The Sydney office is moving

[Posted by Steven Noble]

This week, we move to our new digs near Darling Harbour.

Tower 2, Level 21, 201 Sussex St

Sydney, 2000, NSW, Australia

Tel: +61 (2) 9006 3325

Fax: +61 (2) 9006 1010

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Happy birthday to us

[Posted by Steven Noble]

On Friday, a bunch of us from the Sydney office shared a cake in honour of Forrester's 25th anniversary. Pictured from left to right we have: me, Tomoko Aihara, Ben Etherington, Sabannga Sanixay, Sarah McAllan and Jason Stokes.

For Forrester clients: Are you a rater?

Hello Forrester clients,

Have you ever noticed the option to rate documents?  Next time you're on forrester.com, look for the "ratings and comments" box on the right hand side, next to the document body.  If you typically get PDF copies of documents, you can ask your seat holder to rate docs for you.

Why does this matter?  Ratings are one of the best ways to get feedback on our research quality.  We take the numbers pretty seriously - down the line, they figure into performance evaluations and compensation.  I pay attention to the numbers and the comments that go with them critical.  It's *extremely* helpful to know how to improve.  Sometimes not all improvements can be made, e.g. more specific performance results when a client doesn't want to release all of their data.

So next time you're on the site and reading our latest research - let us know what you think!

Sincerely,

Pete

P.S. Non-clients can register for free temporary access!

UPDATE:  A couple of questions for you to comment on, based on feedback from a former star Forrester analyst...  Keep in mind that actually making these changes are out of my direct control, but it would help me think about why people do/don't rate documents.  No one in "management" has asked me to write this post - I'm just curious to find out more about this.

1. Does the question affect your decision to submit a rating?  Right now we ask "how likely is it that you would recommend this document to a colleague?"  Close, but not the same as "how would you rate this document?"
2. Currently, all ratings are tied to account info, i.e. I get an email whenever someone rates a doc with their name, title, company, and score.  This allows me to follow up on comments and to ask questions.  Would anonymity spur you leave more ratings? (note - you can always comment anonymously below...)

Why and where we blog

I stumbled across a new Forrester blog recently and thought you might be interested in hearing about where other Forrester analysts are blogging:

• New media and marketing: Charlene Li
• Social computing:  Groundswell - Charlene and Josh Bernoff
• Devices and media: Ted Schadler, Charlie Golvin, and Paul Jackson
• Retail
• Security and Risk Management

The marketing team also had a conversation about why we blog.  Our feed subscription and site traffic have grown at a pretty decent pace and I thought it was a good point for a status check.  Some of our reasons:

• A great way to have a broad, public conversation and engage with new voices that surface via comments and trackbacks
• Less formal and faster than writing an "official" research piece - an easier way to air out thoughts on a topic and get feedback (which often leads to a syndicated research piece)
• To gauge the heat level on topics that lie on the fringe of a research agenda
• Building awareness in niche marketing topics
• The audience has so much to teach us - making us better analysts
• Although none of us are compensated for blogging, the blog certainly generates visibility and activity that indirectly helps our business (i.e. the ROI of blogging)

Last time we did a process check, you left great feedback on how to improve - one piece of advice that everyone took to heart was the need to use a more personal voice in posts.  (Hopefully you've noticed!)

So have at it once again - what value do you get out of this blog?  Any suggestions for improvement?

Who tagged the new guy?

Cheers Pete!  I'm the newest member of Forrester's Marketing analyst team and will be focusing my research on database and direct marketing, essentially helping firms to leverage customer data to enhance their marketing effectiveness.
 
Seeing as this is week 3 for me, 5 things unknown is relatively easy. 

1. Prior to getting a ‘real job’ I worked in 9 bars in 4 countries. If I could do a moonlighting gig in the US, I could make it 10 in 5 and add a second continent…
2. I am Irish, but was born in England and have a German last name from a Canadian grandfather…
3. One of my ambitions is to visit all 50 US States. As opposed to airport layovers, I’ve decided that ‘visiting’ means spending at least one night. I’m only at 18 so far…
4. I’m a huge cycling fan (European peloton as opposed to Lance-worship) and have cycled from NY to Boston and Amsterdam to Paris raising money for AIDS charities and research. Other interests are soccer (or football for the non-Americans), diving, photography and wine.
5. I love languages and at one stage or another could speak half-decent French, German, Spanish and Italian.  There's plenty of people who wish I spoke better (or more understandable) English...  My wife, who was born in Italy but grew up in NY, and I speak Italian to our kids more than we speak English to them. That doesn't mean that my Italian is any good... 

So, having just joined Forrester from DoubleClick, I'll tag one of their resident bloggers, Ben, an ex-Clicker Adam, and ex-Forresterite Jim.

Five things you didn't know about an anonymous team member

Thanks, Pete, for the opportunity to introduce myself.  Since I’ve never posted before, my life is a blank slate to readers.  Here’s a snippet:

1. I'm Julie Katz, one of the team’s two researchers.  In this role, I manage our panels and marketing surveys, analyze quantitative and qualitative data, conduct research, and write.  Send me an email or post a comment if you’re interested in:
   
   • Joining our panels (interactive marketers, database marketers, B2B marketers, or general marketers)
   • Taking our Benchmarking survey (covers measurement, emerging channels, and marketing technology -- currently in the field)
   • Learning more about our panel-based research
2. Before joining Forrester, I had a bunch of different interesting jobs/careers (five things right here) including:
   
   • Shelving a lock of Charles Dickens’ hair, some slave manacles, and a Gutenberg Bible at Cornell’s Rare and Manuscript Library
   • Conducting research on newborns and on Japanese adults at a psycholinguistics lab in Paris
   • Raising money for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where I met the original “Jimmy” of the Jimmy Fund
   • Writing grant proposals on Holocaust education for Facing History and Ourselves
   • Interviewing homeless mothers at the National Center on Family Homelessness. 
3. I survived a knife fight.  On a trip to Morocco a couple years ago, my husband and I were stalked by two men in Casablanca.  My husband used his soccer instincts to kick the men away – I just screamed.  Luckily, this happened the last day of our trip – after we had followed a sketchy merchant into the depths of the medina in Fez to bargain for some pottery and an iron gate.
4. As a sophomore in college, I invited Cornell’s new president to my apartment for dinner.  We served him spaghetti and burnt garlic bread.
5. I’d like to pursue my outside interests (cooking--my skills have improved considerably since college, travel, art, and yoga) but my 10-month old baby eats up all of my time – so I settle for reading blogs about them instead. 

Pete already tagged the rest of the team, so I'll end my game of tag here.

Blog tag: Five things you didn't know about Peter Kim

There's a meme that has been circulating in blogs for the past couple of weeks called "five things you didn't know about me."  After posting an entry on my personal blog, I tagged five people with only moderate expectations that they would participate - and three already have (same day!):  Eric Kintz at HP and Charlene Li at Forrester, and Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership.

These posts demonstrate a best practice in corporate blogging - humanizing the digital experience.  Moreover, they got me thinking about this blog; six months ago, I posted about a process check on how we're doing.  The feedback was clear:  we needed to bring out individual voices.  Since then, we've tried to make posts more personal and have added new voices to the conversation.

Back to five things:  seems like a perfect opportunity to share more about who's blogging here.  I'm cross-posting mine:

1. My first job was scooping ice cream at a local shop - the kind of place where we made it ourselves.  One responsibility - keep my recovering alcoholic co-worker away from the Maker's Mark used for bourbon ball ice cream.  (He did whippits instead.)
2. I won tickets to see R.E.M. in 1989 by winning a local radio station contest to see who could Stand on one leg the longest.
3. I graduated from college before I could drink legally.  No bars meant four years of plan b.
4. In 1998, I visited North Korea.  It was like stepping into a time warp, almost something you'd see in a movie.  Some day I'll find the pictures and post to Flickr.
5. And finally more on my name and why I started blogging - including how I learned to love the blog.

And also tagging the rest of the team:  Brian Haven, Christine Overby, Dave Frankland, Elana Anderson, Lisa Bradner, Shar VanBoskirk, and Suresh Vittal.  Laura Ramos has already been tagged and Charlene Li has already posted.  In addition, we have a great team of researchers and research associates who participate in our weekly "blogjam" sessions:  Chloe Stromberg, Jennifer Joseph, Julie Katz, Sarah Glass, and Tenley McHarg.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't tag anyone externally...so Emily Riley at Jupiter and Andrew Frank at Gartner - you're it!

We're looking for a rock star

Our marketing empire is growing! We're looking for an analyst who will lead Forrester's coverage of database marketing and database marketing services. If you:

• Are passionate about data-driven marketing
• Are a strategic thinker who is not afraid of detail (and doesn't get mired in it)
• Thrive on working in a high energy environment with lots of super smart people

Then we want to talk to you! Check out the position description and apply.

Tags: Marketing Jobs, Add to del.icio.us

Process check

If you've been following the conversation here, you know that this blog focuses on marketing - and a lot of different flavors therein.  We've been writing for nine weeks now and with the end of a quarter and beginning of a US holiday weekend, it seems like a good point for a process check.

We had a low-key launch in April and a few key blogs noticed, including BW's Blogspotting, Church of the Customer, and Media Guerrilla.  Thanks for the mentions and to everyone who's subscribed to the feed or email.  We've been meeting on a regular basis to discuss bloggable topics and post a team viewpoint (led by a single analyst).  We've also been posting occasionally when we find something interesting to discuss.

There are a few things we've noticed along the way that aren't publicly transparent:

• While our posts aren't generating a lot of comments or trackbacks, we do receive a lot of email and phone calls after posting on a topic.  For example, I got great tips about the brand monitoring wave that's currently in progress - but there was only one comment on the post. 
• Team blog meetings have helped to cross-pollinate knowledge and broaden our insight into other marketing disciplines.  For example, I'm no marketing automation expert, but Elana is, so it's great to hear about brand issues from a left-brain context.
• Blogging isn't the easiest thing to do when a big portion of your regular job is to write anyway.  They're related, but our written research takes a much different tone and structure than blogging.  Not a bad thing, just different styles for different channels and purposes.  For more on blogging issues, see the MarketingProfs blog.

So are some open questions to you:  what do you like?  What do you think needs improvement?  What would you like to see more coverage of?  Is there something about our approach that dampens an active dialogue?

What it means:  we are enjoying the conversation, even if it's of a public/private nature.  Based on your feedback, we'd like to improve things to make the conversations more useful to you and other readers.  Our assumption is that by increasing the discussion level around issues, everybody benefits.

The syndicated research model doesn't easily allow for discussion, but the blog platform does - it would be great to have all those great minds we're engaging with (past, present, and future) sharing their knowledge here.

So let's hear it!  What's your analysis for these analysts?