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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.

This is not my bed

It's that time of the year, when travel schedules are picking up speed. It seems that companies want to get the word out before the mad year end rush. Although not every fiscal year ends on December 31st, the last few months in 2005 are once again the road warrior's peak time.

According to my schedule as of today, I'll have little time at home, apart from the weekends, and even those are sometimes cut short, particularly in connection with intercontinental trips. So for the next few weeks, you can find me in Nice, Barcelona, London, Prague, Düsseldorf, Brussels, Berlin, Cannes, Milan, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, Rome (again), Manchester, Zurich, Frankfurt, Las Vegas, Copenhagen, and Paris. Plus the respective airport lounges. You can follow along at my virtual itinerary.

And one of those days, I'll wake up again completely confused, not knowing where I am, or what I'm supposed to do there. It typically takes a few seconds to register, sometimes I need to look at the telephone next to the bed to figure what country I'm in. I wonder how the Stones do this. My itinerary still looks like peanuts compared to theirs. Then again, I typically have to be up and running and on stage by 9am, while Mick, Keith, Ron, and Charlie have all day to figure out where they are, as they go on stage only at 9pm. Ha! Didn't think I would ever write a posting comparing myself to the Stones.

Who's afraid of corporate slogans?

Marketing is hard. And I feel truly sorry for those marketiers and advertising execs that need to come up with slogans, visions, and mission statements for software companies. Sometimes those taglines are pure nonsense, others are content-free. Rarely do I find one that really speaks to the values or the offerings of the respective company. I assembled a list of taglines from software vendors that I track but I won't evaluate their particular quality. Make up your own mind what makes sense and what does not.

• Actuate: Improve Corporate Performance Through 100% Adoption of Information
  
• BEA Systems: Think Liquid
  
• Cognos: The Next Level of Performance
  
• Hyperion: Breakthrough Performance Everywhere
• Informatica: Reduce Complexity. Ensure Consistency. Empower the Business
• Information Builders: The Standard for Enterprise Business Intelligence
  
• MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence
• NCR Teradata: You've Never Seen Your Business Like This Before
  
• Qliktech: Simplyfying Analysis for Everyone
  
• SAP: End-to-End Insight for Intelligent Business Operations
• SAS: The Power to Know
• Tibco: The Power of Now

Of course, nothing will ever beat the corporate slogan of German retailer Douglas: "Come in and find out". ROTFL! The best mission statement that I ever came across is from Dilbert-creator Scott Adams: "Rubbing my bald spot once a day." Brilliant.

CRM in action... today: freenet.de

I recently switched my DSL provider from Deutsche Telekom to freenet. Not that anything was wrong with the DSL service, but DT price/performance just didn't do it for me. Of course, it didn't help that DT wouldn't notify me that my flat rate charge was for a 2M line, although I physically only had a 1M line into the house.

At freenet, they offered a 6M DSL line, pretty much for the same price I paid before. I even got a free DSL modem/router, which was very easy to install. Switchover was painless. It's been two months now, and I checked the stats in the router about current downstream/upstream volumes. And I was kinda surprised to see my DSL downstream clocking at 3M instead of the expected 6M. So I called the freenet customer service to complain. After about 5 minutes in the queue (ugh), the lady confirms that my contract shows 6M, but because she's not a technical person, she routes me to another number, which I gladly type into my phone. The voice response, however, tells me I need to call a completely separate number, this time it's supposed to charge me about 1 Euro per minute. I didn't think so, why would I pay for a complaint about something the provider screwed up?

So I call the first number again, and explain (to a different person) that I want to discuss this issue, and I'm not accepting getting charged for it. I must have pushed a hot button in her, because she suddenly starts screaming at me "Listen to me! You have to call this other number!" When I refused again, she says "...then send us an email." Ah. Now we're getting somewhere.... now I wonder when I'll see a response from the freenet techies.

freenet CRM evaluation: Grade D- for bad customer service, lack of channel integration, poor responsiveness