, being active on twitter, maintaining communities in Facebook, and attend many events. I’ve got a personal life, spend time at the gym, am a husband, and have a social circle that’s not even connected to the tech world.

Technology isn’t always the answer to everything, in fact I actually don’t use a digital device as they take too long to input, aren’t always available, are fragile, and there are risks of battery life limitations and data loss, so I use paper.

Here’s how I stay organized:

I use a Moleskin, the medium size in fact, but any book will do.

I use two pages each week (or more often) to organize my tasks.

For every task, I create a small checkbox, for items that are urgent, Ill mark with an “!” mark. As I complete tasks, I’ll check them off. Just about every week I’ll recreate the list, reprioritize, and consolidate. I find that writing the tasks down actually helps with me subconsciously brainstorming, and reviewing you go to bed at night is a great way to put your internal employee (your unconscious mind) to work. This is why you’ll often notice my blog posts come in the early morning, I sort my problems at night.

On the top left column, I list out all of my personal tasks to take care of, house, car, bills, important dates, medical issues that need to be dealt with.

On the lower left I list out blog ideas, (you never know when you’ll get them) it’s important I write these down, as sometimes I’ll forget, and that’s very frustrating. Both of these rarely exceed the whole page.

Now on the right hand column, this is dedicated to my work requirements, and it quickly fills up the half of the page in no time.

When I see more than 10 tasks, I know it’s time to start to really focus by prioritizing, turning off distractions, and hunkering down to get my work down.

This process has been working well for me, although I’m not a star analyst, I’m meeting the requirements of a new analyst, and so far, I’ve not dropped too many personal tasks.

I’d love to hear from you, how do you keep organized?

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Perhaps you’ve read my informal analysis on Target and Wal-Mart’s Facebook campaign that I did last year, well Forrester has asked me to formalize a report in the spirit of a formalized community review scorecard.

I’m seeking examples of Social Network Marketing campaigns (there hundreds, if not thousands of them being deployed) and want to identify those that are successful (and why) and those that are failures (and why).

If you work for a container or ‘organic’ social network like Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, Lindin, CyWorld, Bebo. Or, if you’re a brand or interactive marketer that’s launched a campaign within a social network, or know someone that has, please submit the campaign details to me for this upcoming Forrester report.

I’m looking for URLs, where I can explore the campaign, how it was deployed, and see how the community interacted, or the lack of any real traction. If you know of any campaigns that you weren’t involved with that you thought were a success or failure, you can also let me know.

Leave a comment below, or send me an email at jowyang at forrester.com.

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The question many marketers are trying to answer now, is “Who do people trust?”

I’ve been spending more and more time pouring over data, medium usage, behavioral and preference data for clients, and am learning more and more about how humans behave on the web.

So who do people trust? Three research studies indicate it’s peers, or people they know. And social clout from bloggers, or those with a lot of online friends ain’t it.

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1) Forrester Research

What’s interesting is that colleague Josh Bernoff’s weekly post on who do people trust, indicates that people trust their peers the most, and bloggers last. Josh writes:

“What does this mean for your brand? It means that a focus on “influencers” is not enough. You never know who may be reviewing your product, or where. Influencers may touch a lot of people, but so do the masses of reviewers on Yelp, or Amazon.com, or TripAdvisor. And heaven forbid you get people talking about your brand on The Consumerist.”

If people trust the reviews of friend that they know and trust 14% more than your corporate website, what is your web marketing team doing to accommodate this? Are you spending 14% more effort to listen, learn, influence peer reviews? I’ll bet your not, as most brand marketers I know are spending time building microsites, and launching brochure ware on their sites, without think about the impacts of their corporate website becoming irrelevant.

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2) Edelman Trust Barometer

In a confirming correlation, Edelmen’s research from Steve Rubel indicates the exact same findings, despite different phrasing of the questions. Steve writes: “both marketers and publishers - continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.”

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3) Pollara Research

Steve points to a third research report also validating this claim. Research firm Pollara found similar results:

“According to a new study from Canadian research firm Pollara, self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

“This shows that popularity doesn’t always equate to credibility,” said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there.”

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What you should do
Forward this post back to your marketing team, encourage the team to have an active and open dialog. Should you be focusing in on influencers only in your market space? Or should you start also focusing on ratings and review sites, where customers are critiquing, reading, and making decisions based on each others data.

So what’s this mean for me? Unless you know me, you’ll probably trust your friends or family far more than my opinion.

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So how can I win your trust back? Lately, I’ve been starting to see the cracks in social media, and have started a tag on this blog called Challenges. Social media isn’t perfect, it’s new, and many people and brands are doing it wrong. It’s important to be objective and point out when it works and when it doesn’t.

Update: Am I looking in the rear view mirror? intersting audio podcast debating this post, listen in (around 20 minutes in)

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In 2008, Business Adoption Of Web 2.0 Tools Is Expected To Grow Strongly

Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast
On Monday, colleague Oliver Young (I was involved with the report) published a forward looking report on the growth of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise entitled Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. As I mention with every report, you can purchase it directly from the site, or if not satisfied, obtain a refund, as we stand by the quality of our products.

Who should read this report?
Anyone investing in the space such as VCs, leadership at Social Media companies, or those involved in purchasing at corporations for social media tools.

Caveat: Sans services and “organic” sites
It’s important to note that calculations do not include properties such as ‘organic social networks’ like Facebook (which is valued at $15b), nor do they include services (a report I hope to do soon), so the numbers, in our opinion are just a slice of the overall technology sector. For example, in 2008 we project enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technology to account for just 0.2% of the $364bn global corporate spending on software and to barely even register as part of the $1.7 trillion we expect to see spent on technology overall is a useful piece of context. When you think about social media tools for the enterprise, most often, these commodity technologies are cheap, easy to deploy, and often free.

Web 2.0 Expo, a Physical Manifestation
I spent the last two days at the Web 2.0 expo (I was an advisor to the show), where 7000 people from this market assembled into one building. Who are these people? they are the ‘market’;, vendors, clients, analysts, press, media, and users. It was clear to me many mainstream businesses were attending, I’ll take a guess that many early adopters within the enterprise (I was that guy at Hitachi Data Systems) are dragging their boss, and colleagues who were once nay-sayers to the conference to learn. I saw many Fortune 1000 brands there trying to learn and understand how to use these tools for business.

Mainstreaming
To me, last year’s Web 2.0 expo was far different, it was a geek fest, where live streaming was prominent, and there was much more fascination over the tools –rather than the business impact. This year, many of the questions and folks I met were interested in using these tools to improve their business, they weren’t enamored with the latest widget. On the show floor, I spoke to two CEOs who read the report and commented that the numbers looked in par to their expectations.

Technology Infrastructure moves in
SUN (Who’s had the startup essentials program for a few years), HP, NetAPP, EMC were all present on the show room floor. What do they have to do with Web 2.0? In most cases, this is not their core business, but they realize this growing market will need infrastructure and technology to power these websites. I was pushing for this nearly 3 years ago at the data storage level, but I guess I was too early. Another change is the strong presence of an analyst firm, in this case it was Forrester, we were involved with four sessions, hosted a party, and launched a book. I guess this movement really is headed mainstream now.

What others are saying: in agreement and disagreement
Our friends at ZDNet may have misunderstood what we were actually sizing, at first it was assumed it was just “enterprise 2.0″ (internal) purchases, but in reality, this sizing encompasses externally facing (marketing), and is the largest piece of the pie.

The above and following image was posted on many blogs on Monday, where I encourage you to following the conversation and analysis. First, start with Read Write Web (Oilver and I are big fans of this blog), then Andy Beal takes Here’s the Reason Why Small Businesses Won’t Adopt “Enterprise 2.0″, and for a counterpoint, the respected Dennis Howlett The problem with Forrester’s $4.6 billion prediction, I always enjoy Dennis’ contrarion position, it’s needed in the industry. (update: Oliver Young left a comment on his post)

(This post was reviewed by colleague Analyst Oliver Young, who published the report)

Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

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I’m proud to announce my latest report on OpenSocial. If you’re not familiar with that, check out How to Explain OpenSocial to your Executives.

I interview Google, developers, and social network platforms to find out their ideology and experience with converting applications to the OpenSocial protocol, and I quickly learned that while the promise is indeed a powerful one, in reality, it will be very difficult to achieve. In some cases, developers tell me that widget code needs to be modified up to 50%.

For clients, you can access the short report on the Forrester site, or you can purchase it on the site. As much as I’d love to share this research to everyone, like you have your products, this is ours, and there are costs associated.

Google’s OpenSocial: Good News For Marketing Widgets But No Silver Bullet Google, along with a congress of more than a dozen social networks, plans to launch OpenSocial, a set of standards that will allow widgets to be built once and run on any Web site compatible with OpenSocial. What’s in it for interactive marketers? The ability to efficiently create engaging branded experiences that reach millions of new communities. However, don’t expect your widgets to universally proliferate, as adoption will vary based upon the demographic and technical characteristics of each online community. Interactive marketers should deploy widgets using OpenSocial standards, yet they should also plan — and budget — for rapid iterations and flexibility.

I interviewed:
Google’s OpenSocial Team, IBM’s Lotus Team, KickApps, NewsGator Technologies, Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr, Six Apart’s David Recordon, and Nick O’Neil of SocialTimes.com

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(Part 1 in a 3 part series)

Although it’s Sunday, I’m up early reviewing the data that Andres R, (one of our consultants) and I will be presenting to a client. It’s my first official project that I’m delivering and it’s a real learning experience. I’ve been in heaven lately, swimming in lots of social media data from our massive surveys we deploy, and in this case, we ‘cut’ data from the database to help a client understand the Technographics of the people they are trying to reach.

Being new to this process at Forrester, the research is similar to user experience research I used to conduct. We conducted stakeholder interviews to understand the business goals and drivers, worked with our data team to match the client provided persona and demographic information with our own data, and then conducted analysis.

While I certainly can’t give away any of the details, it’s very clear that two of the three personas that client is trying to reach has heavy use of social media, and the third doesn’t. Furthermore we segment the persona down to the Technographics, to understand how they use each social tool (from blogs, social networks, bookmarks, rating sites, etc) and to then share with client.

Armed with detailed knowledge about how their personas use social media, they are better equipped to move forward with their plans. It’s very clear, based on the data, which tools would work well for the particular personas, and which ones would not. It’s important to understand the people that you’re going to reach before deploying tools. Put people before tools.

You can learn more about Technographics, we’ve made some high level data available on the Groundswell site.

Wish me luck on my first project deliverable.

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I’ve been an Industry Analyst for 5 months, and I think I have a bead on what the job entails as a Senior Analyst.

Why I’m Sharing
I often advise clients to share behind the scenes at their job, giving customers a glimpse into what it takes to build a product, why and how customer service is important, and to build trust by building human relationships using these social tools. It’s pretty dang important that I practice what I preach, so I’ll share, in hopes of you trusting me more.

Several people told me that they felt I was being transparent with my research agenda and results, but many asked for more transparency with my day job. Over this last week, the feedback has been strong that people want to know, and they believe it will help them come closer to my employer.

Quite honestly, I’ve been hesitant to share too much of my job, as I’m concerned about not meeting high expectations, losing trust with my readers here on this blog, and I’m very sensitive to the cultures or my employers.

But recently, an email was sent to my management, where a client joined the company, and had strong intentions to work closely with me, that’s confirmation. Two client told me last night I was a big part of the reason they decided to become a client, wow, that’s confirmation that spurred on this post.

Truth and Misconceptions
Apparently the role of an Industry Analyst is shrouded with mystique and misconception. Meeting the many folks that I interact with online is much different than meeting them in person. In fact, people are much more candid and honest with me in person, and certainly over a beer or two.

At least once a week, people tell me “I could never do what you do, being stuck doing all that data crunching”. Apparently, the perception is that Industry Analysts spend most of their time sifting and sorting long spreadsheets. While that’s actually some part of my job, it isn’t the entirety.

How I spend my time as an Industry Analyst
I’m certainly only speaking about my experience, and by no way am reflecting on the experiences of others.

Pay myself first: Every morning, for about 2 hours before the world wakes up, I spend time reading everything I can on my industry, books, blogs, articles, reports. I use this time to manage my blog, manage comments, look at whos talking to me or about me. You’ll often see a flurry of tweets as I link to things that I think are interesting. If I stopped blogging, I would continue to get paid, but I know the value of being part of the conversation, both personally, professionally, and how it helps me in my day job.

Use the tools I cover: I come from the trenches, and was deeply involved in social media at corporations at Hitachi Data Systems, then went to the vendor side at PodTech, a podcasting, video, and blogging company. I’ve always found that the best way to understand tools (and more importantly, why they matter) is for me to use them. I push the tools to the limit, break them, then report back on how to effectively use them (or not at all). You’ll often see that I conduct a portion (about 20%) on this blog, by asking questions, spurring on discussions, and teasing out insight. If you haven’t figured it out, you are all in my lab, not as test subjects, but as co-scientists.

Research: The most important aspect of my job as an Analyst is to conduct research. I’ve a research agenda that I’ve worked with my manager and team on, and it’s based upon the feedback of clients, as well as where we think the market will need help. I need to spend quite a few hours a week obtaining data, adding feedback to the surveys and other data collection tools we do, conducting interviews, and simmering the content into something tangible and real. I’m learning a tremendous amount from my long term analyst Josh Bernoff, big picture Charlene Li, and guidance from Christine Overby, my research director and manager.

Apparently, Shel Israel linked to my recent report, which is only available to our clients (or you can buy individual reports), and met some feedback where folks felt the knowledge should be free. But just like your company has products, these are ours, and I’m not asking you to give me your products for free.

To date, I’ve published two reports on online communities, one on how to hire for social computing, strategist and community manager. Soon, I’ll be publishing a report on OpenSocial, and then on Marketing Campaigns on Social Networks, and a beefy Wave Report categorizing and prioritizing the White Label Social Network space. The end product is our reports that help provide insight to a confusing market.

Presenting/Sharing: I often present my findings from research at conferences, on webinars for clients, and you’ll see bits of it on this blog. It’s important to share what I’ve learned. The product is educating those who want to learn more, I list all my public speaking gigs on my profile page.

Helping Clients: This is the area of the day job I’m most passionate about. Perhaps the most unknown fact about my job is that I spend time helping clients. I act as a high level advisor, provide guidance, or can dig deeper into consultation projects, or can even bring a team in to help companies. I’m currently slated to help a few companies (some large brands you know) and this will only increase over time. The end result is helping business leaders make the right decisions.

Briefings: This is more of the ‘input’ that fuels my research. I’ve been briefed by many companies in my coverage space (social networks, white label social networks, and widgets) and I’m getting to know my market better and better. Quite honestly, the market is large, and there are 70 vendors in the white label space, I honestly have a hard time keeping track, it’s a overwhelming. Fortunately, I’ll be conducting formal research by producing a Wave later this year, and will define who’s strong in the marketplace. Important: I’m reducing the amount of briefings I’ll be receiving, and require briefings to be done in 30 minuets or less. The end result is me continuing to be informed.

Press Meetings: Another output is that I share my findings and insights to press, who are seeking a third party opinion. I’m contacted by reporters all over the world who ask me for findings, data, and opinions on the area that I’m covering. I’ve been in NYT, Mercury, NPR, BBC, and hundreds of others in the last 5 months, see this Google Query or see this ego page I sometimes update. I hear from family members and friends from all over who spot my quote in the paper.

Special Projects:
While only a sliver of my time, I’m still keeping fresh with social media strategy as an implementor. I hope you’ve been watching carefully, as a few weeks ago I made a call for a community manager to join our company. It’s pretty evident that I had a hand in this, so in many ways, I’m still lightly helping with social media strategy as I did at Hitachi Data Systems, more news of this to come.

Industry Events:
You’ll frequently see me at bay area tech events a few times a month, it’s pretty easy as there are about 4 tech events every night in Silicon Valley.

In summary, I’m getting to practice and focus in on my passion, Web Strategy, where I help companies understand how to use web tools to connect with customers, the mission of this blog, long before I became an Industry Analyst.

As I encourage clients to have an open and human conversation with their market, I’ll do the same, if you’ve further questions, feel free to leave a comment or question, I’m listening.

Update: I had a typo, where I listed Josh as my manager, but have now corrected the post.

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I really appreciate all the briefing requests that are coming in from the many companies in the social media industry. It feel as if the frequency of requests are increasing. Unfortunately, as much as I would want to, I can only be briefed by companies that I’m covering for my reports –any more, is just not feasible for my schedule.

My main coverage area is Social Networks (organic like Facebook, Bebo or the White label versions), Widgets, and companies that have deployed marketing campaigns. These should be external or public versions, not one for intranets/extranets (enterprise web).

The role I serve is the Interactive Marketer, and it’s my job to help them make great decisions, and brush off the hype. Successful briefings tend to be with companies that have a story to tell, have several successes under their belt (often a few large clients) and are really past the ’seed’ stage. I appreciate your self-filtering as the industry advances.

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As a vendor, part of your job is to represent yourself well in front of prospects, customers, partners, media, investors and analysts. In nearly all of those cases, you’ll be expected to tell a case study. In the space that I cover there are over 70 vendors, and you really will need to stand out of the crowd, telling an effective, memorable case study can really help.

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How To Tell An Effective Case Study
First of all, think of a case study as telling a story: start with a start, end with the end, there is a plot, characters, opposition and an ending with a resolution. Use diagrams or slides or screenshots to supplement the discussion.

1) Define the Objective
Define what the problem or challenge that your client was trying to overcome, express why the marketing campaign was needed in the first place. Examples of an objective could be: the need to connect with a certain audience/market, raise awareness for a product, glean insight into an existing market, or directly impact sales. Ideally the less objectives you have, the more focused your campaign will be, so try to be succint.

2) Tell what you actually did
In detail, outline the steps that you did for your client, include the features, services, and deployment. Give specifics: reaching to acommunity, endorsing a contest, deploying ads, or launching a series of podcasts. Of course, each activity should align with your objective(s).

3) Define how you overcame challenges
Many vendors are afraid to show their weaknesses, instead be forthcoming, no campaign ever goes perfect or the client would have done it themselves. Talk about challenges and how you overcame them or what you learned. Demonstrate your flexibility and ability to be a quick savvy marketer.

4) Tell what the costs were
In some cases (such as an Analyst briefing) it can be to your advantage to discuss costs and pricing, because: 1) Analyst can guide clients to the appropriate vendor if they have price considerations 2) The Analyst likely has pricing of your marketplace and if you ask, they may tell you how you compare to market pricing (of course, never giving away confidential information). This can be on or off the record, and they will respect your wishes. Still uncomfortable? use ranges of prices or price bands.

5) Measurable results
This is the clincher. Provide detailed analysis and results on what you accomplished. Use numbers. For example: 100,000 new registered users were gained and 30% of them were very active resulting in an average duration of 20 minutes where 1500 of them talked about the campaign, click through to a microsite, or interacted with a game, etc.

I hope these tips help you, it will certainly help me understand why you’re the worthy company you are. I’ve tagged this ‘analyst’ with my other posts related to this topic, be sure to cruise through those. (like What an Effective Analyst Briefing is Like)

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The other day, I moaned on twitter how many vendors are missing the opportunity during their briefing with an analyst, someone asked me to write up what success looks like, so I’m creating this helpful guide.

Understand the analysts’ coverage area
Analysts get briefed by vendors very frequently, I get briefed a couple of times a week, (yesterday I had 3). It’s important for the analyst to know the vendors in their space, what they are working on, what’s coming, and what challenges the industry is having. My coverage area is around online communities, which include vendors that are social networking sites, widgets, some micromedia, and a little bit of measurement.

You need to stand out in the marketplace
It’s very, very challenging as there are over 60 vendors in the white label space, and hundreds in the public social network space. I briefly discuss what is likely to happen to this industry in this article. Fortunately, I’m not the only one in this coverage space, I share it with Charlene Li, Peter Kim, Oliver Young on the enterprise side, and others who are involved in the research and report phase. Why should you care? Because the marketplace is so large an varied, you really need to stand out in the eyes of the analyst.

Where many vendors go wrong: too high or too low
It’s a real challenge for companies to identify what they are, and having a seasoned marketer on board really helps. You could risk going too high, and be filled with: Marketese, Hyperbole, Mission Statements, and bunch of buzz words, or too low and focus on technology alone, without providing business context. For many startups, there a bunch of technologists that may not have business skills, it’s time to invest in someone who understands communication, presentation, marketing, business development and the marketplace.

What a great briefing looks like: In the middle
It’s rare that a vendor can deliver such a succinct, resonating presentation in under and hour, and I think this is a good model for others to follow:

Yesterday, I experienced one of the best briefings, a vendor was very professional in their communication, messaging, presentation and demo. She started off with a clear message on what the company does, quickly differentiated how her company was different than the other 60, showed how her products and service brought value to customers (without little marketese or hyperbole) showed the major product suites, gave a case study starting with objectives, challenges and measurable results, summarized then passed to the demo. The product manager then showed me a live demo, cruised some of the major features, and showed a live use case, rather than just poking around at the interface. They were forth coming as I asked where to they think customers feel they need improvement.

What to do in a briefing
Colleague Charlene has provided a helpful guide on how to have a successful briefing with her. She lists out some specific questions she wants to see in every briefing, I’d add:

-Leave the marketing hyperbole at home
-Bring a case study with client objectives and measurable results
-Be forth coming in your areas that need improvement
-Don’t do all the talking, ask questions of the analyst
-Tell us where you’re going next, what are the plans
-Read Charlene’s post (link above for other must dos)

These aren’t just good skills to have for analyst briefings, but they are also key in customer communications, investor relations, and media relations.

Additional Resources
The best way to get a briefing is not to email me, instead, follow Charlene’s advice and request go through the briefing central process. They’ll schedule, get the right analyst(s) and help you move forward. Also see my List of Resources, Profiles, Indexes, Blogs, Companies and Information for the Analyst Industry.

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Click To Play

In the above video, I met up with Carter at the famous Buck’s at Woodside, a famous restaurant where VCs from nearby Sand Hill road meetup with prospective investors, and entrepreneurs from the tech community. Many a deals have been brokered here.

When I first heard of Carter Lusher, it was when I ran into his fiery blog post when he was the head of analyst relations at HP (read all the comments too). That’s a pretty heavy duty job, as this means that he’s responsible for ‘infuencing the influencers’ and a tech company this is especially important.

Although he’s moved on to start his own gig at SageCircle, he continues to focus in on social media + analyst industry, and how it’s disruption will cause some analyst firms to be less relevant, and those that participate to be more relevant.

I’ve not heard of any analysts that directly get paid to blog, we do it because it’s fun, or we know the benefits, if I stopped blogging, I would still get my paycheck, although it’s very clear that my influence would be less. (Besides what else would I do for two hours before the rest of the world wakes up?).

In one of his most recent and relevant posts, Carter has some excellent advice (read my comments) why analysts reject briefing requests from startups.

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Listen in to the audio podcast by pressing the play button using the Forrester player above. Folks have asked for me to be transparent in our research, so I’m pulling you all in behind the scenes as Charlene Li and I discuss the topics we research on.

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Peter Kim, and myself collaborated on Top Social Computing Predictions For 2008. While many folks have already published their predictions in Dec, now’s a good time for us to share after the noise has settled down.

While we each gave specific predictions for the year, Charlene and I focused in on the aggregation or portability of the Social Graph. Not famliar with what the social graph is? Then please read Explaining what the “Social Graph” is to your Executives.

Thanks to Sim at Utterz for creating this customized player for Forrester, it was easy to use, we just needed a quiet room and a phone.

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Special note
If you’re just reading my blog to get my insight but don’t want to hear about my day job (I get criticized whenever I talk about it) then you can skip this post. It’s a tough line to walk as if I don’t talk about it, (I’ve been sucked into the paywall), and criticized if I do talk about it (I’ve become a corporate shill). Regardless of the rift, I’m going to continue to provide a well rounded view to what’s going on in my worklife regardless of a few resentful comments.

Conversations in my coverage
I’m attempting to be very transparent in my day to day job as an analyst, and I’d like to share with you some of my upcoming research projects that I’ll be completing over the next year. If you’re watching my closely you’ll realize that some of these topics I talk about here on my blog, or on twitter, it’s natural to really envelope the topic with both arms, in many cases, it helps me to develop an idea, framework, or thesis before I get started. There are over 500 analysts at Forrester (Update a few hours later: I just learned that the actual number is 331 research professionals which include analysts, researchers, RAs, etc.) , with many different focuses primarily for decision makers in IT or Marketing (I’m focused on the interactive marketer or social media manager).

Upcoming Research
The title analyst leads to much discussion, as a more functional title would be researcher and advisor. Over the next few months I’ll be doing research on Social Networks (white label too), Online Communities, Community Managers, and widgets/open social. Writing reports is the toughest part of my job, each report takes a few months, and each sentence has to be defensible by insight, interviews, data, experience, or knowledge, unlike blog posts, there’s little room for uncertainty. Honestly, and I told this to our CEO, I think that writing them is a real pain in the ass. So if you’re working in areas that I mentioned, I’ll be reaching out to some of you for interviews or data as I approach each report.

How does this blog play into this?
While the final output (reports) are limited to Forrester clients (it’s our product, just as you have yours at your company) you’ll find tons of juicy bits on my blog that act as a supplement, and information, interviews (my videos are often done after I interview someone for research, I like to “bring you along” with me) and also includes data and case studies that get cut from the reports, all which I hope you’ll find helpful…at no cost. Keep in mind that I was partly hired for this web strategy blog, but I am not paid for it, everything you read and watch is above and beyond my duties in the day job. My measurement goals do not include this blog, and anything I do here is out of pure passion (I’ve blog for 2 hours before 6am nearly every day), quite frankly, I could quit blogging and I’d still get paid, but that’s not the point –it’s damn fun.

Coming soon
Also, in the near future, I plan to write some posts to help you make your interactions with analysts easier such as: when and how to brief an analyst. Just wanted to share with you all as I approach my fourth month into this role.

Love to hear your feedback, questions, or comments.

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Having recently been hired as a Forrester analyst, I’m exploring the industry, in order to do my job more effective. At my previous role at Hitachi as the community manager, I learned that creating indexes are particular helpful for me, and also for clients.

The following is a list of resources, profiles, indexes, and information for the analyst industry.

Who is this for? Anyone who is an analyst, or uses analyst services or information. You’ll need the right information to do your job, and this is to serve as a starting point.

List of Resources, Profiles, Indexes, Blogs, and Information for the Analyst Industry

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Analyst Firms
Rather than listing out the hundreds/thousands of firms, I’ll link to indexes.

Tekrati’s Analyst Firms
A very comprehensive database, it lists hundreds (if not thousands) of analyst firms

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Resources for the Analyst Relations Professional

Tekrati
Tekrati: “monitor, profile and report on over 500 industry analyst firms worldwide each weekday at Tekrati’s Industry Analyst Reporter website. We provide fast, easy access to over 3,400 analyst biographies and contacts through Tekrati’s Analyst Profiles online directory.” They also offer a product called Analyst Profiles that “Tekrati’s Analyst Profiles presents biographies, contact information, contact tips and company descriptions only about the industry analysts.”

AR Insights
Analyst Relations proffessionals can use AR Insights as it: “was designed by and built for AR professionals, successful AR programs are choosing ARchitect™ not only for the powerful database but to manage and streamline the day-to-day activities of their AR departments.”

AR Intranet
Another resource for Analyst Relations pros: “The AR Intranet contains productivity tools and information for industry analyst relations professionals, leveraging insight from Lighthouse Analyst Relations and Analyst Equity.”

Analyst Strategy Group
AR services include: “Analyst Strategy Group provides key direction and support for leading Analyst Relations programs as they migrate from operationally focused AR to generating strategic, measurable value”

Hill & Knowlton: Analyst Influence / AR Capabilities
Services include: “H&K AR is a dedicated global practice with full-time AR professionals on-staff who focus exclusively on analyst relations”

Knowledge Capital Group (KPC)
Multiple services which include: “The Knowledge Capital Group (KCG) is the leading Analyst Relations Strategy Development Consultancy for the Technology Industry”

Lighthouse: Analyst Relations
“Selling complex technology to complex organisations is a recipe for a lengthy, expensive sales process. What if you could be introduced into more sales opportunities, shorten the sales process and stand a higher chance of success at the end of it - all with one programme? This is the potential of a successful industry analyst relations programme and little wonder that many technology vendors are bringing new resources to bear in this important area. ”

Sage Circle
“SageCircle is a firm that does “analysis of the analysts” and provides best practices for a variety of communities that interact with the analysts including”

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Social Media
Rather than list out the thousands of industry analyst blogs, I’m going to link to current indexes. Resources listed alphabetically.

Forrester Blogs
Blogs under the Forrester URL domain

Gartner Blogs
“Gartner Blogs are frequently updated journals including opinions, news, ideas, commentary and Internet links. Gartner Blogs should not be considered Gartner research.”

Jupiter Research Blogs
Great overview page aggregates many blogs, RSS options available. Impressive.

Jupiter Research Podcasts
“We’re podcasting discussions with our analysts to expose our thinking to a wider audience. We hope you find these conversations interesting.”

Net Savvy Executive: List of Blogs that Analyze Social Media
“Here’s a little information overload for you. Links to blogs associated with social media analysis companies. Most are linked to companies in the the Guide to Social Media Analysis. Some are more work-oriented than others, but there are some good sources in here.”

Redmonk’s Blogs
James, who is very active in the social sphere, tweeted me, suggesting that their website aggregates all three blogs, certainly meets the criteria.

Tecnobabble’s Top 100 Analyst Blogs
“This league table is a global ranking of the top 100 analyst blogs.”

Tekrati’s comprehensive database of Analyst Blogs
Really an amazing industry resource.

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Analyst Briefing Tips
Many companies brief analysts on their products, as they influence media, and sometimes act like media now that they have social media tools, here’s some advice:

How to brief an Analyst
Charlene, from her perspective, lists out how a company can maximize their time when briefing an Analyst.

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Related Resources
Websites that helped compile this information (and are a great read) include:

Carter Lusher (Formerly HP’s AR relations): Who are you?

Tips from analysts about how to interact with them more effectively

ARmadgeddon: Great blogroll with many resources

In praise of open source Analysts

Need to update this list? Leave a comment
I’ll update this list with your feedback, try to provide some background information on the resource, if possible.

See my other industry indexes for other resources.

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