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 being inundated by oceans of corporate marketing content from fierce competitors struggling 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 does have a cost and not some little risk (especially if the vendor didn’t really measure up), whereas broadcasting in social media was basically free, ostensibly in the vendor’s control, and offered a way to coalesce free Peer Validation. Online, streaming “second-party” platforms would theoretically be more immediate, direct and impactful. A lot of enterprise IT vendors at that time started cutting their in-depth analyst programs to the bone1, and increasingly engaged tweet-depth social media managers.
Looking backwards, we can see that in that same timeframe many enterprise IT vendors began focusing on their more established (e.g. “sellable back-to-base”) solutions instead of providing thought leadership. However, well-established solutions are inherently a few steps closer to commodification. Commoditizing IT simply doesn’t warrant much market validation, almost by the definition of “commodity.”
Then we all know what happened to social media as believable peer validation. Much of social media today is actively “managed” by marketers and PR firms while the rest is filled with unidentifiable trolls. Free social has become completely untrustable. Only the naive (or if we are kind, those reacting in “fast thinking” mode) still put any weight into what they see on social. And in B2B marketing, our desired IT decision-making audience is far too busy with real work to spend any time consuming today’s social media streams2.
IT Buyers Still Need Validation
However, B2B technology users and buyers still need to make their vendor short lists for new projects, determine solution alignment with their intended use case and predict returns/payback. They are still looking for help identify emerging solutions, prioritizing initiatives and rating/comparing vendors. If social media Peer Validation no longer meets any of these needs, what can IT solution providers do to attract and help their target prospects?
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, the results are always consumed with more than few grains of salt. Internally written copy may help profile actual field usage and provide some logos as evidence, but the inevitable marketing hyperbole without any comparative perspective severely limits real validation3 value.
I propose a better answer can be found by developing and leveraging trusted third-party validation content. It is still the case that third-party perspective is highly sought out for maximum 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 expert can deliver direct, lasting, and convincing validation arguments. Solid collateral developed from that third-party perspective can serve up controlled and consistent messaging, and can be leveraged for years4. Especially compare that to the wild variability in content, applicability and messaging delivered through live references or social media. And the value of third party content 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 recommendations – 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.
- 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. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- One of our clients claimed our field validation report served as their number one piece of sales collateral for multiple years running. ↩︎