Communitiessocial-Networks on Philip Sheldrake

Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the Ethereum World blog .

Our first blog post on the myths and challenges of social network moderating and the direction we’re heading in for decentralized social networking elicited some agreeable feedback but also this response:

“I don’t agree with your views about moderation. We’re building blockchains for freedom.”

Have you ever had that feeling where your communication simply fell flat despite your sincere best efforts?! 😞 Where your carefully constructed words didn’t appear to make the slightest dint?! Sure you have, you’re human too.

Similarly, we’ve all conveyed abrupt disagreement. This is the natural to-and-fro of conversation, and it demands mutual respect and enthusiasm for the potential benefits of mutual understanding.

How then should I respond to my responder? The response was private communication, so let’s call him Bob. I find myself asking …

What exactly does Bob mean by “freedom”?

In the earlier post I write that AKASHA celebrates freedom of speech and freedom of attention equally. And I also noted our longing for freedom from the crèches of centralized social networks. But Bob is “building blockchains for freedom” and appears to consider this different from rather than aligned with our direction.

Can I find an explanation for this and reconcile perceived differences? 🤝

Community moderating — bringing our best

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published to the Ethereum World blog .

In light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world’s attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms.

Our work at AKASHA is founded on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. We are dedicated to that unfolding, and so then to enabling, nurturing, exploring, learning, discussing, self-organizing, creating, and regenerating. And this post explores our thinking and doing when it comes to moderating.

Moderating processes are fascinating and essential. They must encourage and accommodate the complexity of community, and their design can contribute to phenomenal success or dismal failure. And regardless, we’re never going to go straight from zero to hero here. We need to work this up together.

We’re going to start by defining some common terms and dispelling some common myths. Then we explore some key design considerations and sketch out the feedback mechanisms involved, before presenting the moderating goals as we see them right now. Any and all comments and feedback are most welcome.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity’s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient ‘sociotechnological primitives’.

First I’d like to qualify pre-architectural. It’s not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we’re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.

A means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.

Nuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own … maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale (part 1 of 2)

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

Despite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin’s theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation.

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another …

[On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859]

Modern day scientists know that any investment of resources by individuals — of the same species or different — in acts of cooperation could in fact make those individuals vulnerable to non-cooperators, and yet cooperating proves to be a continuing strength rather than a weakness. We see cooperation everywhere we look.

[We have] a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

[Microcosmos , Margulis & Sagan, 1997]

Cooperation confers an irrefutable advantage and we’re still grappling with understanding the qualities of the mechanisms that make this the case.

Human beings are brilliant same-species cooperators — hence our parasitic success — and yet a quick scan of typical news headlines would suggest quite the opposite. Without dwelling too deeply on international relations or indeed media theory, the reported character of interactions between the likes of the United States and China and Russia and India and Europe might be said to be more fractious than cooperative. And national news headlines compound the gloom.

Why?

Why can’t we just work together for mutual advantage on our little blue marble ? As co-pilots of Spaceship Earth ?

Why decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks – the Internetome

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Aldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term global village as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).

When centralization is mediated by an organization, governmental or corporate, its best interests must be aligned perfectly and continuously with the parties subject to its gravity in the mediating context – otherwise decentralization must be preferred to avoid the appropriation and erosion of those parties’ valuable agency. Importantly, decentralization demands decentralization at every level without exception for any exception would be centralization. By definition.

This post aims to scope the challenge that still lies ahead to secure decentralization even with the rise and rise of cryptonetworks such as Ethereum . For more information about decentralization in general and why it’s important, see Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply , written for the World Wide Web Foundation.

the hi:project and the Digital Life Collective

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the newsletter about the Digital Life Collective sent to hi:project subscribers 24th April 2017 and posted to the hi:project blog .

The hi:project team is collaborating with others interested in trustworthy and empowering technologies. We’re working to launch the Digital Life Collective and we’d love you to be part of it.

Now for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of an ambitious, open-source, nonprofit vision such as the hi:project, I provide a fuller debrief below. For those who prefer their updates bitesize, everything you need is contained in the next six paragraphs.

…

You’ll recall the hi:project has some mighty challenges in its sights. We will help: solve personal data & privacy; secure a citizen-centric Internet of Things; transform accessibility & digital inclusion.

Just as for many free open source software projects, no-one profits with the hi:project but rather everyone because of it. And therein lies both the broad opportunity and the deep problem. If everyone secures the return on investment, if the profit cannot be privatised, who exactly is going to make the investment?

In other words, markets aren’t designed to address such particular potential, but that hasn’t stopped us appealing to commercial players – more on how that works below. Moreover, it doesn’t seem foundations can fund and foster such fundamental architecture. And our brush with academic funding was a brush off. In all, we’ve been working across four fronts, failing at these three, and seeing if we can succeed at the fourth.

At first the fourth appears counter-intuitive … if the hi:project seemed too big, fifty of us have banded together so far to go bigger. The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative dedicated to “tech we trust for the world we want”, and today is the day we go all official. Today we put the incorporation paperwork in the post and invite you to become a co-founding member so that together we can give the market a miss for the moment, pause the powwow with foundations, give up grinding the grant applications … and start simply co-operating.

Technology of, by and for the people. Our tech, not their tech. Find out more now at www.diglife.com .

As for engineering the hi:project … well we’ll be making our case to the Collective in due time.

The debrief

From the moment we started talking about the hi:project, we contrasted the user interface (UI) and the human interface (HI), the former describing the status quo in which you, the mere user, are actually the used, where you are in fact the product being sold, the civilian being controlled . By adopting HI as our terminology, we communicate the intent to reinstate your sovereignty, your dignity, your humanity.

Technology trends relevant to change management

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute .

I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa .

The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine?

Why I've decided to stop curating a Flipboard magazine

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: Social Business Design magazine – Purpose & policy, openness & agility, structure & culture, communication & trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise.

Trips off the tongue.

The service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche ‘publication’, attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers.

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I’m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.

Mike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.

[embed width=“960”]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]

"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?"

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:

Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?

This post addresses two problems integral to this statement.

A means not an end

Social business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, I describe social business by way of the following challenge:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

Shared values

Some pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to Stowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. In his words :

Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Stowe Boyd recently published “A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work” (although the title will change ). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you’ve read Attenzi – a social business story then you’ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.

[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to A Manifesto For A New Way of Work .]

Here are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.

_____

Dissensus (versus Consensus)

— active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business

Cooperative (versus Collaborative)

— sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns

Creativity (versus Tradition)

— new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous

Autonomy (versus Heteronomy)

— paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture

Influencing Influencer Marketing

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

WOMMA ’s new guidance on influencer marketing begins with the assertion: “This is not an update to the 2008 WOMMA Influencer Handbook - this is a complete rewrite …”

I’m not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to AMEC and The Conclave , and it was in this capacity that Brad Fay and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA’s Neil Beam to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it’s turned out to be.

I’ve expressed Euler Partners’ approach to influence in recent posts, notably “Influence - request for comments ” (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular:

Dell Social Media Predictions 2013

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™ (#fauxtrademarks). As amazing as social media is becoming, it’s still no full substitute for eye-to-eye interaction. I met the co-founding CTO of Yammer this week, Adam Pisoni , and our conversation came to life immediately in a way that I don’t believe would be as easy to kindle pixel-to-pixel.

Here’s an interesting question I think. Can you distinguish in your mind the kinds of online relationships you have with people you see physically from time to time from those you’ve yet to meet? I believe you probably can, and probably do.

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to Euler Partners .]

We kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011 . Here’s a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for “buzz monitoring”, and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and influence flows are the lifeblood of mutual understanding, knowledge building and decision-making. Maintaining technological islands for influence flows with one group of stakeholders (eg, customers) distinct from another island for influence flows with another group of stakeholders (eg, employees) effectively ‘misses the trick’. It fails to recognise that today’s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme’s guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller ), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham ), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer .

I think you’ll agree the audience’s questions and the guests’ responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I’ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.

Reputation and Wikipedia

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup ]

What does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of Wikipedia’s “five pillars” , you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?

Let’s face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn’t the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia’s potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that’ll work. Not.

And yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there’s the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.

This week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, spotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson’s interest in Wikipedia and PR practice . He found Watson’s contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page:

What our publics are telling us

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Public relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect mutual understanding . Right?

Well, from my experience, the vast majority of practitioners are looking to exert influence but invest considerably less time divining insight from stakeholders and feeding that back into the organisation to improve decision-making.

For the best part of this week I’ve been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what’s going on in the minds of customers and prospects.

ESOMAR describes itself as “the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide”. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members’ contribution to effective decision-making.

This particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far…

Firstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in ’traditional’ marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we’re all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently?

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

I’m in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow’s European PR Congress 2011. I’m the first session of the day so I have the challenge of exciting the delegates, with getting some energy in the room. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm from the audience when I presented last month in San Francisco, so it’ll be interesting to compare the two.

Now, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov&Partners.Ukraine ) that social media in Ukraine has not yet gained the momentum it has in Europe and the USA for example. She estimates that household broadband Internet penetration is just 26% [updated following the first comment below]. Interestingly, however, according to Total Telecom in July last year : “Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions… putting penetration at 121.2%.”

Whilst I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of feature phones and smart phones, the waiting staff in the restaurant this evening indicated that such devices are booming. In the car to the hotel I also noticed that Nokia is investing in quite a big outdoor advertising campaign here for its feature and smart phones.

My stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month’s Dreamforce , so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it’s more the narrative I intend to tailor for this event. The emphasis tomorrow is simple – Public Relations, as defined by the Excellence Study, has a very bright future.

Social Media Analytics

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Are you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you’re a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.

Marshall Sponder visited London last week as part of his tour promoting his new book, Social Media Analytics – Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics (ISBN 978-0-07-176829-0). Having read a draft manuscript of the book, a quote of mine appears on the front cover: “Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market.”

There is no better independent authority on the tools and techniques than Marshall. Whilst some pundits simply maintain lists of social analytics vendors with some basic feature comparison tables, Marshall has actually used many of them for real. Moreover, he has a peculiar ability to prod the vendors and the engineers that build these services, to get under the hood and separate the actual capabilities from the marketing claims.

Marshall is not, however, a public relations practitioner or management consultant. This book does not provide a strategic framework for the integration of social analytics into your organisation. It does not address important issues such as privacy (of customers, employees and the wider public) or ethics. It doesn’t attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review.

How many Tweets make a Like?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking for an acid test as to whether an organisation is centred in this social world, as to whether they have a marketing and communications strategy that integrates social media cogently and coherently rather than bolts it on, listen out for questions like this:

How much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?

If this is the kind of question they’re asking then, in my opinion, they simply don’t yet ‘get it’. If you’re feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:

$0.23 per hundred
A ’like’ is definitely worth somewhere between 2 and 3 tweets; sort of around 2.42
A comment has an engagement quotient nine times that of a ‘friend’
If you’re in tech, then a +1 is currently five times more potent than a RT, but the reverse is true for other markets
That depends if you’re B2B or B2C
Well, can I ask, is there any yellow in your logo?

In The Business of Influence (Chapter 5) I include the following table, titled “Maturity of influence approach”.

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I’m doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I’m attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce.com conference and with 45,000 registered delegates this year it is now, or so CEO Marc Benioff assures us, the largest corporate tech event of its kind. There is a palpable enthusiasm for the theme, regularly articulated as “awesome” by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order:

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It sure is one helluva a show (and I particularly appreciated the Metallica and Will.i.am gig last night!)

The theme for this year’s conference is the socialization of the enterprise and the reason for my invitation to present to the Executive Summit yesterday and delegates at large today. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Dreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

There can be no doubt that Salesforce.com is on a mission to help its customers make the social transition with as much emphasis placed on increasing the social exchange with employees and partners as customers and prospects, and this mission entailed the acquisition of Radian6 earlier this year.

When I spoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn’t appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking.

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media… the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.

First up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: “… we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don’t use .

I think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form… Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren’t. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased… How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?

The primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can’t blame social media or society’s enthusiastic adoption of it. Yet this belies or at least underplays its influence in my opinion. I would never resort to such tabloid misrepresentation as when the Daily Mail labels one photograph of a London bus ablaze “Twitter riot” , but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots.

Meanwhile in Mumbai

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in BRIC – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and 771 million mobile phone subscriptions , no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.)

The Indian economy

The OECD’s June 2011 review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment:

BT's social failure drives customers away

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You’ll know that consumer facing organisations are investing shed loads in social media. Right? But how intelligent is this investment? Are they even getting the basics right?

Thinking or just acting?

This is the number one differentiator in my book between the success stories and the also-rans. There are those who truly ’think’ social. They have reviewed operations from the ground up in light of the age of social media. Every aspect of business is reviewed systematically through the lens of social media, and strategy is developed on this basis. And whilst they are to be celebrated, this post is about one company that has visibly #failed in my eyes in recent weeks.

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“200” caption=“Image via Wikipedia”] [/caption]

BT is the UK’s number 1 Internet Service Provider, yet a May 2011 upgrade to the firmware of its customers’ home routers left Linux users unable to connect to it.

And in case you didn’t know, Android, the world’s fastest growing operating system for Smartphones, is based on Linux. So BT does not currently provide me Internet service for my Android phone, leaving me and other customers in my position having to use the more expensive 3G data networks than home broadband. Disgraceful.

But this isn’t a blog about ISPs. This is a blog about social media and customer relationships and business performance. Enter BT’s support forum (at http://community.bt.com ).

Not PR – Friday Roundup

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“CELEBRITIES, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results. Online ‘reputation management’ agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings.”

So opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can’t provide the link to The Times as I’m not a subscriber to its paywall, but it’s syndicated here , sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.)

On reading the article, part of me recognised this sort of capability at the same time another part of me felt very uncomfortable with it being associated directly with PR. And then I winced some more…

“[These agencies] typically use thousands of social networking profiles - set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person - to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.”

This is NOT public relations. This is not two-way communication aspiring to foster mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. Such activities clearly breach the CIPR’s code of conduct , specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation.

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day!

It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What’s it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.

Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I’ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman’s David Armano, Dell’s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt.

Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform , and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.

Here’s how Radian6 describes it:

Insights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout , OpenAmplify and OpenCalais . The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.

How does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff.

CIPR social media measurement guidance

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.

It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.

Measurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.

What's the ROI of social media?

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum . It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.

I sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What’s the ROI?…

Of the latest rebrand?
Of the office refurb?
Of the internal communications activity?
Of the training and development programme?
Of the upgrade to Windows 7?
Of the new standard issue smartphones?
Of the stakeholder engagement via social media?

If you’d like to see where we went from there, here’s the presentation:

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It’s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I’m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.

Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here’s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic ‘Content – An illustrated history ’, which is easy to breeze through :-)

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You can now get your hands on The Marketing Century – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book’s introduction.

I’m delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.

Buy at Amazon / CIM / The Book Depository / Blackwell’s / Waterstone’s . And more info at Google Books .

1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , Peppers & Rogers Group)

The Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company’s long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer.

Content - an illustrated history

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format .

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC .

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu’s brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare’s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what’s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it's not

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR ’s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group’s chair, I’d better get my skates on. Here’s a quick look at the main thrust of our report.

Social media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what’s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn’t it, except that the view of what’s important and what’s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience.

Take the announcement this week from Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s top supermarkets:

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.

Reading. Lots. Lots of books. Here’s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.

Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott

Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I got my copy of Real-Time Marketing & PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I’ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it’s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David’s latest books).

Let’s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.

It's all about curation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.

In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed having the opportunity to ask Robert Phillips (@citizenrobert ), CEO Edelman UK, his opinion on the state of the PR profession. Robert believes that public relations is at a pivotal moment when, confronted by the brutal transparency of social media, the profession has the opportunity to embrace the public information and two-way symmetric models as the default rather than the exception, ditching the spin and persuasion attitudes and connotations. Resigning them to history, or at least to publicists.

The fallacy of the influentials

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Life’s complicated, so we better get used to it. That’s my remote contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, Boston 2010 . In other words, your marketing and PR campaign does not pivot around finding and persuading 10, 20 or 50 so-called influentials.

We should de-emphasise the application of social Web analytics (aka social media analytics, listening platforms, social monitoring) to finding the influentials. Rather, we should employ these amazing tools and services to actively listen, to learn from the conversation and to facilitate the workflow aspects of joining in the conversation.

Life is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we’re influenced more by our respective 150 nearest and dearest family and friends more often than the other 6 billion combined! I discuss the evidence for this assertion in my video here:

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. And the reading, the planning, the structuring and first few chunks of copy have been enjoyable in a hard work kinda way.

It’s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , and I’d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It’s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you’re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can’t help but learn more as you do it.

The 1st CIPR TV show

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

CIPR TV is underway!

I co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with Stephen Waddington (@wadds ) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC’s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR’s 2011 President, Paul was never stuck for an interesting and articulate response to a wide range of questions spanning public sector PR, reputation washing, graduate recruitment and internships, diversity, the CIPR’s response to the ASA’s misguided stance towards social media , and his plans for the CIPR next year.

The Friday Roundup: The ASA's misstep

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Some things aren’t quite as simple as first they seem. And when this is the case, it’s good practice to consult widely. And on this count, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA ) has failed.

On 1st September, the ASA announced: “Landmark agreement extends ASA’s digital remit ”. The scope of its Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for the CAP Code governing UK advertising, will extend to “apply in full to marketing communications online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.”

Now who could possibly argue with that?

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:

Companies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they’ll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF & the semantic web #CIPRSM [link ]

My role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.

Hosting CIPR TV... live at five!

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo&feature=player _embedded

The last time I was on TV it was the BBC’s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe’s first email money service at the time (before PayPal was available in these parts) and our servers were struggling quite a lot under the weight of our success on eBay UK. Facing up to a firm line of questioning, I was able to reassure Working Lunch viewers that any money they had stored with us was safe and sound.

Fast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn’t even launched until 2005, before going on to be the fastest growing website ever. By 2007, the capacity consumed by YouTube exceeded that of the entire Internet in 2000. In May this year, over 24 hours worth of video was uploaded to YouTube for every single minute of the month!

And now we have .

Friday Roundup: I'd like to quote you

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to quote you.

Without doubt, the marketing and PR professions are in revolutionary flux right now. I reckon that if we didn’t have these disciplines to date but just realised here and now that we actually wanted to influence what people think and do, and ensure we’re influenced straight back, that we’d design things very much differently to the status quo we’ve inherited.

I’m delighted that Wiley has invited me to write a book on just this topic. It’s going to focus on the much needed transformation of marketing and PR strategies, and the related disciplines in the influence mix, for the current and future digital age.

The book explains what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming up. It points to the changes of direction organisations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant.

And in the spirit of a marketer honing a product’s positioning, I’ll tell you what this book is not. This book is not a social media ‘how to’. Rather, it’s about your organisation, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organisation and personal careers, whilst the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.

I’d like to quote you. Please do get in touch if you’d like to share your viewpoint and experiences… the book will only be improved by your contributions. Seriously, do it!

And if you’re interested in the bit about what’s coming up, I’m running a session this coming Thursday in London at the CIPR on the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things if you’d like to join us.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

The Web of data is a Web of influence

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Web 3.0. Perhaps obsessed is a more accurate description.

Web 1.0 is the Web of documents. Web 2.0 is the social and user content Web. Web 3.0 is the point at which the Web itself understands that content and social interaction. Some call it the semantic Web, and some call it the Web of data, but regardless of naming conventions, it’s going to mess up a hell of a lot of business models, and create some fascinating new business and public-benefit opportunities. And it’ll transform reputation management too.

If you think ‘atoms of influence’ trickle far and wide courtesy of human expressions and understanding with social media acting as loyal conduit, just wait until machines understand these contributions too.

Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a “Human Seismograph”?

Brian Solis won’t mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It’s a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn’t quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.

And two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.

Firstly, Brian’s post “Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter ” reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine.

An interview with Seth Godin - PR not publicity

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_27421” align=“alignright” width=“250” caption=“Seth Godin - www.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/" ] [/caption]

Seth Godin is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me… and of course he is.

With a dozen titles to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.

Interview with Seth Godin

TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth at CIPR Social Summer

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Last night the CIPR Social Summer series hosted a session on all things TweetDeck . If you haven’t tried TweetDeck, try it now. It’s free!

According to Twitstat.com today, after simply tweeting at twitter.com, Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client globally. Here’s the stats I just grabbed from Twitstat:

Rank		Client	% of users	Tweets/user
1	(1)	web	16.80 %	2.90
2	(2)	TweetDeck	9.50 %	3.17
3	(6)	twitterfeed	5.90 %	5.58
4	(3)	foursquare	5.85 %	1.49
5	(4)	Twitter for iPhone	5.85 %	2.38
6	(5)	HootSuite	5.39 %	2.68
7	(8)	Echofon	3.22 %	3.25
8	(25)	API	2.76 %	6.66
9	(7)	Tweetie for Mac	2.55 %	2.38
10	(9)	Seesmic	2.16 %	3.02

But TweetDeck is more than a nice way to shepherd incoming tweets and craft your own. TweetDeck is rapidly becoming the most powerful way to manage your social networking without ever having to log onto each and every social network yourself. It aggregates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare, and it even lets you watch YouTube videos brought to your attention by your social network in situ.

So I was particularly delighted when TweetDeck MD Iain Dodsworth (@iaindodsworth ) accepted our invitation to join us for one of our sessions to share his insights and answer our questions.

An interview with Brian Solis

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Image by affiliatesummit via Flickr

I interviewed Brian Solis for the CIPR’s website recently. Brian is one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist and futurist, Solis helps practitioners get to grips with the effects of emerging media on marketing, communications and publishing.

His perspectives are well worth a listen:

Friday Roundup - is social media good?

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Is social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked in my consultants’ capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the BBC’s Question Time ? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it’s simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme’s fans as the Twitter backchannel has allowed us all to join the debate.

But is social media “good”?

I hadn’t seen Stephen Waddington’s post this week about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of “digital rubber necking” makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn’t too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer’s facebook page now has 17,000 members.

So, my answer?

One Web. Many social networks. Facebook's Achille's heel.

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook will die.

When it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook’s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!

But social networks aren’t subject to the same dynamics as the ‘irrational exuberance’ that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of ‘softer’ issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and ‘harder’ issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.

Economics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called ’network effect’ eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market’s network effect first. But that’s more ecommerce than social networking.

Making sense of social analytics

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.

And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are:

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a bit of a ‘first’ going on at the CIPR… yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.

So I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life’s hard.

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR hosted a smashing event on Monday focusing on the impact of digital and attracting delegates from all sectors as well as a mix of in-house and agency.

I was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I’d focus in on the following assertion:

It’s my opinion that the things people think have change haven’t, but some things have changed that aren’t yet widely understood.

Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel … the Social Media Measurement Group.

Some time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure ‘column inches’, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).

My disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.

Without a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone’s defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign’s success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X out of the press? “Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm….”.

How social media might help put UK politics on the right track

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK’s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.

But that doesn’t mean same-interest groups aren’t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It’s just that the majority of the British public aren’t that engaged with social media just yet. And don’t start with that “but Obama did it in 2008” malarkey… sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority “online” effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone’s definition of social media.

Let’s take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election.

The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession… all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

CIPR social media group and the Semantic Web

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I’ve appended here for your convenience. I’m delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting.

One of the first things I’m going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0.

Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp .

It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!

UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I’m delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that?

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

PR and Web 3.0... a call to action

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade…

1. Web 2.0 participation

I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the “write” part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don’t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.

The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to host the first meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative in New York this week with a fine group of people :

Kate Delahaye Paine , the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (twitter , linkedin )
Marshall Sponder , the Web Metrics Guru (twitter , linkedin )
Ted Shelton , Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group (twitter , linkedin )
Jay Krall, Global Product Management, Cision (twitter , linkedin )
Aubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (twitter , linkedin )
Harish Rao, network science at The Rao Group
Diane Meier , Founder and CEO, Meier Brand
Connie Bensen , Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, Alterian (twitter , linkedin )

The task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. For those of you unaware of the Influence Scorecard project, you may want to flick through the presentation at the end of this post, or perhaps read my last post on the matter .

One of our first tasks was to get some definitions agreed. For example:

The first Influence Scorecard meeting

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who’ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I’m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven’t checked back with Charlene since February… are you around next week Charlene?)

I do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don’t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!

Given that I’ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation.

But that’s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That’s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question.

The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In Brian Solis’ latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers , he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.

If you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . Of course I recognise we’ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I’m tracking. And wow is this market exploding.

(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled “Listening + Conversation Management Systems”.)

If you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch . Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt .

An outline of the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called “transition period” and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.

It hasn’t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I’m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.

Most encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.

So I’m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It’s concise. It’s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how.

We are one. We'd like to look like one, talk like one, act like one.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That’s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.

Which is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn’t care.

I put “they” in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up “they”, doesn’t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.

That’s why we use “they” as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct “it”.

Secondly, the “they” also indicates what’s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is.

MarCom Professional meet

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Chew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional?

Where and when… http://tinyurl.com/dogduck , Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009.

Updates here and @sheldrake . Hope to see you there!

P.S. The current description of what MarComProfessional is about is here FYI.

Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ’traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.

For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy ’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.

I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.

We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.

Data visualisation

Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy - supporting perspective in Ad Age post

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled “There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile ”, B.L. Ochman posted “Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet ” on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.

Right up there at number 1:

You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.

Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake ) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives.

I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that your business most likely isn’t ready to do business in 2009!)

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.

Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.

The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.

The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.

There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success.

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This slideshow made me laugh.

View more presentations from The Kaiser .

I’ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I’m intrigued by its success.

You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and ‘clients’ that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.

You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.

You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious… with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more ‘many-to-many’.

Dear PR Week, it's not about Twitter per se

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today ("Twitter has suddenly exploded ") we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.

I’d write here things like “AWESOME” and “WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING”, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I’ll refrain.

What’s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.

…I don’t know a Racepoint consultant who isn’t on Twitter, and there’s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

To recap, this is where marketing communications has got to…

Interruption marketing (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.

Your brand and reputation is defined by everyone’s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.

You simply have no choice, you have to converse. Dialogue is where it’s at. If you’re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you’ll get the girl.

So I thought I’d focus here on how to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.

Multimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what’s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you’ve got.

So what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say in an interesting way? There’s no formula (that I know of!), but here’s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your “PR 2.0” synapses, one film and one animation. I’ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.

Influence Scorecard update

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks

Whilst the volume of responses to the Influence Scorecard has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I’ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!

Nevertheless, I’m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, “Thank you”. And I’d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I’ve added some reciprocal blog links…

Nielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest, RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.

Questions

Where you’ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general… definitions and events.

Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Weber releases the 2nd edition of Marketing to the Social Web today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.

With a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”… he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.

Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard . The post was testing the water to determine the level of interest such an event might generate, and I was answered by dozens of emails, direct twitters, comments and even some direct editing of the post itself, as I’d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)

I even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here…

Moreover, the interest was split almost 50:50 between Europe and North America, and it was spread fairly evenly amongst each of the required participant groups.

What is clear from all the queries and interest is that we now need to put some meat on the bones. Here are a few top line thoughts on ‘influence’, ‘scorecard’ and what we hope to achieve. Your thoughts are welcome.

Influence

Organisations want to influence the opinion and behaviour of their stakeholders. They do this via the various marketing and communications disciplines and approaches - PR, advertising, branding, community building, conversational marketing, direct marketing, events, product placement, public affairs, sponsorship etc..

Of course, stakeholders also influence each other and some will want to influence an organisation - how ready an organisation is for this dialogue is another matter.

Scorecard

The ‘scorecard’ is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as “business performance management ” or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute :

Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications operates within an increasingly complex multi-stakeholder web of influences, and the way many of us can or will be able to devine how influence goes around and comes around, how reputations get built up and eroded, is to look at it pictorially.

My best attempt to date at explaining this in non-mathematical language is in my post “Can you see it? Making influence visible. ” Check it out. More widely, my post “Influence… it’s a numbers game ”, lists all my posts related to this topic.

Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:

Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.

What's the difference between the social web and social media?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the “Social Web” and not “Social Media”. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:

“social web analytics” - Google estimates 18,600 results
“social media analytics” - Google estimates 20,100 results

Interestingly, however, the term “social media” attracts more than twice the search count estimate as “social web”:

“social web” - Google estimates 8,250,000 results
“social media” - Google estimates 19,700,000 results

Social media is a subset of the social web.

The social Web and agenda setting: a presentation to today's European Agenda Setting Conference, Zurich

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President Media Tenor , David W Moore, author of The Opinion Makers , and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.

Here’s my deck if you’re interested:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialweb socialmedia )

Influence... it's a numbers game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday “Where are the PR Numerati? ” (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he’s right and I’m numerate and I’m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book “The Numerati ” by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don’t mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will:

You're No One If You're Not On Twitter

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of ’the balance’ as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?

Here’s one songster’s take:

Where the social Web goes from here

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics : “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter -fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed , you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal.

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I’m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn’t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They’re keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I’m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. Here’s a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling “organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time.”

Can you see it? Making influence visible.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a revolution coming in public relations… visualisation.

[Courtesy Christopher Baker ]

Picture the scene

You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?

It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.

Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.

To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?

Welcome to the world of data visualisation.

The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that’s almost Google’s raison d’etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO )?

Google’s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank . Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website’s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.

This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.

But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website?

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .

Twingly - new blog search engine launches

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Twingly launches today, “the next generation blog search engine”. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com .

The B2B Social Web - my interview with the Ecommerce Times

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The B2B Social Web has arrived and it’s not going to go away.

I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here’s the first half of our conversation…

1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?

If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others’ regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.

MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.

2) What major trends should my readers know about?

The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc.

Win a free ticket to Being Digital conference courtesy of Taptu

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

Readers of my blog may know I’m speaking on one of the panels at the Being Digital conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu… see their blog post here .

Online, offline, up a tree, down a cellar - effective networking is all in the mix

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I’m asked on a regular basis “What’s the point of spending so much time online?”.

The very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into “offline” and “online” portions. Yet they don’t distinguish “time eating / not eating”, “time talking / listening”, “time with new people / with old acquaintances”, “time on the phone / not on the phone”.

Like eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn’t? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning… some of which just happens to be online and some offline.

Convergence Conversation: Prospects for next generation access in the UK

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK’s broadband infrastructure.

I’m delighted to be chairing the event, and we’ll kick off with the following speakers:

Angus Flett - BT Wholesale
Geoffrey Spencer - Nortel
Antony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group
Bill Gash - Partners in TV
Mike Aigner - Geo Networks
Chris Barraclough - STL Partners

What’s the topic?

Recent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs’ “all you can eat” business model. The BBC’s iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch.

FT writes about "Gated Communities in Cyberspace"

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - “Business urged to woo social network figures ” - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be “Influential people are influential people, online or off”.

But it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though. I quote….

2007 - The Year of Social Networking

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It’s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year.

The biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see.

This has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it.

Social Network Levelling

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“If Facebook is the Cathedral, who owns the bazaar?”

This evening’s Mashup Event , hosted this time at Merrill Lynch’s London HQ, focused on Social Networks. It was the busiest of the series to date; at over 200 attendees it was twice the size of the one I chaired earlier this year. So congratulations to Simon and Tony on making it happen.

Social networking has arrived. I can say this on the sole basis that we were in less-than-5-star hotel venues not long ago, and now we’re hosted by one of the world’s biggest investment banks! Moreover, the breadth of attendees is growing as more and more employers and leaders become interested in how Mashups affect their business, affect their markets, affect their lives.

Graphic engagement

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Racepoint we’ve been thinking about the ramifications of one of my previous posts, “Continuous engagement… the death of market research ”. A particular area of interest is the way in which we might help companies interact with stakeholders other than via text-based media.

Yes, I know there’s the telephone too, but following the tenet that restricting the channel can only restrict the quantity and quality of interaction, how else can we reach out and engage?

Continuous engagement... the death of market research

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

ESPN pulled the plug on their cell-phone product after investing $150m including $40m in advertising. This is precisely the failure market research is intended to prevent. How can business harness customers and prospective customers to improve their hit rate and time to market?

The following simple figures demonstrate the difference between traditional market research and continuous engagement.

There are dozens of differences between the two approaches. Research is ad-hoc or at regular intervals whereas continuous engagement is, well, continuous. Research is one-way, and engagement is two-way. Research is devoid of any direct brand benefit (and research purists will claim this is beneficial) whereas continuous engagement inculcates brand loyalty. Here’s a list of the primary differences:

Mashup events

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Attended the Mashup* event last night on “media and advertising agencies in a digital world”. It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA’s head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA.

Unfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn’t quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish’s question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about Openads for the first time. Very interesting.

Communitiessocial-Networks on Philip Sheldrake

Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating

What exactly does Bob mean by “freedom”?

Community moderating — bringing our best

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale (part 1 of 2)

Why decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks – the Internetome

the hi:project and the Digital Life Collective

The debrief

Technology trends relevant to change management

Why I've decided to stop curating a Flipboard magazine

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?"

A means not an end

Shared values

Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front

Dissensus (versus Consensus)

Cooperative (versus Collaborative)

Creativity (versus Tradition)

Autonomy (versus Heteronomy)

Influencing Influencer Marketing

Dell Social Media Predictions 2013

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR, by the CIPR Social Media Panel

Reputation and Wikipedia

What our publics are telling us

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

Social Media Analytics

How many Tweets make a Like?

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

Meanwhile in Mumbai

The Indian economy

BT's social failure drives customers away

Thinking or just acting?

BT’s woeful social inadequacy

Not PR – Friday Roundup

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

What’s it about?

Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic

CIPR social media measurement guidance

What's the ROI of social media?

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , Peppers & Rogers Group)

Content - an illustrated history

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it's not

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott

It's all about curation

In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK

The fallacy of the influentials

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

The 1st CIPR TV show

The Friday Roundup: The ASA's misstep

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

Hosting CIPR TV... live at five!

Friday Roundup: I'd like to quote you

The Web of data is a Web of influence

Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph

An interview with Seth Godin - PR not publicity

TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth at CIPR Social Summer

An interview with Brian Solis

Friday Roundup - is social media good?

One Web. Many social networks. Facebook's Achille's heel.

Making sense of social analytics

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR

How social media might help put UK politics on the right track

The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain

CIPR social media group and the Semantic Web

Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise

PR and Web 3.0... a call to action

1. Web 2.0 participation

The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard

The first Influence Scorecard meeting