Steve and I had a discussion at Mashup Camp about what to call ourselves. This came up because not everyone knows what an industry analyst is. Sometimes it’s easier to say you’re a consultant.
I said before maybe I’d prefer to call myself a blogger. People look at me a little funny if I say I’m a blogger–because they think that means I’m some sort of cowgirl commando on the web, flaming people everywhere, posting pornographic pics, and cursing all the time–but at least they know what I’m talking about. If you say “industry analyst” in Denver, people don’t look at you funny… they look at you with utter blankness.
For those who know what analysts are, there’s a bit of mystique. We get to monitor the whole of the software industry, or at least a segment of it, in its entirety. Most big software vendors have analyst relations departments devoted to trying to capture and align our attention. We get to travel to interesting conferences, stay in fancy hotels, eat nice dinners and hobnob with the higher ups, all on a not-so-impressive income.
I don’t find analyst life so far different from blogger life. As a blogger, I was starting to get enough recognition that people would approach me, wanting to tell me about their service or software and get my opinion and get me to write about it. As a blogger for GigaOM, I catapulted myself into the big time, bloggerwise. Same with associating myself with RedMonk. Suddenly, I’m important, more important than I was before. It makes sense–I have more reach now and people who don’t know me can judge me based on my associations instead, if they know something about the people and organizations I associate with.
This is not the first time that association with some institution has given me some credibility beyond whatever I created on my own. That’s closure, I guess, but I’m way more interested in brokerage than closure.
I don’t really care how it happens that I can get into the conversation. As long as I can be myself and cover technology at the same time, I’m happy to do it. If, however, I have to change myself, forget it, because I’m just not interested. More than that, I’m not capable. I can’t change myself. Tried that already. Didn’t work. To me, that’s the whole beauty of blogging–be yourself, not some marketized version of yourself. Be yourself and show the world that business and work is made up of people, not airbrushed sanitized likenesses of people.
The struggle that industry analysts have is whether they are authentic or not–whether their opinions have been bought or not. Isn’t the best way to show that your opinions are your own, that they fit in with everything you believe and live for, is to show yourself as you are?
