Within their Marketing and Communications departments, large IT companies have both Analyst Relations (AR) professionals and Public Relations (PR) professionals. Note that they are not usually the same people.

One obvious reason for this is that analysts and journalists are distinctly different in what they do and why they do it:

1. An analyst is a domain expert and a journalist rarely is. (There are exceptions to this, like Jack Schofield who writes for the Guardian in the UK or Walter Mossberg who writes for the Wall St Journal in the US).
2. An analyst is often also a technology consultant and a journalist rarely is.
3. Journalists produce information for the general reader of their publication. IT Analysts produce information specifically for IT professionals.
4. Vendor companies hire IT Analysts for specific assignments but almost never hire journalists (except possibly for presentation work).

Why does any of that matter?

Those facts matter for several reasons. PR professionals can do AR work, but unless they have experience in it they are likely to irritate the analyst by doing such things as:

• Sending press releases. Analysts are only interested in a small number of press releases (if any) and are very sensitive to information overload. They will treat regular mindless press releases as spam and they will think less of the company that issues them.
• Arrange senseless briefings. All analysts could spend all year doing nothing but getting briefed. If you arrange a briefing for them it needs to be worth their while. If it isn’t they will think less of the company and/or product.

Analysts have to manage their time between information gathering and earning a living. If you waste their time you are costing them money. Analysts can cost you money as well. If they don’t like your technology they can say so directly and publicly. They can blog it. They are unlikely to do so out of spite, but if your company fails to impress in the way it interacts with the analyst, the analyst may, by contagion, fail to be impressed by the products and/or services.

What is Professional AR?

An AR professional can be involved in many things from organizing Analyst conferences to organizing user conferences, to reporting on what key analysts are saying (to C-level staff), and so on. The activities they get involved in vary from company to company, but if they know their job, it will always involve maintaining relationships with all the analysts that matter to their company. It isn’t called analyst relations for nothing.

The AR Professional maintains the business relationship with the analyst for the benefit of the company. And note that it is a business relationship, even if the company never ever hires the analyst for any reason. This is what many PR professionals fail to realize when they get involved in analyst activity.

I am sometimes asked by vendors whether they should depend on their PR companies to carry out AR activity. There is no simple answer. Some of the larger PR companies (Schwartz Communications is an example) understand AR and can usually do what needs to be done for smaller vendors, but most PR companies do not.

Ultimately it comes down to: How well do you know the analysts that matter to us?

If all you have is an email list and you don’t know the analysts, how can you do analyst relations?

Note: This posting is one in a series of postings that deals with the topic of dealing with analysts. Click here for links to other postings in the series.