Gelbart Kahana Global Marketing» Forrester

A Conversation with Gideon Gartner

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:37:29 +0000

I recently posted a comment on Gideon Gartner’s new blog and ended it with an invitation to let me know if he is ever in Tel Aviv to meet up. The next day I got an email from Gideon that he was in Tel Aviv and would I like to meet him for coffee. Whereas some people would get excited at meeting a rock star–for me–an AR Consultant and pioneer in Israel–Gideon Gartner is my rock star. I met him and his lovely wife Sarah in Tel Aviv and we had an extended chat that included his questions about how I stated my AR business in Israel, the origin of the Magic Quadrant as an internal not an external document and logistics of getting to the local TedEx event. I expressed my opinion that the Gartner model has huge brand value but the real threat to that model will be the new,open models like RedMonk and others and not a competitor like Forrester. Only time will tell and I wait eagerly for Gideon’s book to hear more gossip and tidbits on the creation of one of the best brands in history.

My take on Forrester’s Purchase of Strategic Oxygen

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:47:53 +0000

Although this didnt make the splash that Gartner’s of AMR acquisition did- it signals a move towards more go-to-market tools for clients. I believe that this is a move that makes sense to a lot of marketing people who need real tools to quantify their decisions. Unfortunately it will not be a part of Forrester’s membership so it comes at extra cost.. Some answers to your questions on the acquisition by Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/sofaq

Check out what Forrester Says about Google’s New SiteWiki Tool

Nancy Shapira — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:02:33 +0000

As a huge fan of the coolest company in the world, I have downloaded Google’s new SiteWiki Tool. Forrester predicts it will be big…

http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2009/09/dealing-with-googles-sidewiki-land-grab.html

Do you Know What’s The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?

Nancy Shapira — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:53:30 +0000

Do you Know What’s The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?

Forrester has a VERY cool tool to identify your target customer and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them.

Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
Ready to embed

A Threat to Analyst Groups?

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Tech Crunch has moved into the Analyst/Research Group space with their new venture: Tech Crunch Research offering either single reports at $149 or an annual subscription at $450..
RedMonk was the first opensource analyst firm and their tagline is : Analysis for the people,by the people. They offer their research for free and sell their consulting hours based on the company size, use of research and ability to pay.
I see this as the business model of the future for the big guys also-Forrester and Gartner. The subscription model has a limited lifetime as a business model since everything else in the IT and Marketing world is moving towards transparency. I am guessing that Forrester will be the first to move and Gartner the last–but it will happen.

The Easiest Way to a First Page Ranking on Google

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:07:00 +0000

A good article from Forrester that I would like to share with you:
The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google. “If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start. “Blended search,” the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google,” says Nate Elliot from Forrester.

Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.
So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I’ve talked to offer a number of different tips:
*Insert keywords into your video filenames.
*Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
*Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
*Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
*Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).

Should Analyst Relations Focus on Sales?

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:51:00 +0000

This is the title of an article by Kevin Lucas, Forrester. The subtitle is: “It’s Not Just the Wrong Question-It’s Downright Misleading.” so you can guess what Kevin’s answer is. From Forrester’s perspective the real question should be: What corporate business value can AR Deliver and that may or may not be Sales. Forrester’s research shows that AR managers felt more confident about reaching goals for marketing and product management.

Kevin lists other values that AR can bring including:

Share Value
Product and Service Creation
Market Awareness and perception
Order to Cash
Service and Support

His recommendations are:

Clarify which corporate business goals you’ll support
Align all elements of your AR program with the chosen business goals
Be realistic about what you can really acheive

My take on this is that all of the above is true– in a different economic environment; however, many companies are in survival mode now, or worse, and are cutting marketing and AR functions and focusing only on sales and the short term. Although this is not a recommended strategy–that is the reality of the situation right now and AR has to pay attention to the shift.

In light of this, I believe that AR must focus on Sales for at least one of their goals–no matter how difficult it is to execute–it can be done. In addition, the other goals mentioned are very difficult to quantify and if you can assist in shortenting the sales process-that will be noticed and is quantifiable. What do you think? I will discuss how AR can affect sales in the next post. Comments welcome.

What do the Results of the IIAR Survey for Analyst of the Year Mean?

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:43:00 +0000

First of all I apologize for being away for so long–I am busy growing my AR consultancy in Israel and starting the Israeli chapter of the IIAR in Israel.

The results of the IIAR Survey foreshadows several things about the future of the Big Analyst Groups:

Being the most important/influential analyst group is not always as important as being relevant.
The little guys (SMBs) are tired of being ignored or priced out of the market with the current subscriber model of the big analyst firms. Red Monk and their analysts are high on the lists probably because they follow their credo: “If you’re used to dealing with analyst firms that nickel and dime you, or ask you to pay for every insight, RedMonk will be a pleasant surprise. We share our learning freely, making our content available at no cost. We give back to variety of communities with both time and money, and always have time to help the little guy. When we say we’re different, we’re not kidding.” Another company with the same principles: “One of the founding principles of Macehiter Ward-Dutton was that in order to reach our goal of being a leading advisory company in our space, we needed to be able to reach as many people as possible with our ideas and findings – and that meant finding ways to make our work as “open” as possible. Consequently we decided that all our core research reports should be made available, free-of-charge, to anyone who subscribes to our site.

I believe that this is the future of Analyst Groups and I think that the big guys need to start paying attention….

Your comments are welcome.

Are Industry Analysts Objective?

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:35:00 +0000

Many vendors think that Industry Analysts can be bought.
According to Bill Hopkins from KCG-the Knowledge Capital Group who are an Analyst Relations Consultancy Firm, “While there is truth to the view that you can buy the opinions of many sell-side analysts (and maybe some Point Players on the buy-side), it’s absolutely not true when it comes to Deal Makers and Breakers (Forrester and Gartner).”

What do you think?

Gartner and Forrester’s leftovers

Nancy Shapira — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:35:00 +0000

Analyst Equity wrote a post last month on picking up the money Gartner and Forrester leave behind. As these two leaders concentrate on the big boys, the other analyst groups are focusing on their weakpoints: the smaller and medium sized businesses and the verticals. In my experience, Gartner, on the content side, is blown away by some of the other analysts, in the Financial Services space; but they still are the winners on the buy side.