What's your blogging style?

Over the last six months, at least a dozen of my friends, coworkers and business associates have solicited advice from me regarding starting their own blog. The first question I ask them is for them to define their style...



There are a variety of reasons to blog ranging from using it to share knowledge and ideas to simply writing for marketing purposes. Regardless of the motivation, how you blog requires you to think about the style of your blog upfront. Below is my attempt at enumerating all of the approaches I have seen in my travels.

The Instruction Post
This gives the reader a set of instructions that delivers an end result. They are consistently the highest traffic generating blog posts so you should feature regularly on your blog.

The Information Post
One of the most common posts out there, just think Wikipedia. If you provide an answer to questions that others seek, your traffic will jump.

The Review Post
Whenever people are looking to purchase a product or service, they jump to google to find the opinion of others before making a purchasing decision. In this type of posting, any opinion is almost always better than no opinion at all.

The List Post
A post frequently favored by IT executives who are busy and eschew reading with the preference towards scanning a page. Typically these posts start with top ten type headlines.

The Interview Post
Sometimes consumers are less interested in hearing from the marketing department and their chock-a-block eye candy blog entry that lacks substance but do want to hear from industry peers and their perspectives. Sometimes readers want to know how they can prevent the same mistakes others have made so try to spice up your blog by adding the human element to a regular basis.

NOTE:James McGovern is available to participate in interview style postings

The Case Study Post
These types of postings tend to be very informative but are useful to readers who actually read. In the world of Twitter where everything is a sound-bite, this style of posting is on the decline. If you are going to use this style of blog post, I recommend a little humility is in order. How about emphasizing the negative instead of the positive. Instead of hyping the "cost savings" that is so overused, instead admit why and where a project/customer may have struggled and what could have been done differently in hindsight. This will aid in adding credibility/authenticity.

The Profile Post
This is similar to the case study post except that instead of focusing on a product or service, the target tends to be a person. The blog post may analyze how people have gotten to the top in their profession, how they run their business, etc. This type of posting is very popular and provides a simple way to add a bit of variety and human interest to your blog.

The Link Post
One of the most popular, if you have nothing to say, you can always link to someone who has. This style was very popular several years ago but at some level may be declining in that linking has moved more to Twitter.

The Problem Post
Have you witnessed a problem that many people are struggling with that you have resolved? Share a solution with others and gain acceptance. This type of post typically is shared and amplified by its readers over other styles.

The X versus Y Post
If you take a look at any of the technology forums you see these kind of debates played out every day but you can also address issues other than technology. By drawing some personal conclusions you instantly create a divide in the community as some will favor one approach over an other. A great divide is important for generating commentary so don't hold back! From incite comes insight.

The Rant Post
Passion is the spice of life and putting it in your blog can help you create a more human element. If you've experienced a frustrating experience due to poor data quality, don't just complain to your partner and friends, get blogging about it!

NOTE: I have written way too many posts in this category

The Inspirational Post
The opposite to a rant is to tell a story of how someone successfully implemented a strategy and explore how it changed their business or them personally.

The Research Post
These can take more effort than other posts but if you have a moderate customer base or large network already then a short survey on important topics can help gather information others may value.

The Collation Post
This post focuses on a particular topic and gathers a range of content to help the reader understand more. The reason is obvious, anything that saves people time by helping them get answers in one location is guaranteed to get them coming back for more. Listing your competitors is a great idea that should be explored.

The Prediction Post
You don't have to be a Gartner analyst in order to make a prediction. Add your thoughts and predictions to generate some debate. It may help stimulate innovation in the area discussed.

The Debate Post
One of the most popular ways of getting people engaged but if you look at a lot of the data quality blogs this blog type doesn't feature all that often. A blog is not a one-way street for pushing information at your readers. Create commentary by posting debates on contentious or popular data quality subjects.

The Hypothetical Post
Not a very common one this but think about a potential future situation or event and hypothesize on it to spark some debate and engagement from your readers.

The Award/Prize/Quiz Post
These are great posts because they typically are infectiously spread and don't require that much effort to create. Propose to give away books, tickets to an event or other prize.

Answers to Questions asked by Analyst Relations Professionals

Last week, I put out a message on Twitter asking analyst relations professionals what would they like to know about end customers and our interactions with industry analyst firms. I received two great questions and figured I would share the answers publicly...



Ksenia Coffman asked: How do end customers of analyst firms perceive "magic quadrants" on the scale from "pay-per-play exercise" to "bible"

Historically Magic Quadrants, Waves and other similar comparisons provided immense value in a world filled with expensive proprietary vendor offerings. Increasingly, there value is decreasing for a variety of reasons ranging from the increased adoption of open source to leverage software-as-a-service and other considerations.

Magic quadrants and their industry equivalents typically compare vendors more than they compare products and makes it challenging to incorporate fair comparisons of proprietary and open source products. At the end of the day, a customer is looking for a solution to their challenge and want to learn about all possibilities and the current method sometimes takes viable open source product offerings off the table. Analysts are quick to promote the fallacy that many of their customers aren't that interested in open source but I think the reality of the marketplace speaks otherwise. In the world of open source, sometimes customers do care about having vendor support in which the quadrant approach may work and at other times customers don't feel the need to spend money on support. This is all contextual.

The key consideration for analyst firms when it comes to providing real value to their end customers when it comes to open source is to figure out a proxy for revenue in these types of reports. Since open source isn't based on selling licenses, the revenue lens is flawed at best. It would be my recommendation that analyst relations professionals encourage Gartner and Forrester to not arbitrarily defend their current practice of exclusion of non-commercial open source from Quadrants and Waves and to figure out how to change the measurement to allow for inclusion.

Another perspective on this question requires acknowledging that Quadrants and Waves have value at procurement time, but increasingly many end customers are acknowledging that they already have more software than they need. Nowadays, with the emergence of enterprise software licenses where an enterprise may pay one fixed fee for all the software they can consume, the challenge is less about making a procurement decision than in how to properly leverage technology they already have. In this regard, end customers would benefit more from understanding technology from the perspective of a reference architecture, relevant industry standards and overall deployment best practices than they would from understanding overall market trends that are more popular with the vendor community.

Michael Myers asked: How much weight do end customers give to the analysts vs other sources of information?

The credence given by end customers to analysts does vary significantly based on who the analyst is and there is no consistency. I would say that credence tends to be given to analysts who are more practitioners who can go deep than analysts who just cover market trends. within the twitterati, the concept of the star analyst appears frequently and I can truly say that the analysts that are considered popular amongst the analysts themselves and the media at large aren't necessarily the ones that are most influential.

As an Enterprise Architect who spends a lot of time crafting PowerPoint, there are times where I need quotes and referencing an industry analyst is a popular tool in the toolbox. Some analysts are quotable but this doesn't make them influential. The inverse is also true. For example, Bob Blakely of Burton/Gartner has never been quoted in any of my PowerPoints but he happens to be one of the most influential analysts covering identity and privacy. In fact, he happens to have the distinct honor of having been referenced in my annual review.

Generally speaking, some parts of a PowerPoint presentation are marketing where you need a few obligatory quotes and some analysts are great at providing them. The hardest part is that you can't use search engines to tell which analysts have influenced the thoughts and minds of people and therefore many analysts use easy to gather metrics that otherwise are fundamentally flawed.

It is important to acknowledge that analysts are only one part of the equation and there are other factors at play. The analogy of the grass is always greener on the other side of the street (aka Jones) plays in the model of end customers as well. Not a day goes by where we aren't comparing ourselves to Progressive, Geico, Travelers and so on. Analysts can choose to increase their influence by providing their guidance in a vertical-specific context or more likely provide metrics/guidance that suffer from the lack of vertical focus. If the CIO of Walmart were talking to an analyst, would he care more about the industry trends at large or would he care more about what Target, Tesco and Dollar General were up to?

Other models of influence include reaching out to industry peers to get alternative perspectives. For example, if I wanted to find out not just what is good about a particular piece of technology but more of its operational characteristics (things that occur after procurement) what is the probability that analyst firms are going to provide me with insight when compared to say searching for the product name on LinkedIn and connecting to other users while avoiding going through the filtered vendor provided reference list?

Increasingly, there are many alternative sources of information that are freely available. While they may not be normalized they can in many cases be more insightful. So, what our industry peers are up to has a more profound effect on our decision making than analysts themselves, but the better question to ask is why aren't analysts helping end customers connect the dots. They need to acknowledge that they are no longer the center of "research" and need to embrace open source methods of analysis.

Star Analysts according to James McGovern: Part Two

In my previous blog entry, I commented on who I believe are the Top Fifteen Star Analysts. Today, I will provide insight into the common characteristics...



Below are six traits of star analysts...

Quantitative vs Qualitative
Some analyst firms are overly obsessed with metrics. While I too believe in the use of metrics to enable informed decisions, the vast majority of metrics captured by analyst firms have nebulous value to end customers. Consider the scenario where I am looking to purchase a relational database. Does knowing that Microsoft and Oracle are the top contenders from a metrics perspective add value to the conversation? Would it add more value if I were to see those metrics sliced and diced between industry verticals? For example, we know that Sybase is very popular on Wall Street but otherwise gets lost in the mix if you look outside of financial services. Let's face it, some products are generally applicable to all industry verticals while others tend to have an affinity to particular verticals. In order for metrics to be useful, analysts would need to provide more of a dynamic way of allowing customers to get customized metrics. Otherwise, they are of questionable value.

Qualitative analysts on the other hand tend to do a lot better job of explaining a problem through the lens of a customer and not primarily reliant on the metrics they have captured in surveys. We all know that the grass is always greener in the neighbors yard and this scenario applies to enterprises as well. Should I care what 74.2% of the insurance companies at large are up to or do I really care more about what Travelers, Progressive and Geico are up to?

All of the analysts that made my list are masters of being qualitative and are able to provide deep insight not only on their particular coverage area but able to understand the industry vertical slice as well.

Abstraction can morph into distortion
The quantitative people will respond with the notion that sometimes a customer simply needs a number. I believe that sometimes a customer simply needs a name. Did you know that our media relations policy doesn't allow for me to be abstract in my communications with the outside world? I cannot hide behind the fact that I work for a Fortune 200 enterprise headquartered in the Northeast. I must use my company's name. Which of the below phrases do you feel is more informative:

• I had a conversation with several insurance carriers in the Midwest regarding X
• I had a conversation with several insurance carriers including Geico, Selective, State Farm and Progressive. One of them indicated that they are using X

It is important to understand that a customer doesn't know whether you have done your research or are simply making it up on the fly. The later is more professional in that it shows that the person understood the question by not only responding with a technology answer, sliced and diced it not only to a particular industry vertical, but to specific companies in the vertical as well as gave you a credible hint as to how to satisfy your answer more deeply if needed all without violating the spirit of non-disclosure.

All of the analysts that made my list are masters of contextual name dropping without violating non-disclosure.

The Responsibility to be Social
All of the analysts that made my list are participants in a variety of social media forums ranging from Twitter to Facebook. This means that they are doing their part to keep an up to the minute pulse on the industry and what people are talking about. Waiting around for surveys and conferences in order to figure this out is minimally lazy and more than likely not timely.

If you observe an emerging trend before others, you are a true analyst. If you observe a trend after everyone else has already analyzed it, you are a historian. All of people on my list do not practice archaeology but are true observers, participants and most important amplifiers to those willing to take risks and lead.

Open Source
When in an enterprise setting, sometimes we are looking for a strategy around commercial vendors. At other times, we simply need to know the cheapest thing that can possibly work. Many analysts sit back and wait for vendors to schedule briefings with them. This behavior causes many analysts to not have visibility into viable open source product offerings. The best of the analysts do their own homework and don't wait for information to come to them.

All of the analysts on my list are literate when it comes to open source and follow all forms of software regardless of its cost or lack of.

The Buck doesn't stop at Procurement
The vast majority of analysts seems to spend less time understanding products and more time analyzing vendors. At some level, they are doing their end customers a big disservice. We all know that if an enterprise spends a million dollars on a product at procurement time, that we will spend order of magnitudes more throughout its lifecycle and therefore some focus on not just what it take to procure it but what should we do after the product has been purchased is in order.

Maybe the shortcoming of analysts who didn't make the list are the ones who were never practitioners and therefore wouldn't have a clue as to how to understand what occurs in an enterprise after it has been procured? With a few exceptions, the vast majority of analysts that made my list held senior-level IT positions in large enterprises at one point in their career. They weren't English majors who studied journalism and decided that being an analyst was more lucrative.

Briefings are Good, Conversations are Better
Sometimes there are burning questions that pop up out of nowhere within an enterprise. Do I really want to wait a week or two until the analyst is free in order to have a dialog? Sometimes you have a question that doesn't require a conversation and you simply need to be pointed in a better direction. This can be accomplished via thirty year old technology known as email. Sometimes when I ask a question, I fully expect a few links to come back and nothing more.

All of the analyst that made my list not only will communicate with end customers the way that end customers want to communicate, but they will usually maintain a relationship after a dialog has ended. The vast majority of analysts look at scheduled briefings as being transactional and miss the importance of building a relationship. I really like it when an analyst sends me a link that contains something of interest to me especially when I wasn't expecting it. This shows that the analyst isn't just interested in achieving some arbitrary internal metrics set by his firm but is interested in a long term relationship.