This is Ground Control to PR Tom

Some interesting opinions are posted at the Lighthouse and Armageddon blogs about AR, PR and corresponding best practices. I particularly like Step 1 of the mentioned process: Target the right analysts.

Since I'm on the receiving end of countless briefing requests from clueless PR folks, I can certainly relate to quite a few of the statements made in those posts. Many vendors don't seem to understand that there is a clear difference between analyst relations (AR) and public relations (PR). Of course, tiny vendor companies a la "3 guys and a website" can't afford having both functions, but even established PR firms should do their homework before playing an AR role. Don't get me wrong: there are excellent PR professionals who do an equally great AR job, but I get the feeling that many PR folks send their press releases and briefing requests to any analyst they can google, kinda like "as long as we get into the analyst's inbox, it's OK." It's not OK. It's SPAM.

The fundamental thing that those PR "professionals" don't know (or worse: don't care) about is called analyst coverage.This means that an analyst looks at a particular segment of a market, for example, databases, servers, operating systems, CRM, or healthcare. No analyst covers everything. I cover Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Data Quality. Yes, I have a personal interest in many more things, and the peripheral scope is even wider, but real coverage this isn't. So, although I built a network at home, configured firewalls, and do VOIP, coverage of those topics isn't my thing.

Of all those PR emails I get (and there are a lot!), I suspect about 90% is trash. Every once in a while, some topic falls into my area and really is interesting and I typically follow up with a briefing. But most of the time, the respective PR person wants me to spend an hour on the phone about topics (recent collection!) such as

• Outdoor sensors
  
• Iris scanners
• Money dispenser software
  
• Video compression
• Battery software
• Повесть о Linux и NAT
  
• Broadband over copper
• Computer-aided parallelization

and other certainly important issues, just not for me. I wish there was a do-not-call registry for PR. Until that exists, I implemented my own registry in Outlook. Every PR person once sending me unsolicited PR spam about some funky software or device gets blacklisted and every email from that account is deleted.