The Forrester Report on Personal MicroBrand vs Corporate IP

Forrester is cutting back on the ability of its analysts to create Personal MicroBrands, says Sage Circle:

Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on “Altimeter Envy”). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure. In addition, forcing analysts to only blog on Forrester-branded blogs concentrates intellectual property onto Forrester properties increasing the value of the Forrester brand.

Dennis Howlett notes (that's where I read this) that Forrester may not have their Econometer correctly tuned:

I won’t discuss the precise numbers here but let’s say that neither the people I mention [Jeremiah Owyang, Ray Wang] were benefiting more than 5% of the revenue they brought in, often with zero support from sales. In other words, Forrester had 90-95% margin on the back of personal blogs but against which it was not prepared to compensate two hard workers. The same was true for Charlene Li the year before. Given what Ray and Jeremiah were doing, that should have sent a loud red flag signal to Forrester exec. Apparently not.

Possibly, but the IP ownership issues go deep - expect more of this in future. I await the Forrester Report on the topic with Eager Anticipation

Update - not a Forrester Report, but a response of sorts on the Forrester blog Groundswell, which was started by one of those who have left (Charlene Li). Anyway, it says:

But for Forrester, it serves our clients better to be able to get to all our blogs from one place, and to know the opinions of analysts that they see are part of the other opinions they read in our reports, in press quotes, and in everywhere else we talk.

Forrester does not yet have individual analyst blogs on our site, but that's coming quite soon. This is why it's so ironic to read comments that "We don't let analysts have individual blogs" or "Forrester should read Groundswell." I cowrote Groundswell, and I believe our policy is the right one. Groundswell says that your employees will be blogging -- it doesn't say that content companies should have their content creators blog anywhere they want. If you're creating content for a content company, that company ought to host your blog.

So, byelines on the company blog then. Seems like the best solution over all, after all newspapers and magazines have used it for many, many years.