I really loved this post from Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation.
You see, my business partner Stephen did a presentation at an Eclipse event yesterday, as did Carl Zetie from Forrester. However only one of these guys has a free public blog and an open approach to branding and content.
Can you guess which approach leads to more potential web entry points?
Go read the blog to see all the touch points. Ah linkage…
RedMonk is determined to lower barriers to entry. We’re easy to work with.
Gartner and Forrester on the other hand are constantly looking for new ways to increase revenues, by raising barriers to entry.
Sure Charline has a free blog, but what about the rest of Forrester?
Forrester and Gartner are making the same mistake as the New York Times. To paraphrase Jay Rosen: “part of our unique selling proposition: if you’re in the market, you get more if you stop by monkchips and tecosystems.”
If you are stuck behind the firewall noone is going to reference you. If your corporate use policy takes ten minutes to explain, and requires that people contact you to request approval every time they want to use your company name, then they are less likely to reference your brand.
Gary Potter says:
September 23, 2005 at 7:02 pm
My company has full access to Forrester research and at times it is very frustrating to not be able to reference their material. Charlene did a video I wanted to link to in our internal (behind our fire wall) blog system about social networks. Even though we have full access, they had no provision for existing clients to reference material they have access to. 🙁
John says:
September 23, 2005 at 7:54 pm
James, Great post. Since I don’t have access to research anymore, this “only for clients” policy makes my job even harder to determine what the analysts’ stances are on certain issues and trends, especially when all I have to go by now are some sound bytes in the press. Descriptions for specific reports are usually no help either because it seems that all the major firms in their infinite wisdom conspired to offer the least amount of information possible.
So if they don’t publicise it or blog about it, then how are we supposed to know about it? At least there are firms like RedMonk, Jupiter and M;Metrics that are trying to lower the barriers. Hopefully more will see the light…
ARonaut says:
September 28, 2005 at 10:21 am
Entertaining and thought provoking post. We’ve posted some commentaries here:
armadgeddon.blogspot.com