ARmadgeddon: On Blogger Relations and Influencers Relations
ARmadgeddon asked so I am responding.
While there are circumstances where secrecy is needed-notably in advisory consulting- it is often overused.
There is no reason why we couldnt podcast more briefings. Indeed- Dana Gardner is building a business in that space. The likes of David Berlind and Dan Farber at ZDNet are driving a notion that the conversation should be recorded, to ensure both parties are properly treated.
The flipside- a very senior executive once told me something in a briefing that appeared on my blog. Unhappiness ensued. I wish I had known the quote was off limits. I even pushed back at the time and asked if he stood by the statement. But then I was the bad guy for reporting it.
It goes back to this:
“In today’s Web 2.0, conversations are in the open: blogs force corporations to rethink the line between what needs to be protected (actively) and what can be left in the wild.”
Tell us what needs to be kept secret and we’ll respect that. But that means you need to know what your pearls are.
We would happily delete a section from a podcast, whether a briefing or not, if there was a danger of collateral damage.
Its probably best to avoid saying something in a briefing that you wouldn’t want to see reported though. That just seems like common sense to me – even if it is, say, FUD against a competitor.
Of course we allso protect the confidences of our customers’ customers. We will talk to end users on an NDA basis.
Of course we would prefer it if those conversations were fair game too. Enterprise adoption proof points are gold dust.
In the financial analyst sector there are now laws in place against selective disclosure. The industry analyst space has no such legal constraints, but I personally would be happier if there were.
I also don’t think business done in dark smoky rooms tends to the public good, and as the majority shareholder at RedMonk I am not letting down my shareholders by respecting and encouraging the public good. We believe in transparency. For personal reasons and because we think it makes good business sense.
The information should be made public – that’s the purpose of a briefing isn’t it?
Taking this a bit further – I don’t like pre-briefings far in advance of the actual news. In fact I have even been considering a policy that RedMonk would only take pre-briefs from clients, to enable us to take calls from press and so on when the shoe drops. But otherwise we’re just keeping someone else’s secret, for a month or something, then you have to do a bunch of dat tracking and othersuch, to make sure you don’t mess up.
We want knowledge we can use. I want to blog the news. I want to tell people what I know.
Secrecy incurs management and administration costs.
Of course if we were a white paper analyst firm we might want time to get a puff piece ready before the announcement date. But we’re not a white paper analyst firm. We’re an advisory firm.
Secrets are barriers to participation, which is not the preferred RedMonk way.
Can we keep secrets? Absolutely.
A related though not synonymous iussue: will we sign blanket NDAs – we dont like to, but if we have to to come to a conference or something we will.
Tell us something is secret and it will remain so. But please have a good reason, for your own sake as much as ours.
Finally I want to stress one more time in case I wasn’t clear.
Secrecy is appropriate in some contexts, and our business depends on it to be honest.
But there is no reason many of our briefings couldn’t be podcasts.
disclaimer: I am terrible at recording all the briefings we take. I wish I did better. Cote is a much better at documentation.
ARonaut says:
November 17, 2006 at 5:43 pm
James,
Thanks for your response. You pose the question in interesting term: secrecy vs. participation.
The analysts have long valued secrecy: they used to hold their “power” from “knowledge”. Where that model is going in the Web 2.0 era is a good question.
However, participation should not mean immediacy and should not be antagonistic from in depth analysis. There’s a lot of noise out there…
Dana Gardner says:
November 17, 2006 at 7:52 pm
How to define Briefings 2.0 is an intriguing subject that I have given quite a bit of thought to. I agree with James wholeheartedly: Keep your NDAs, observe consulting dialogue as different from a briefing, but recognize the value of a lively briefing soars with the size of those exposed to it — and stretches the boundaries of education and understanding. Analyst-only briefings sans an audience are of far less value in terms of market education.
And these exposed briefings are powerful at self-qualification of eager communities. The content tends to be geeky enough to engage those closest to the issues, like buyers, but too geeky for those tangental to the meaning. No need to water down the benefits to suit a wide audience, or general reporters. So my sense of the proper balance on this is to as an IT analyst do a vendor briefing, gather my notes and invite the subject-givers back for a second recorded version, which they sponsor and the listener knows that up-front.
As we deliver this podcast/transcript out to the blogosphere and to IT media partners, the educational boundaries grow, communities are defined, the analyst moderates as a trusted truth-seeker, and the vendor gets the pertinent details into the public domain while an engaged and selective audience adds real meat to their bones of needed interest — at no cost. Expose the tagged transcript and blog on it, and viola — true communications via search, link, comment, and actively involved communities of reaction and validation (or not). Listen or read, search or RSS. By keeping it all on the level of a briefing, it is by definition informational and not slippery.
Incidentally, I recently moderated a panel before the Publicity Club of New England on these issues, and the consensus was that within IT media and communities that one-third of the content would soon be user-generated (blogs and comments), one-third would be vendor-generated (white-papers, sponsored podcasts, webinars, webcasts, etc.), and one-third would be traditional reporter-generated content (news stories, reviews, columns). Openly available analyst briefings aid and abet all three.
James says:
November 18, 2006 at 1:40 am
There is still a place in web 2.0 for traditionally published analyst documents…
James says:
November 18, 2006 at 1:47 am
For your comment, blogs force corporations to rethink… is on the money. Most EA teams can’t tell you their line. I can say emphatically that we not only know where the line is but the EA team itself determines it. You will see even more sharing coming out of us in 2007…