Who Can You Trust? – Making A Case For Third Party Validation

When I started out as an IT Industry Analyst, the independent analyst business focused on providing trusted third-party validation. Prospective technology buyers were inundated by oceans of corporate marketing content from fierce competitors that struggled in fast-evolving IT market segments to differentiate their solutions and unique value propositions. The 3rd party analyst community served to help:

• Identify market leaders and important emerging vendors
• Predict longer-term winners from losers
• Discover useful applications for new technologies (i.e. solutions)
• Understand realistic value propositions (i.e. ROI/TCO)
• Document real users (i.e. case studies).

Social Media as Peer Validation

Then social media became a thing. Engaging with third party analysts has a cost and not some little risk (especially if the vendor didn’t really measure up), whereas participating in social media was basically free, ostensibly in the vendor’s control, and offered a way to coalesce Peer Validation. This social second-party validation would theoretically be more direct and thus serve as more powerful validation. A lot of enterprise IT vendors cut their analyst programs to the bone¹, and engaged tweeting social media managers.

Also, a lot of enterprise IT vendors began focusing more on maintaining only established (e.g. “sellable back-to-base”) solutions that are naturally a few steps closer to commodification. Commoditizing IT simply doesn’t warrant much market validation, almost by the definition of “commodity.”

But then, we all know what happened to social media as believable peer validation. So much of social media today is either actively “managed” by marketers and PR firms or filled with unidentifiable trolls that it has become completely untrustable. Only the naive (or if we are kind, those reacting in “fast thinking” mode) put any weight into social these days. In our B2B marketing, the desired IT decision-making audience is far too busy with real work to spend any time on social media streams².

IT Buyers Still Need Validation

B2B technology user and buyers still need to make their vendor short lists for new projects, determine solution alignment with intended use case and predict returns/payback. We could also talk about helping identify emerging solutions, prioritize initiatives and rate/compare vendors. If social media Peer Validation no longer provides much value, what can IT solution providers do?

Some IT vendors have tried to bring validation collateral in-house. This rarely works. For example, when a vendor writes up their own customer use cases, they are always consumed with more than few grains of salt. Internally written copy may help define actual usage and provide some logos as evidence, but the inevitable marketing hyperbole without any comparative perspective severely limits real validation³ value.

I propose the answer can be found in developing and leveraging trusted third-party validation content. It is still the case that third-party perspective is highly sought out for believability and reputation-based reliability – as quotes in PR’s, featured in multi-media collateral, on stage at events/shows, and yet in social media.

The Return of Third Party Validation

Validation content developed by a trusted third-party can deliver direct, lasting, and convincing validation arguments. Solid collateral from a third-party perspective serves up controlled and known messaging, and can be leveraged for years⁴. Especially compare that to the wild variability in content, applicability and message delivered through live references or social media. And the value is not just based on the “trust” in analyst independence and expertise, but also in the relatability, usefulness and applicability to the reader’s real-world IT situation. An experienced analyst understands the decisions, risks, and costs the prospect is facing, and the wider competitive market of alternative solutions available.

We want to influence IT decision-makers who are generally “super” busy people. They don’t sit around monitoring social media streams. They won’t read marketing copy. “Trust Me” doesn’t work. They get fired if they make bad IT investment decisions. They want and need real trusted validation – of solution, vendor, technology, expected success and investment value. In future posts, I’ll review some of the types of validation content we help produce here at Small World Big Data.

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1. And then engaging only with the biggest firms, which ironically, get paid most by both the biggest vendors and the biggest IT buyers, and mainly then just recommending them to each other. ↩︎
2. Despite this observation, many measures of PR/AR influence are still based on social media follower counts. Ironically, social media is probably the fastest way to keep your competitors informed. Its like that old joke about the guy looking under the streetlamp for the keys he dropped back in the dark alley because he can see better under the light. ↩︎
3. Not to mention we’ve found that too many marketing “copy” writers don’t have an IT background, can’t relate to their customers’ worlds and don’t really understand the solutions they are writing about. Resulting marketing copy sounds vague, high-level, repetitive and ultimately devoid of actual insight or information that would inform or sway a savvy prospect. ↩︎
4. One of our clients claimed our field validation report served as their number one piece of sales collateral for multiple years running. ↩︎