AR teams will get in trouble with executives for being surprised by analysts’ social media commentary – Looking ahead to 2010

This post is one in a series where SageCircle pulls out the crystal ball and looks ahead to what happens in the analyst ecosystem in 2010. See below for links to all posts in this series.

The vast majority of analyst relations (AR) teams are not regularly monitoring their most relevant analysts’ social media usage. However, this lack of attention could prove to be politically dangerous in 2010.

Many AR professionals have been confronted by executives at their companies with negative press quotes by the analysts. Often the executives demand to know why the analyst made the negative comment and what AR is going to do about it. Up through the early Internet age, while troublesome because it caused a fire drill, it was reasonable for AR not to be aware of a particular quote because a comprehensive press clipping service would have been too expensive. However, as the Internet and search tools matured, it has because harder for AR to justify ignorance about press quotes. This provides the added danger of damaging AR’s credibility for not being on top of the situation.

As more analysts adopt social media, sometimes chaotically, AR now has to anticipate being confronted by an executive wanting to know about some analyst’s negative blog post, tweet, or comment made in a social network. Just as with press quotes today, AR cannot feign ignorance about the negative comments made in social media. This is because it is perceived to be free and “easy” to monitor social media. Thus, an AR team that is not aware of an analyst social media comment brought to its attention by an executive will be in grave danger of having its credibility questioned. This could give rise to a new group tasked with social media influencer relations that would take over working with key

Incorporating Social Media Metrics into Your Measurement Program – A SageCircle Webinar

Some of today’s new challenges for AR teams are how to determine if there is value to monitoring analyst opinions on blogs, Twitter, and social networks like LinkedIn; how to do the monitoring; and how to use the information gathered to create meaningful metrics. To help analyst relations teams be proactive with the emerging measurement requirements for social media, SageCircle is announcing a new public webinar focused on providing the tools and insights needed to efficiently collect, analyze and report social media metrics. 

This webinar is designed to teach you how to measure analyst social media traffic, the various methods for automating your social media monitoring for effective data gathering, and ways to measure both the mentions and the tonality.  We will discuss how to incorporate social media into your balanced scorecard and provide concise reporting to executives.

Key Issues to be addressed in this webinar include:

• How do social media metrics fit into the overall AR measurement and reporting program?
• What are the social media metrics needed for both performance and operational measurements?
• What are the best practices for collecting social media metrics?
• What are the approaches for reporting on social media activities and outcomes, either as standalone reports or as part of a broader reporting structure?

In this SageCircle Webinar, our strategists will provide a succinct analysis of

Superstars Owyang and Wang joining Altimeter Group is not just about social media

On August 27, 2009, the Altimeter Group announced (click here for press release) that it was expanding with Deborah Schultz and former Forrester analysts R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang.  They join Charlene Li, former Forrester social media analyst and co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies . Here are some salient points about the announcement that we picked up from Altimeter’s briefing for SageCircle: 

• This is a true firm, not a loose collection of individuals operating under a marketing umbrella
• They are Silicon Valley-based partners which will permit creation of a coherent team and methodology
• Their coverage emphasis will be on “emerging technologies” not social media
• The focus will be on thought leadership and practical applications
• Their business model will incorporate many traditional analyst firm elements (e.g., vendor selection, training, consulting, and speeches) with the addition of a hands-on lab and a community platform
• Regularly published, client-only research is not part of the model

Because of the partners association with social media – as analysts, corporate practitioners, and personal usage – the coverage of this announcement will likely give too much play on that aspect. While an important part of Altimeter’s marketing and initial research coverage, SageCircle thinks that focusing on social media misses other more interesting implications of this announcement:

1. Altimeter has the potential to be a contender (see Boutique Analyst Firms: Pretenders and Contenders) with serious visibility and influence
2. Altimeter has the potential to grow a serious technology buyer client base, maybe over 50%, unlike most single practitioners and analyst boutiques that rely on vendors for revenues
3. A technology buyer client base when combined with its vendor selection services should increase Altimeter’s relevance to vendor analyst relations (AR) and other influencer programs
4. Altimeter has the potential to systematically cover

Forrester adds 20 analysts to Analyst Twitter directory and dozens of contributors to the role-based team blogs

Forrester gives us yet more data that social media is being adopted by the major firms. Twenty additional Forrester analysts were added to Analyst Twitter Directory since the August 14^th update. The 58 additions to the Forrester Blog Directory are equally interesting but not as time compressed as we had not updated the directory in some time. Here are some observations.

Research associates are using social media to raise their profiles. Research associates are those folks that do a lot of the grunt work when it comes to analyst research projects. They might get an occasional byline mention, but do not have an entry on the official analyst bio page. We have noticed that some savvy research associates are using blogs and Twitter to start building their personal brands. For instance, the Sourcing & Vendor Management role blog had been dormant all year with zero posts until early July when three new contributors revived the blog. When we started adding the contributors to the Forrester Blog Directory we noticed that none were analysts, rather they were all research associates. In addition, there are some research associates who are also tweeting. We include research associates in the directories because some will be promoted into full analyst status some day.

Not all analysts named as contributing to Forrester blogs are really blogging. We noticed several cases where two or more analysts are on the byline of a particular blog post, but that is the only time that they appear in all the blogs. The blog posts in question were obvious official responses to a

Should AR respond to an analyst blog post or dismiss it? The answer is “Yes.”

Next question? Seriously, this is not an either/or decision but one based on the circumstances of a particular blog post and governed by the communications policy and decision process that the analyst relations (AR) team has put into place.

There are many factors that will go into a decision framework to determine whether and how to respond to an analyst blog. These include visibility of the blog and individual post, relevance of the analyst, relevance of the topic, intensity of the opinion expressed, perceived motivation of the analyst, and so on.

Likewise, there are options for how AR responds to an analyst blog post. In some situations, AR can and should ignore responding to a post. In others, AR should pick up the phone and call the analyst or send an email. In yet other cases, AR should leave a comment on the blog post to correct factual errors. On other occasions, AR will find it useful to engage in a comment-based, asynchronous “conversation” to not just correct errors but to discuss differences of opinion when it comes to the analysis in the post. If the vendor or AR team has an appropriate blog, it can also be a platform for responding to an analyst’s blog post.

The one thing that AR cannot do is ignore analyst blogging and tweeting. AR needs to monitor all forms of

A potpourri of observations on social media and the analyst ecosystem

Time to take a minute to check in with what’s up with the analyst ecosystem and social media.

Atwitter about Twitter – Twitter continues to be a hot topic in general with some negative backlash developing (e.g., Morgan Stanley’s report that teens do not care for Twitter and Nielsen’s research that millions are “Twitter quitters”). So what? It does not matter how many millions of users don’t use Twitter after signing up or how many millions follow some actor or talk show host. What matters for AR teams is whether their most relevant analysts are using Twitter and how it is being used.

Forrester and Gartner Blog Traffic: Nothing to sneeze about – We caused a bit of a buzz when we compared the traffic hits on Jeremiah Owyang’s personal blog to Gartner’s and Forrester’s corporate websites in Don’t underestimate the visibility a blog can provide an analyst because Jeremiah’s blog had twice the traffic of the two corporate websites combined. Looking at the firms’ own blog networks shows good traffic to them as the graphic illustrates (click here or graphic to enlarge). Forrester’s team blogs have averaged 65,000 unique visitors per month over the last year. The Gartner Blog Network has grown steadily since its September 2008 launch to 29,000 unique visitors in July.

 

Social media metrics, useful but not “special” – As we were working on

Don’t discount the business value of analysts’ 350,000+ phone-based inquiries with end-user clients

In all the buzz about 21^st century social media like Twitter and blogs there is this 19^th century warhorse that is the analyst firms’ secret weapon – the telephone.

 Yes, the lowly telephone.

A common conversation SageCircle has with vendor executives is their opinion that analyst research is commoditized because so much information is available for free on the Web and in blogs, thus analyst influence must be dropping. It quickly turns out that the executive is almost always referring to the analysts’ published research. Our point in this post is that written research has always been commoditized and thus the written word is not what sells analyst services. What clients really buy is spoken advice – personalized and delivered real time – that cannot be commoditized, digitized, and distributed around the Internet.

Many members of the vendor community do not have a visceral feel for the client value delivered by these ad hoc phone-based inquiries between analysts and end users because they have never participated in one. Often vendor executives approve spending for analyst contracts because they think it is all part of a pay-to-play payola scheme. Because of this attitude they never bother to actually use the inquiry services they buy. 

However, the typical end user client of an advisory firm does not have this negative bias about analyst firms. For the enterprise IT manager, the advisory analyst is a trusted, objective advisor. In many cases, the analyst can actually save the client many times the analyst contract cost by providing timely insights – via a short phone inquiry – about a vendor contract the IT manager is

Don’t underestimate the visibility a blog can provide an analyst

An interesting exercise is to compare the relative web traffic between the largest advisory analyst firm (Gartner), the largest IT market research firm (IDC) and a very visible analyst who has his own blog. Using the site comparison feature of Compete here is the graphic showing Forrester analyst extraordinaire and social media poster boy Jeremiah Owyang’s (bio, Twitter handle, blog) personal blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah, Gartner.com and IDC.com:

 

Click here or on the graphic to enlarge. The top blue line is Jeremiah’s blog, the green middle line is Gartner.com and the bottom orange line is IDC.com. There is not a single month in the past year where Web Strategy by Jeremiah did not receive more unique visitors (an average of 136,000 per month) than Gartner.com and IDC.com combined.

Not an apples-to-apples comparison… and that is the point 

Of course, comparing two very different types of websites, a blog vs. corporate sites, is not an apples-to-apples assessment. Rather this illustrates how a savvy analyst can leverage a personally branded blog to obtain unique access to a broader audience than he could even on the regular research website of a $1.2bn but very traditional analyst firm. This is because the analyst blog is easily

Where do social media metrics fit into an AR measurement program? [Practitioner Question]

Question: Are social media like blogs and Twitter something we should be measuring or is it too early yet? Where does social media fit in a measurement scheme?

 If your analysts are using social media, then including those sorts of metrics in a measurement program is really not optional. In this case we are putting social media on par with published research, press quotes, and activity counts as something worthy of measuring. While a 140-character tweet does not have the impact of a Gartner Magic Quadrant, it can provide useful information that should be added to the data mix.

Social media has elements of both operational metrics and performance metrics. Some example uses include:

• Operational
  • Unfiltered opinions feed into plans and briefings
  • Activity insights feed into interaction calendars
  • Tweets and blog comments by AR to an analyst fulfill top-of-mind touches requirements
• Performance
  • Tonality tracks analyst opinion movement
  • Mentions of company, products, and competitors with opinion can track changes in perception

Social media metrics complement other sources of data. For example, social media can complement Spoken Word Audits because social media-based conversations between analysts and end users are often personal, unfiltered, and

LinkedIn: Another Area for AR Attention

Please don’t shoot the messenger, but it is becoming increasingly clear that LinkedIn might be something some AR teams also have to start monitoring. Why? Industry analysts are using LinkedIn not just as a contact management system, but more and more as a research, community-building, and marketing tool. Examples:

• Building forums using LinkedIn Groups
• Gathering structured data using LinkedIn Polls
• Collecting unstructured opinions using LinkedIn Answers
• Issuing research project launch announcements using Network Updates
• Letting reporters know they are available for quotes using Network Updates
• Requesting information contributions using Network Updates

We think that this trend is sufficiently important that we have added which relevant LinkedIn Groups analysts moderate or belong to into SageCircle’s Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis database (which already had URL for LinkedIn profiles). This will make it easier for clients to evaluate whether this is an issue they should be concerned about.

BTW, this service can eliminate the work of establishing whether your top analysts are tweeting, blogging and using LinkedIn for research. Starting at $195, it is a bargain. Click here for more information. Annual Advisory clients can request a traffic analysis at no charge.

The following technique suggestions assume that you have a profile on LinkedIn and know how to use at least its basic features. SageCircle Advisory clients can set up an inquiry to have a short walk-through of LinkedIn if they want to get up-to-speed quickly.

SageCircle Technique:

• Search LinkedIn for your

LinkedIn forum moderated by AMR analyst

AMR analyst and outsourcing expert extraordinaire Phil Fersht (Twitter, bio, blog) is an effective user of social media as a research and publishing tool. It turns out that Phil is also using LinkedIn as well having created the The BPO and Offshoring Best Practices Forum to build the BPO community. Here is Phil’s invitation from his Horses for Sources blog:

“Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch… Horses For Sources’ official LinkedIn Group, the aptly-named “The BPO and Offshoring Best Practices Forum” now has 5,700 members. This is a forum for leading sourcing practitioners to share their experiences, views, opinions, best practices and lessons learned in the worlds of IT outsourcing, Business Process Outsourcing, Shared Services and Offshoring. You also get a free subscription to the Horses Digest. And it’s FREE FREE FREE. Am I the most charitable person you know?”

This is yet another example of how savvy analysts are

Knowing when an analyst is kicking off a research project – one of the paybacks for monitoring social media

Intelligence about what an analyst is researching is a huge value of monitoring social media (e.g., Twitter, blogs, or social networking sites like LinkedIn). Here are two examples of analysts announcing projects that showed up in my RSS feed this week: 

Debbie Wilson, Gartner, in her blog post Call for Strategic Sourcing Suite Vendors. “Today I am kicking off the Magic Quadrant for Sourcing Application Suites update process – and calling for vendors that should be considered for inclusion.  (I have not decided on inclusion criteria yet – but definitely plan to cover a wider set of vendors than last year’s report … Anyone I left out?” Debbie also discusses why she is broadening her definition of the market and then lists 37 vendors she has already identified.

Greg Young (Twitter), Gartner, in his post New Magic Quadrant Upcoming: Web Application Firewalls. “The Gartner Senior Research Board gave me approval to research a Magic Quadrant on Web Application Firewalls (WAF). The publishing target is Q4.” Greg then goes on to discuss the evolution of the marketplace that justifies the need for a Magic Quadrant.

There are a number of calls to action for analyst relations (AR) professionals whose markets are covered in these posts.  These include:

• Set up client inquiries with the analysts to learn more about the research projects
• Make the decision about whether

Example topics to post or tweet about

ne of the perceived hurdles for analyst relations (AR) professionals who want to adopt social media like blogging and Twitter is how to come up with all the content. While initially this might seem daunting, once you get in the habit of watching for relevant content it will pop out at you. Here is a small subset of examples of what you can blog or tweet about.

 SageCircle Technique:

• Spotlight existing content on your company’s website or blogs
• Spotlight your company’s participants (links to bios, profiles, etc) who will be at an industry event that analysts will also be attending
• Spotlight your company’s upcoming analyst events such as tracks, breakouts, etc
• Recycle content from internal emails, presentations and documents (where appropriate)
• Participate in tweet-based conversations with your top analysts
• Mine research, internal or purchased or online, for relevant factoids
• Point to your company’s staff member quotes and interviews in the press

Related post: What AR should blog about – common questions

SageCircle clients should request the analyst responses to our Fall SageCircle survey of

An analyst can go from skeptic about social media to fan overnight

hen it comes to social media usage by analysts, nothing is set in stone. For instance, Carter was having a conversation with an analyst from one of the “Big Three” firms who said:

“I do not have a blog and I refuse to sign up for Twitter.  However, I do read every blog by the vendors that I cover.” 

At the time that quote was said, it provided some interesting insights into this analyst’s attitude toward social media. However, within months, this analyst who was so adamant that he would not use Twitter or have a blog, was tweeting and had TWO blogs: one for his firm and one under his personal brand. Moral of the story is that analyst relations (AR) cannot assume that an analyst’s position on social media, no matter how vehemently stated, is permanent. Of course, an analyst that was a heavy user of social media could stop using it as well.

SageCircle Technique:

• Check SageCircle’s various analyst social media directories periodically for your top analysts
• Ask your analysts who are not using social media if

Analysts keep adding social media capabilities, something AR needs to emulate

While updating the various SageCircle social media directories, we were struck about how the industry analysts continue to embrace blogging and Twitter. Here are some statistics from this week:

Blog Directory - Forrester – four new personal blogs, for a total of 96 entries

Blog Directory - Gartner – 18 new blogs, for a total of 79 entries

Twitter Directory - Analyst – 42 new entries, for a total of 534

We already have 16 new analyst Twitter handles for Monday’s update even though the weekend is when we usually do the research to identify new tweeting analysts. In order to support the Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis service, we are going to add Gartner analysts’ personal blogs to the Gartner Blog Directory. In addition there are hundreds of other analyst blogs beyond Forrester and Gartner blogs we actively track.

So, how is AR doing when it comes to adopting social media? Not so well. The Twitter Directory - AR had only 18 new entries for a total of 339. The analysts are typically joining Twitter about 50% more than AR. On the blogging side, we have identified only five AR program blogs.

Social media is clearly a missed opportunity for most AR programs. Most AR managers and professionals we talk to indicate that time – or lack of it – is a major reason why they are reluctant to start with blogging or Twitter. This is clearly a valid concern.  However, adopting social media does not

Analysts can go around AR using social media

When Analyst Relations Get Social is a short and interesting post by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang (bio, Twitter handle) on the fact that analyst relations professionals should not consider themselves gatekeepers, but facilitators. On this, we at SageCircle completely agree. Frankly, the best AR programs have always had the facilitator attitude.

For those AR programs that still want to be gatekeepers, social media is making it harder and harder to maintain control of every interaction with the analysts. As Jeremiah points out:

 ”…For example, I can easily tweet out “anyone in the sharepoint team have have a moment for some questions” and I’d suspect they’d quickly respond in seconds, whether or not the AR person was involved. …”

SageCircle Technique

• AR programs that currently look at themselves as gatekeepers should reevaluate this position
• AR needs to embrace social media then experiment and

Analyze social media traffic of analysts to determine your workload

A common issue that AR managers bring up when discussing why they currently don’t follow analysts on blogs and Twitter is that it would be too much work. Hmm, maybe it could be a lot of work, but really the reality is that it does not take much time per day tracking posts and tweets. Why? 

• There are not many analysts in any particular market who use social media
• Tools are available (e.g., RSS readers and Twitter Search) that make it easy and fast to track posts and tweets

Something that AR should do is work from facts and not assumptions so we recommend that AR managers conduct an analysis of their top analysts’ use of social media. This analysis should cover at least the previous three weeks to smooth out changes in usage due to travel, special events like analyst summits, holidays, and so on. Data to be gathered includes the number of blog posts for both firm and personal blogs and the overall number of tweets  

The analysis concentrates on the average number of social media publications per day. In the tests and beta client engagements of our new SageTool^TM Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis (see graphic) we found that most analyst lists only had a small percentage of analysts that actively used social media and that the volume of traffic was modest. Of course there are

Forrester’s blogs – Observations while building the new SageCircle Forrester Blog Directory

Today SageCircle is launching a new directory for tracking the Forrester analysts who blog. You can find it in the left-hand navigation menu section Directories. Look for Blog Directory - Forrester. 

The reason why a directory is needed even though Forrester has a blog home page is how they have organized their blogs. Forrester’s analyst blogs are centered on particular “roles,” which is now Forrester’s standard approach to research management. Forrester blogs are typically team written with various analysts contributing posts. That causes a problem for people, end users or vendors, who want to know which analyst posts to which blog. The blog home page lists the blogs, but not the analysts who contribute to them. Therefore SageCircle has done the work of identifying which analysts contribute to which blogs and put that information in our Forrester blog directory.

But wait! There’s more! Some of the Forrester analysts have personal blogs where they post significant commentary as well. So we are including the personal blogs as well.

While our research was mainly to find names for the directory, we did gather up some other interesting tid-bits about the blogs as well.

Contributors – Most of the blogs have

Announcing “Launching a Social Media Strategy: A SageCircle Workshop”

Social media is rapidly transitioning from being a playground for individuals to an important tool for business.  Some tools like blogging have been around for awhile, while others like Twitter are still emerging.  Regardless of the current start of the art, many hundreds of savvy analysts and AR professionals are using these and other tools to improve relationships, generate intelligence, and enhance conversations. 

There are many questions for AR about social media

Unfortunately questions for AR abound: Should AR teams blog and tweet?  Does AR have to track bloggers and Twitterers who are not traditional analysts?  How can you pick up responsibility for blogging and Twittering when resources are already stretched thin?  When and how do you incorporate analyst blogs and Tweets into analyst opinion monitoring programs.  And most important: How to get started?

To help AR professionals and teams take a strategic approach to dealing with the rapidly changing social media usage by members of the analyst ecosystem, SageCircle is announcing a new public half-day workshop focused on how to incorporate social media into AR’s daily routine and toolbox.

Key Issues to be addressed in this workshop include:

• What are the roles of social media in the analyst ecosystem?
• How should social media be incorporated into AR’s strategic and tactical plan?
• What are the policy implications of adopting blogging and Twitter?
• How do social media get incorporated into AR measurement and reporting programs?

Get Up to Speed Quickly

In this SageCircle AR Workshop, we provide AR professionals with

Why analysts need to be more measured in their use of social media

SageCircle recently posted about the how the lack of any review cycle by either vendors or the firms themselves allows for very timely social media postings on blogs or on twitter, but can represent a real challenge to AR teams, especially those that are not actively watching social media.  We thought it was obvious that the need for analysts validating content was a given.  However, in the past weeks we have encountered several instances where analysts appear to have made opinion statements based on rumor without checking facts.  In the rush to publish they have not been doing their due diligence or the vendor AR teams have not been responsive to the analyst request for information.  Please note this is not a common problem and we hope it does not grow.

This speculative type of behavior can be damaging to both large and small vendors – and it certainly kicks-off multiple unnecessary “recovery” or “damage control” cycles when the analyst could/should have just picked up the phone and asked them a question before posting or rushing to be the first to tweet.  The stories you are about to hear are real…. we have changed the names to protect the guilty.

In one situation some tweets expressed concern about the financial viability of a small company.  An influential analyst posted “I’ve been hearing there’s a lot of changes going on at <company>, if you’re a customer and this has impacted you, I want to know, email me”.  The flurry of activity resulted in a blog post suggesting that people hold off purchases.  After understanding all this was unfounded there was a “retraction”, but the company is still in damage control model.

In another situation, the Twitter post was “Hearing from <company> customers that there are new clauses that will force customers to commit to no Third Party Maintenance.”  This Twitter post was a specific callout implicating the company (in Twitter he even tied them specifically to anti-trust implications as a result of this speculation – which obviously was/is a VERY

Big 2 social media expands – 15 new Gartner blogs, 3 new Forrester podcasts

There has been significant activity on the social media front over the last few weeks that you might want to examine for relevance, either as an end-user client of the analysts or a vendor AR team. 

Gartner has moved to phase 2 of its expanded use of blogging that was started last October. Last week it added 15 bloggers to (see Gartner Blog Network Directory for links). So far, five have posted, marked below with *, and we expect the rest will likely get their first posts up in the next week or so.

• Baker, Van
• Blechar, Michael
• Cappuccio, David *
• Global Posts
• Lheureux, Benoit
• MacDona

IDC’s Mike Fauscette on his usage of social media as an analyst

Mike dropped by the analyst and AR meet up that SageCircle hosted on Monday, January 12, 2009 in the Silicon Valley. We asked Mike (blog, Twitter handle) to explain how he uses social media in his job.

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Forrester’s Ray Wang on analyst usage of social media

Ray dropped by the analyst and AR meet up that SageCircle hosted on Monday, January 12, 2009 in the Silicon Valley. We asked Ray (blog, Twitter handle) to explain how he uses social media in his job.

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The Volume of Analyst Publishing and Quotes

In the “Metrics – Written Word Audits” section of the Online SageContent^TM Library we recommended that AR establish a multi-faceted program to capture and analyze analyst opinions – in as near real-time as practical. This is easier said than done because the sheer volume of research and quotes being generated is growing as new forms of publishing opinion (e.g., blogs and Twitter) are added to the traditional methods. 

While browsing some research, it becomes quickly apparent that there is a huge range of research documents, not all of which need to be monitored by AR. Some research is teeming with opinions that could sway technology buyers, while other research merely provides simple product or market descriptions. Length does not correlate to volume of opinions; single page flashes can present more opinions on multiple vendors, multiple products, and markets than a 30-page report.

Blogs and Twitter add new complexity to

77% of industry analysts would read AR blogs, if…

…”they had relevant, useful, timely information.” There is always a catch, eh?

Frankly, this percentage is significantly higher than we would have guessed before we conducted our survey of thousands of industry analysts. Even though we are ardent proponents of AR using social media, we expected that many in the analyst community might be adopting a “wait and see” attitude at best. However, we were pleasantly surprised that many analysts said they would read AR blogs. Here is the full question and percentage replies:

Question:     I would read vendor AR blogs if they had relevant, useful, timely information (pick one)

• 20% – Yes, regularly
• 31% – Yes, occasionally
• 26% – Yes, episodically related to major news or announcement coverage
•   5% – No, because I do not read blogs
•   8% – No, because I do not have time
•   9% – No, because most vendor blogs are a waste of time
•   1% – Undecided

This would indicate there is an obvious opportunity for AR teams to