Analyst: I'll grant you three wishes...

Picture the scene.

A world-class analyst from a highly renowned international firm decides they love your company so much that they are going to grant you one free wish (the analyst being slightly less generous than the proverbial genie).

What do you pick?

1) Should they get on the phone and give a glowing recommendation to the hot prospect that sales are desperately trying to close?

2) Perhaps it would be a day with your sales and marketing team, where the analyst shares their knowledge on current market developments and provides an insight into the hot technology and business buttons?

3) Or maybe it will be to have the analyst talk to a journalist at the FT and give them a favourable quote for the big IT feature which is coming up.

As I was thinking about this, I was instinctively thinking that the choice was between 1) and 2). Analysts deliver real commercial benefit not PR fluff. And then I thought some more.

It'll completely depend on where your business is. Might sales be able to close that prospect anyway? Are the sales and marketing team already industry gurus? If so, are you wasting the opportunity? How much use could you get out of that FT story?

We should never forget that there is so much more to AR than getting good quotes for the press (something many PR companies seem never to have learnt or have simply forgotten).

But we should also remember that perhaps occasionally providing the quote could be the best thing we ask the analyst to do.

New PR blog

I keep finding that there's a lot of things I want to say and explore more generally about PR, marketing and communication in the IT market.

I do want this blog to stay focused on industry analysts and analyst relations so I have set-up another blog called PR Insights. Please feel free to check it out if you have a broader interest in IT PR.

IDC eXchange

IDC has launched a new blog, IDC eXchange, written by SVP - Research Frank Gens.

It is described as providing "research and insights about the present and future of IT in the world."

Thanks to Andy Lark for picking it up.

Correction: Ashim Pal

So Ashim Pal has left the analyst community and joined Microsoft. But it was over a year ago. Whoops. Better fact checking in the future, I promise. Thanks to Andy Bitterer for pointing out my mistake.

Insight sets up press release RSS feed

Our sister company Insight Marketing has just started putting out its press releases on RSS. I said I'd give them a plug.

Analysts continue to move in-house

Dario Betti has left Ovum to join T-Mobile.

And word on the street is that T-Mobile's not the only company currently looking to lure analysts in-house.

Describing analyst relations

Ever struggled to describe what analyst relations is all about? Here's a wonderful summary from John Mihalec, head of IBM analyst relations.

"...in the computer business there are all these research firms who write about the industry and provide advice to customers about what to buy, at the same time they also provide advice to the computer vendors about how to sell... it's our job in Analyst Relations to make sure these research firms understand IBM's products and strategies, and become convinced that IBM is doing the right things for customers. It's also our job to listen to what the analysts are saying about us, and to make sure IBM harnesses the wisdom in those assessments."

Thanks to John Simonds, Delusions of Adequacy.

Ovum and EVUA form joint venture

An interesting announcement - Ovum and EVUA form joint venture.

Given it also has a JV with the GSM Association - Wireless Intelligence - it looks like Ovum's started to develop a specialism in this field.