It is hard to believe considering all the hype, but social media is still a relatively recent phenomenon. However, regardless of its newness it is having a dramatic business impact on many industries. A big question for the analyst ecosystem – the analysts and their employers, vendor analyst relations (AR) professionals, consumers of analyst research, and others – is how social media is changing the analyst game. Some folks say social media doom the big advisory analyst firms by making so much information and opinion available for free. However, the two pure-play public companies (Gartner and Forrester) have seen double digit revenue and research contract value growth since 2005 – except for the recession year of 2009. Even in 2009 research contract value remained basically flat as enterprise clients increased their spending that offset the drastic cuts by vendors. Hmm, it does not appear that social media has slowed those two firms down any. On the other hand social media has been the rocket engines for “new style” analyst firms like Altimeter Group and Horses for Sources.
What do you think? How is social media impacting the analysts and AR? To encourage discussion on this timely topic, social media heavy hitter Jeremiah Owyang has organized a free webcast with a panel of analyst ecosystem observers who will discuss, disagree, and debate how the analysts and their roles are changing in the age of social media. The panel consists of:
- Jeremiah Owyang (partner at Altimeter Group, former star analyst at Forrester, @jowyang, blog)
- Jonny Bentwood (Director, AR & Strategy at Edelman, @jonnybentwood, blog)
- Barbara French ( President and Managing Editor at Tekrati, @bfr3nch, blog)
- Carter Lusher (strategist at SageCircle, former Gartner Research Fellow, former HP Corporate AR Director, @carterlusher, blog)
- You! – your observations and opinions will make this webcast even more fun and insightful
Register for the Webcast: The Impact of Social Media on the Analyst Industry
Wednesday, July 21st at 9am to 10am Pacific.
Twitter hashtag is #SocialAnalyst
Registration is limited, please sign up now, and mark your calendars. Although we have a long, long list of specific discussion points, we want to help craft the discussion around the comments and questions you have, so *please* leave a comment of the discussion topics you’d like us to tackle.
Related blog posts:
- Jeremiah has posted about the event on Web Strategy by Jeremiah
- Barbara has posted about the event, from her blog on Tekrati
- Jonny has posted about the event from Technobabble
Tags: Altimeter Group, analyst relations, AR, Barbara French, Carter Lusher, Edelman, Jeremiah Owyang, Jonny Bentwood, SageCircle, Tekrati