As director of industry analyst relations and market intelligence at Lawson Software Kathy Nottingham would not dream of going more than a month without talking to the analysts
who follow her industry. "These analysts are the experts and they are a key source of information in the marketplace," she says. "They help to form a lot of opinions about who you
are and about the significance of your business events."
Unfortunately, Nottingham's analyst roster runs to some 200 names, and she cannot possibly make personal contact with every one of them. Her solution - one that is increasingly
popular among PR and IR professionals - is to send out a monthly electronic newsletter.
Producing a good analyst newsletter can be tricky. It's got to be short and to the point, and yet also has to offer depth. And it's got to provide more content than just rehash
the latest news release. At Nucleus Research, analyst Kathy Quirk is happy to see regular newsletters from the companies she follows. "There is just so much going on within this
industry, you have an awful lot of things to keep track of," and a newsletter helps keep things visible, she says.
But Quirk has some ground rules that would interest most PR players. For starters, she wants more of the nitty-gritty than a typical reporter might receive: "Not just a link
to a press release, but to background materials, to presentations, white papers, customer statements, an overview of what is going on," she says. On the other hand, she does not
want the whole song-and-dance. "I don't need to see the entire press release. I don't need to see the entire content of the background material that you have." A headline and a
link will do quite nicely, thanks.
At the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a trade association for companies that use Bluetooth wireless technology, Marketing Manager Eric Schneider strikes that balance by
focusing each monthly newsletter on a specific subject. With help from PR agency INK Public Relations (See PR NEWS, May 31, 2004) Schneider reaches out to about 40 analysts each
month with a two-page HTML communiqué containing roughly five separate news items.
Schneider chooses the subject based on current events. "Some months it's more obvious than others, because there is a specific topic that's in the news," he says. "For example,
we had some security issues in the past three months that have received some specific press, and we knew that would be of interest to the analysts and that they would need more
information."
The Bluetooth newsletter is tightly formatted, which helps Schneider pull it together each month without undue effort. There's always a Q&A with someone from a member
company and an "In the News" section highlighting recent news articles. Another section offers detailed information that may not be widely circulated in the public, which is meant
to give the analysts a heads-up on what may be coming soon.
Besides merely keeping the dialog flowing, the newsletter helps "to establish ourselves as a single point of information for them," Schneider says. "The more information they
get from us, the more they come to us for information, the better information they can put out to the public. Obviously we have an interest in influencing that. While analysts are
not easily influenced, we do at least want to make sure they have the most accurate information available."
At Motorola, Director of Global Industry Analyst Relations Mike Doheny says he launched a newsletter at the start of this year to reach out to those analysts who may not be
part of his first-string team. He talks to his key analysts constantly, but there are many others he likes to keep in the loop, and the bi-weekly newsletter helps achieve that
end. "They get so much information from so many different companies, they tend to miss announcements and other information unless you are really getting in front of them," he
says. "So we wanted to find a way to touch these other analysts on a regular basis."
To gather content from throughout such a vast organization Doheny relies on his own powers of observation -- combined with support from his frontline PR staff. He keeps close
daily watch on the Motorola Web site and looks for new press releases and white papers that may merit a second look. At the same time, the communications staff members who manage
PR for specific business lines will feed relevant information to him.
A standing template allows for quick production, with a masthead and formatting elements already in place. Doheny and his team merely drop in a headline with a brief
description and a category - press release, upcoming event, etc. - and then add links to relevant sites. All of the descriptions include a business-line category: Public safety,
automotive, home entertainment and so on.
Despite such high-minded efforts, however, there are some pros who say that such newsletters are just a waste of time.
At The Knowledge Capital Group, an analyst relations consulting company, CEO William S. Hopkins counts himself among the naysayers. "I actually believe that analyst newsletters
are a convenient form for PR agencies and PR people to show: 'Hey, I am doing something instead of doing nothing,' " he says.
The problem, he claims, is that regular electronic communiqués do not relieve the information glut. They make it worse. "[Analysts] are inundated by e-mail, 400 to 500 messages
a day," he says. Moreover, there is this mistaken idea that analysts sit around all day boning up on an industry or a company from the 10,000-foot level. In fact, most analysts
are busy working on specific problems and particular assignments, "so they don't want an endless stream of unrelated information pushed out to them. They want to know what they
need to know.
"I used to be an analyst. I know hundreds and hundreds of them. I talk to 50 or 60 of them every month and the simple truth is that analysts don't read newsletters," he adds.
"It's not that what these newsletters deliver is bad. It's just it almost never has any immediate value. It's just background noise." Hopkins says this holds especially true for
financial analysts, who tend to work with an exclusive set of companies. They talk weekly and daily with those firms, and they just don't want to hear from others.
But that is just one highly informed expert opinion. Even among the analysts themselves, there is at least some sense that a well-crafted newsletter can help PR advance its
cause. "It is in their interest to make sure that we are kept abreast of things that are going on in their company, otherwise there may be things we don't find out about, things
that indicate a change or a trend in the market," Quirk says. "It depends on the analyst firm, but in our case we work with the end-user clients, and the more up-to-date
information we have, the greater the potential that we could advise a client to take a look at those offerings."
All The News That Fits
Want to make sure investing in an analyst newsletter pays off? Here are a few tips:
- Go short: Keep it brief.
- Go deep: Link to info that goes beyond the typical press release.
- Go wide: Use a newsletter to reach the analysts you don't talk to on a regular basis.
- Play smart: Never use a newsletter in place of personal contact with your top-tier analysts.
Contacts: Mike Doheny, 847.435.3371, [email protected]; William S. Hopkins, 512.334.5927, [email protected]; Kathy Nottingham, 651.767.6436, [email protected]; Kathy Quirk, 781.416.2900, [email protected];
Eric Schneider, 913.710.9345, [email protected]