If you spend much time poking around the Web for the straight skinny on social media, you’d be hard-pressed to miss Jeremiah Owyang. Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a fairly well-regarded analyst firm that covers business and technology, including social media.
On Monday, while attending SXSW in Austin, Owyang tweeted this about mZinga, a social media software vendor: “I’m getting more information (nearly 4 reference today) that Mzinga is having financial difficulties. They need to brief me immediately.”
My initial reaction was mixed and dispassionate. On one hand, part of Owyang’s job is to disclose information – the good, the bad and the fugly – to the clients who rely on him to help them make buying decisions. On the other hand, it seemed as Owyang was tweeting a bit out of turn, based on incomplete, dubious information.
But he didn’t stop with that tweet, adding in a subsequent tweet a link to this blog entry where he said, “I strongly recommend that any Mzinga clients or prospects stall any additional movement till they brief me next Monday.”
Owyang’s blog is extremely popular – if the chest thumping on it is true, Technobabble has ranked it the #1 analyst blog, while it comes in at #31 on AdAge’s Power 150. Owyang has more than 33K people following him on Twitter. The numbers suggest that the overwhelming majority of people paying attention to what he says are, in fact, not clients. My hackles were raised.
Add to this the fact that Forrester is on the take from mZinga, who, like many other social media software companies covered in Owyang’s WAVE report, pay Forrester for consulting services*. Apparently mZinga didn’t schedule a briefing with Owyang quickly enough to dissuade him from telling tens of thousands of people not to buy their products until further notice.
I’m foaming at the mouth.
The shady world of software analysis has avoided the public ire for long enough. Taking money from clients looking to buy AND vendors looking to sell, and claiming ANY amount of objectivity is, flatly, a ruse. We can thank Owyang’s stunning lack of judgment for exposing a little more of the emperor, but dude’s been naked all along. (I remember waiting with a gut full of nerves the arrival of Gartner’s latest “Magic Quadrant” covering the mobile industry. I can assure you it was always many things, but never magical.)
In the Web 2.0 world, can’t software analysts be rendered obsolete? How about a community where the masses describe and rate vendors, and where those ratings are rated based on how helpful/true/bogus they are?
At the very least, analysts should pick who they want to shill for, and disclose it thoroughly. Forrester can start exhibiting the same transparency they extol by naming every single vendor who pays them and appears on their WAVE report.
*We help business and marketing executives at technology providers with:
– Market and competitive assessments.
– Go-to-market strategy.
– Custom market research.
– Product development.
– Message tuning.
– Case study development.
– ROI proof.From the Forrester site.