So it looks my hot topic this week is how full of beans most vendors are and how it is making life difficult for security admins looking to choose the right product.  I already wrote about how some vendors claim customers use their products for functions that they do not. I wrote about how customers are hounded by sales people calling and writing, blowing smoke about products and solutions they don't want.  BTW, on a comment to that one, Greg Ness writes a very insightful piece that I want to paste in here:

I think we're seeing the tale end of the era of "entrapment marketing" whereby someone downloads a white paper or watches a webcast and then gets swamped with calls from salespeople. As a marketing VP I get about 5-6 calls a day. They're so disruptive that I've turned my ring off and batch process the calls once a week.

I think the quantity and quality of the traditional downloads has declined since the early 2000s, so that real people get even more calls than they used to. I've become a big believer in social media (no registration required) and inbound registration/interest.

I have a netsec blog at: www.archimedius.net where I talk about issues. I launched it last year after seeing our google analytics scores register large social media inbound traffic to our website. Three top blogs were generating equivalent visitor eyeball minutes on our website to leading pubs.

Social media is less disruptive, usually is part of a broader, real-time technology conversation and helps you to establish better relationships with prospects, all in exchange for sharing your view of the world.

Now I was reading a recent analyst report on NAC and almost choked when I saw some of the data passing for information in this report. To be fair the analyst does preface their report by saying they can't vouch for any of the factual information supplied by vendors,  But my God does anyone tell the truth anymore?  Funny thing is it is the usual suspects up to their same old, same old fudging their numbers. 

So not only do we have misleading press releases talking about customers who don't really use the products as announced, we have analyst reports that have glaring factual errors that are not checked and people rely on and customers who are swamped with slick sales people.  What can we do as an industry to bring sanity to all of this?  Am interested in what your take on all of this? Is security marketing worth the paper it is written on anymore?