B2B magazine op-ed

Nick has written a short op-ed piece for the US-based B2B magazine. It's available here.

SAP Industry and Influencer Relations blog

Just picked up on Don Bulmer's blog, courtesy of ARmadgeddon. Don is VP of Industry and Influencer Relations at SAP, and is a welcome addition to the otherwise sell-side blogs promoting greater focus on influencers. That is, Don is a practitioner of what others (me included) are preaching*. We can all learn from his insights.

A couple of things occurred to me when reading his most recent post:

1. SAP has evolved its Industry and Influencer Relations group from its Analyst Relations team. That's one way of getting there. But not the only way. Influencer50 has clients that have arrived at Influencer identification & engagement from marketing effectiveness, sales effectiveness, PR, product marketing, corporate marketing and a bunch of other activities. That's not to say that it's a solution to all problems. Just that Influencers can be useful in a variety of ways.
2. SAP isn't the first firm to evolve in this manner - there are several others. For example, Wipro has been doing this kind of thing since 2006. We wrote a case study of Wipro for the book.
3. Don says that when SAP identified its business and IT influencers "We were surprised to find that a number of our assumptions on decision making authority and influence were challenged." That's completely normal for this exercise - influencers are not obvious, and take detailed and diligent research to identify and rank. IBM's Information Management group was "shocked" to discover it didn't know its influencers (again, a case study in the book). So don't embark on influencer identification expecting it to confirm what you already know.

And thanks, Don, for the link back to this blog.

*Before anyway starts, yes, we do use our own approaches. I'd like to think the book is a good example of what I call Influencer-led collateral...