Blog Bites Man

Why pay for an analyst’s stock research when there’s heaps of free information out there from experts in the form of blogs?

By way of example, here’s what I read to get marketing best practices ideas:

• Church of the Customer
• Profitable Marketing
  
• Word of Mouth Marketing
  
• Corante Marketing Hub
  
• Buzz Networker
  
• Marketing Strategy and Innovation
  
• Tyler Reed
  
• Web Ink Now
  
• Traffick: Search Engine Enlightenment
  
• Marketing Experiments
  
• Marketing Sherpa
  
• Seth’s Blog
  

The list changes a bit every couple months as I get tired of one blogger and find another. This represents about 20% of the blogs I track, these are just the marketing-focused ones, but there also technology-focused sites like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and dozens of others crossing a variety of topics. I have about 100 coworkers reading blogs that interest them, too, and our company does a pretty good job to communicate internally about the most interesting news from these blogs (via internal blogs and the sharing of bookmarks). And then there’s our friends & family network, people who email us news and information out of the goodness of their hearts.

It’s a lot of reading to keep up with! Collectively as a company, I don’t think we miss any news… ever.

The news and analysis that we read is churned and turned into strategy. Regarding strategy development, we do most of it internally but we have recently penned an agreement to work with RedMonk, a firm that takes a different kind of approach to the whole analyst thing, for a short period of time. We’ll take that for a test ride to see how it works. We like the people behind the RedMonk brand, they’re bright, down-to-earth, and “with it.”

I don’t think we’re know-it-alls — we are far from perfect. It does, however, seem like a heckuvalot better approach than hiring traditional analysts or paying for their expensive opinions. Blogs and bloggers are having the same effect on analysts as they have with news media.

Not being sarcastic: Am I missing something? Is there some other reason to pay for a subscription to Gartner, Forrester or other firms these days? Do big companies still pay for them because it’s cheaper to pay an analyst then try to develop those critical skills in-house?

From today’s SF Gate, an article entitled Police Turn to YouTube to Catch Suspects:

But when Johnson didn’t recognize either man, he decided to involve people — a lot of them — to help crack the case. He posted a clip from a security camera on YouTube.com, Google Inc.’s video-sharing Web site, then e-mailed the clip’s link to about 300 people and organizations saying the department was looking for the men.

The moral, I suppose, is that social software is hard on  politicians and criminals (redundancy).