Obviously any ranking system is open to question, and its not clear exactly what the new Technobabble 2.0 Industry Analyst Top 50 measures, but it aggregates some useful measures of web influence, and I am very happy to report that out of more than 200 industry analyst bloggers RedMonk takes the top three slots (at least unless/until Charlene Li does something about the inclusion of Bloglines subscriber numbers.)
What I like about Jonny’s recent stuff (he works at Edelman, so it will be interesting to see if Steve Rubel, who has recently been pondering engagement measurement, picks it up) is that he is at least asking what a new analyst business might look like, rather than assuming the status quo will be maintained ad infinitum, which seems to be the position of many in the business.
I know there are many skeptics out there about on the question whether blogging has a role in research, and whether firms like RedMonk have any industry influence. That is fair. But it seems to me that just as we should not confuse a Technorati ranking with industry influence, neither should we imagine that an utterly reductionist focus on RFP involvement tells us everything about influence either. A myopic focus on capital expenditure and new product purchase relies on a too-blunt instrument in the age of open source and free services. If businesses adopt Google Apps, for example, in their free form, will that be ignored by analyst firms used to comparing Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes adoption, say? As I have argued before tracking MySQL adoption is not the same as tracking MySQL revenues.
There are many kinds of influence, it seems to me, and analyst relations and corporate communications departments need to understand this. In much the same way that software companies do a poor job of revisiting their customers to ensure that software was successfully installed, and users were trained effectively to use it, and benefits were realized, so industry analysts tend to focus on purchasing behaviours rather than value.
Do we have influence? Sure we do – notably within some open source ecosystems, but also in traditional spaces. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems CEO and President says so (see his blogroll, which calls out both mine and Stephen’s blog). He is far from alone.
Is it surprising that a firm which set out to be the first blogging analyst company should take the top spots in such a poll? Of course not. But it is a nice validation of our strategy -sure it is. We don’t put information behind a firewall, which dramatically improves our ambient findability. We use social software to benefit from ambient intimacy. We want to be easy to deal with. We want to be fun. We want to be smart. We want to learn from a range of communities, not just one narrow constituency. I think the Top 50 award represents all of that. So that’s a good start to the week.
Finally I am very interested to see if this ranking gets any play in the blogosphere – industry analysts being about as popular amongst civilians as estate agents…
disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, MySQL and Sun are clients.
Dennis Howlett says:
June 18, 2007 at 10:25 am
This is interesting on several levels. I won’t comment on how the criteria measure up except to say they represent a particular view of influence that most would agree is restricted to those that use those forms of measurement in the first place. Nothing wrong with that as long as the limitations are understood.
At a Microsoft event last week, several ‘prominent’ analysts knew nothing of Facebook, Twitter and other social software. They readily agreed that the influence of the traditional analyst is on the wane. Myself and a ‘softie were having fun doing the Twitter thing and explaining the value of those kinds of conversation from a business perspective. Mouths were agape but at least one of the analysts got it.
Gartner is genuinely exposed. And I don’t say that out of malice but out of the obvious fact you can’t play both sides of the fence and hope to have a viable long term business. Do end user companies buy their ‘stuff’ in large quantities any longer? If my reading of the analyst tea leaves is remotely correct, they’ve moved over to the sell side and there is continuing pressure on ‘sales.’
As someone once said: ‘We live in interesting times.’
Ric says:
June 18, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Hey – too cool for school, James!
ARcade : Top 50 analyst bloggers says:
June 19, 2007 at 3:51 pm
[…] aren’t transparent) and Bloglines tells me that Nate Elliot has 179 subscribers, as opposed to James Governor’s 114, yet Jonny gives James the nod on that part of the survey, what’s more Mr Bentwood […]
Jonny Bentwood says:
June 19, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Congrats James
What I find most interesting from the league table is how companies like Gartner are being paid to advise on blogging yet can’t get to grips with it themselves.
The analyst model is in flux and I fully expect this medium or similar ones to be far more important in the years ahead.
links for 2007-06-20 » SDLC Blog says:
June 20, 2007 at 12:43 am
[…] James Governor’s Monkchips » ABC, as Easy as 1,2,3: RedMonk Rankings in Analyst Top 50 Congrats to Redmonk guys! You rock! (tags: redmonk analyst) […]
Neil's point-free blog says:
June 20, 2007 at 9:43 pm
RedMonk Kicking Gartner’s Bottom…
Great to see the triumvirate of analysts at RedMonk taking the top three slots on the Technobabble 2.0 Analyst Blogs rankings. I met James Governor at EclipseCon this year, and it was refreshing to hear an industry analyst dishing out opinions for less…
Analyst blogging - is it worth it? « Technobabble 2.0 says:
June 26, 2007 at 2:03 pm
[…] certainly seems that blogging has a huge impact. I lost count of the number of people applauding James Governor for his proactive stance in this […]