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	Phil's Blogservations Friday, April 16, 2004 Posted by philgomes 2:09 PM The Value Of Analysis The Value Of Analysis Cheers to CNET, which came through yesterday with some very quick, thorough, and insightful analysis of RealNetworks' recent overtures to Apple. The story originally broke in The New York Times. Now... Why am I taking the time to write this? I've always believed that the first 30-60 minutes of every PR person's day are the most important by far. In order to be effective — able to determine the strength and relevance of a client's message in the greater scheme of things — a PR person needs to consume a lot of data per client very quickly. This is why I've been such a fan of RSS, not only as an outbound public relations tool, but an operational one as well. But raw information simply isn't enough. There is a little-appreciated difference between "information" and "intelligence," the latter of which is defined as "actionable information" by professional business researchers. Any attempt to synthesize a variety of thoughts, opinions, and reactions helps achieve this goal. A bunny-trail for you PR folks out there... Have you ever had to assemble a "tracker" for your clients, perhaps when you were just starting out agency-side? Most of the time, this is just a raw data dump from Lexis/Nexis into MS-Word. Did you perhaps fool yourself into thinking, at one time, that a client ever made a decision based on this daily 50-page monster? The broken information-gathering and intelligence processes that I've observed at most agencies is maybe a topic for another posting, but it is an issue that I've run into a number of times. Chief among my problems with how this process is carried out is that 1) there is little attempt to analyze or even summarize this data, and 2) the task is left to the most junior person in the PR team with little involvement by those who can best render analysis. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.