A fellow Enterprise Irregular posed this question to the EI's relative to the maturity of the industry and the acceptance of bloggers @ Oracle Open World:
Especially after the Workday session where 20 of us from small and large firms all sat in same room and had a hugely productive session I thought the industry had reached a certain level of maturity when it came to recognizing enterprise bloggers. Last year Benioff even gave bloggers first row seats at Dreamforce.Dennis Howlett, Frank Scavo and I were initially allowed to enter a session at Oracle Openworld then asked to leave because our badges did not say "analyst'. How Mike Krigsman and Josh Greenbaum qualify for that title and others don't was something I posed to Karen Tillman, the VP of corp communications - nicely. Her answer was even more bothersome - 'several different factors go into that decision" Now I like Karen and we had a nice drink afterwards, but chickenshit like this continues to happen 5 years after Nolan et al tried to break those barriers at SAP.
Another EI said:
The larger issue in the industry, that every corp comm team struggles
with, is what these lines are -- analyst/consultant/blogger/journalist. I'm in all four camps, and depending on the company and the situation I'm in a meeting under the guise of one or more of these titles.
With a response from yet another being:
It's only a challenge for corp comm teams that have not acknowledged that the lines don't mean anything. Even if you carry all four titles, so what... the objective is the same, to influence you positively in order to draft your influence in the market.
Exactly.
Workday got it right! They're looking for insight from multiple parties with multiple viewpoints. That's what its all about. Not just driving affiliations. It has been five years since SAP took down those walls. The fact that stuff like this still happens and it happens to influential bloggers caught me off guard. Oracle has evolved their BR function to create a credible and effective program for bloggers. But my belly button says that there is still a lot of old thinking out there regarding the boxes that companies think they should be placing influencers into and what access they should be accorded. The lines are quite artificial. Market influencers are market influencers and if one is important enough to a company to be invited to be there then a blogger should be accorded the access that any another influencer would be accorded.
