Over the past two weeks, I’ve shared some discussions on social media and analyst relations with industry influencers Teresa Cottam of Telesperience and Peter Brockmann of Brockmann & Company.  To wrap up the series, here are their takes on the future of analyst relations: 

Q: How do you envision analyst relations to evolve in the future?

TC: I would argue that there are three key challenges facing AR: getting noticed, managing your influence across an ever-wider range of interaction channels and dealing with an ever-increasing number of analyst firms.  Getting noticed is an age old problem.  Most senior analysts suffer from information overload and an enormous workload, so getting heard above the background noise can be challenging.  Quite often there can be a mismatch between when a company wants to announce something and what an analyst is covering currently.  If you have a great story on policy control, then journalists will pick this up, but analysts will only pick it up if they’re currently working on policy control now.  Large analyst firms tend to decide research directions in advance—sometimes considerably in advance—and this means they are less adaptive than journalists.  The challenge for analysts is now to work across several modes—strategic, tactical and adaptive research—and some are better at this than others.  The challenge for analyst relations is to engage with analysts in an appropriate manner across these modes of research, and this necessitates engaging across a variety of new channels.  Likewise, there is the issue of identifying the ‘right’ analyst for your needs.  This isn’t the 1990s where most senior analysts lived within five big firms.  Now a large number of the most senior and influential analysts have either become independent or have set up small firms.  Simply engaging with the top few analyst firms is, therefore, not enough, and many companies simply don’t have the resources or expertise to identify, build and maintain relationships across such a large number of influencers.

PB: Besides being writers, public speakers and thought leaders, analysts are often a kind of market proxy for marketing professionals.  Even though they aggregate data from disparate sources, extrapolate consumption algorithms, constantly survey buyers and sellers, and are always offering opinions to users, vendors or both, analysts can only write and talk about what they know.  So educating analysts on the client’s view of the world will always be part of growing the client’s business by shaping the views of analysts, who in turn shape the views of others.  Likewise, buyers will only act on information they trust from sources that they deem trustworthy.  These natural and very human limitations means that there will always be information intermediaries, like analysts, who package up and filter the vast array of information about companies, technologies and markets, and more importantly that analyst relations will always be a contact sport.