Digital-Media-Marketing on Philip Sheldrake

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

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:

'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.”

That’s how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content , and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.

Names have been changed…

Incident 1

Anne: “So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time.”

Me: “So if we’re looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us… the owned stuff that has earned a share – a ‘Like’, a RT, a +1 for example.”

The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than 'paid, owned, earned'

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Version 0.1 « work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as a PDF if that suits you better.]

Précis

Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework .

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy:

The UK takes a step closer to Streams Banks – your personal data nirvana

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of The Business of Influence about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:

I consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.

Should I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation – the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms, which may entail my negotiating different terms or choosing not to buy that specific product or service.

To me, a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others is nothing short of dystopia. Of course, the situation I describe above is far from where we find ourselves today and I make the case that influence professionals should be helping to lead the charge toward empowering the customer – past, present and future. As such, the chapter continues to lay out a potential privacy framework, introducing Streams Banks:

It’s the moniker I’ve given the service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualize it all.

A streams bank archives the minutiae of your life, if you so wish. The service may offer suggestions or advice in decision-making, and perhaps it may even be relied upon to make certain decisions for you autonomously.

What on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..

Imagine that you’re a mobile telephone network operator. Right now, you own the data describing the customer’s use of your network. What competitive advantage might be had by reversing that situation, by transferring ownership to the customer – on the condition of service of course that you can have access to their data in order to determine billing and associated aspects of your service provision? And what if you gave the customer the tools to learn about her data, to download it and share it with whomever she wished. What might she learn about herself and her family? How might this data be mashed up? How much easier would it be to source the perfect tariff for the next year given the opportunity to share last year’s data? If you think that sounds bad for business you’re effectively saying that opacity is good. History has shown that walled gardens and other protective practices eventually crumble in competitive telephony markets.

Well, it seems this day is dawning.

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

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

An interesting start to the day today… over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today’s Social Media Conference. I’m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here’s my presentation.

I know… it’s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

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.

Groupon is bad for business – no April fool

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

According to BusinessWeek, Groupon could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It’s now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business.

My sister-in-law recently bought a £300 spa package for £100 via Groupon. Haircut, massage, manicure and pedicure. She’s delighted.

“Would you go back to the spa?” I ask. “Definitely” she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: “When they run another Groupon deal.”

In other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles).

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.

Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile . We’re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I’ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.

In short:

Previously distinct disciplines are converging
There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability
A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy.

Here’s how I present the situation in my upcoming book, The Business of Influence (Wiley, April 2011):

The 2011 Plan

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk strategy.

Without thorough strategy, one is resigned to contribute nothing to living up to your organisation’s mission and pursuing its vision. Thoroughly resigned. And the turn of the year is an apt time to take the strategic long view.

But let’s begin with the shortest view. David Meerman Scott’s latest book ‘Real-time Marketing and PR’ (book review ) emphasises that being attuned to the second by second deliberations, assertions and flippancy of the social Web is nothing short of imperative for many organisations. Nevertheless, he also points out that we need our approach to be informed by the organisation’s over-arching needs and guided by sound and consistent policy.

The title of a post by Brian Solis this week articulates the challenge succinctly, “failing to plan is planning to fail ” and Vanessa DiMauro also calls for proper diligence in her post, “not so fast! ”

So how do you know if you’re doing OK, or going hand to mouth? Why do too many of the leaders I work with consider they have this licked and yet discover otherwise?

Here’s an acid test. Grab a handful of colleagues in your marketing and PR teams this afternoon for fifteen minutes and ask the following four questions:

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.

The next big big thing: it's happening now

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that’s changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you’re an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it’s the end of 2010, it’s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that’s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition’s. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference , in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I’d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Real-Time Marketing & PR

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

David Meerman Scott’s new book is out, Real-Time Marketing & PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I’ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I’m in the midst of helping them prepare for the launch of a gorgeous new app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android in November. (Ping me if you’re interested in social news readers and I’ll make sure you get your hands on it as soon as.) And part of that preparation has focused on the active listening capabilities and the workflow management needed to keep on top of the conversation and in the conversation. Thanks to the team at Nielsen Buzzmetrics , we have prepared all the search terms and we’ve made use of existing infrastructure to make sure the team understands who needs to respond and by when, as efficiently as possible without headache!

Friday Roundup: Are you an Influence Professional?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Public relations isn’t just media relations. Marketing isn’t just promotion. Promotion isn’t just advertising. PR isn’t just one-way. Digital isn’t just Web.

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. It’s about influence and a new role in the marketing and PR mix. It’s also about taking a good look at where marketing and public relations got to in the 20th Century, what happened in the last ten years, and what will happen in the coming decade that will make the last ten look like we were just taking it easy.

Most intriguingly, on talking to as many people as I can, not only have I found little useful understanding amongst those looking in on our professions, but I’ve found inconsistent definitions and misunderstandings between our respective disciplines.

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 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.

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’.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 3

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

YAWN!

A yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2 ).

I’ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.

Just needed to find one I really liked.

Fortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media’s guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don’t need to look any further.

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:

Wordle - extending the fascination of a tag cloud

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn’t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle . Bringing style to the tag cloud.

Here’s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely… an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I’m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.

The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My last post described the first half of my interview with Ecommerce Times. The second half of our interview focused on B2B video programming, or what the publication described as TV Media Relations . B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in…

Forget “Pop Idol” and “The Apprentice”, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We’re within sight of bespoke TV shows dedicated to your industry, your profession. Coming to a screen near you, a whole raft of new productions with names like Logistics Insights Live, The Coronary Care Beat, Patent Law Update, IT Compliance Bulletin.

But where is this “screen near you”? What is TV?

Buying market share - when all else fails, get your wallet out

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Six searches are conducted via Google for every two on Yahoo and one on Microsoft Live . That’s not how Microsoft would like it. So the news from Microsoft last night (well, by British Summer Time anyway), CASHBACK!

Here’s how it’s worked so far. The search engines deliver paid-for results alongside so-called organic (not paid for) search results. When someone clicks on one of these paid-for results / aka “sponsored links” / aka “ads”, the search engine charges the advertiser. If these ads were served on an affiliate site, the affiliate site owner gets a share of that revenue.

So everyone is a winner. The search engine makes serious revenue (Google made $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion in the last quarter, the majority from search related ads), searchers see ads relevant to their search query, and the advertisers attract relevant visitors to their websites.

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 .

A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I’m not a ‘celebrity’…

“Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?”
“I don’t believe it… is that really you? We’re big fans of……”
“I’ve got all your albums.”
“Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?”
“I don’t believe it, is it really you?”

Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one… “Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.” From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.

We got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it’s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.

Listen. The Science of Social.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn’t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it’s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.

One glaring betrayal of the ‘social media practices’ that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.

Listening to one person isn’t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information… turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.

This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) 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.

Twingly in private beta - "a next-generation blog search engine"

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I’m allowed in! From their press release today…

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I’ve got my invite and I’ve logged in to take a look.

UK Next Generation Access - what might we have to play with?

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

We’ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries .

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect’s excellent report “Connecting Britain’s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband ”:

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry… the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.

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.

Engagement Mapping: the what but not the how

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When does advertising pay? Apparently, we’re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.

The advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA.

Now if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.

But that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then.

Morph

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Links from Feb Away Day

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day:

Readius at Mobile World Congress

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update…

Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year’s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a “mid-08” launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.

Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon’s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony .

The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag’s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It’s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that’s not even here. Apple.

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson’s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung’s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia’s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people’s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.

OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The OnMedia event this week in New York included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007. I’ve seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I’ve included my favourite of the bunch below. You can see all the winners here .

Produced by Omnicon’s Cutwater (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that “goes viral”, it’s interesting content. This time the interesting comes in the form of “how did they do that?”, so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.

Local Content For Local People

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There are degrees of ’local-ness’; after all, Paris is local to London relative to San Francisco. But if, as Graham Jones asserts , the Internet will have an equal if not greater impact ’locally’ than globally, what are the ramifications for content?

‘Local’ is a hot topic,and last week’s Mashup Event was dedicated to the topic. IT enables personalisation of applications and services, and one’s locality must rank up there with all things personal.

Now marry this with the increasing availability of high quality video content, and I’ve become fascinated by the opportunities and benefits of repurposing video content on the fly to match the viewer’s needs precisely.

I’m compelled to make this post having watched last night’s first show of the new series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . Always a f***ing entertaining show, I was gobsmacked by the revised editing style. I know. This series is Ramsay’s first in the US and comes out of Fox. I know. I’ve been to the US and witnessed US TV many times, although Fox is ’exceptional’. Acknowledging that I’m making a sweeping generality, US editing is simply unpleasant viewing for a Norfolk boy with traditional British expectations and sensibilities…

You're in IT

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say “I’m a marketing communications consultant”, you’ll also be saying “I’m in IT”.

Computers ‘do’ numbers, and they can ‘do’ numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today’s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT.

In the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of Zara ’s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT.

These professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it’s time for marketing communications. Let’s look at some numbers.

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.

NLA, Agency or Anachronism?

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have always admired the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century’s rules to this one. Now I know rules don’t just expire, but equally, they don’t just stay relevant untouched, and the legal underpin for the NLA’s stance surely demands review. If 2007 marks the year music companies reviewed their attitude toward digital rights management, then it’s time the NLA got real too.

MMS - the perfect storm

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

According to Mark Imrie, formerly Head of Products for O2 and now Head of CRM and online capability, “MMS was a technology-led service that was rushed to market”. Quoted in Billing World last month, Mark succinctly explains the lacklustre performance of MMS to date. But where next? What’s required for MMS to take off in 2008?

I’d say it boils down to phone design, pricing and applications, and these three are coming together nicely to form the perfect storm next year.

Magpie Brandwatch

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

I’ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I’d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me… How do they disambiguate brand names?

In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap?

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.

The new mobile revenue split

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So O2 has won the exclusive right to iPhone in the UK; but what a price! With the battle heating up between operators, device manufacturers and content providers to divide the spoils of user revenue, this seems to be a massive concession for a UK operator.

[gratuitous picture of an iPhone… in case you can’t recall how attractive it is]

Capitulating 40% of iPhone associated revenues can’t make sense to anyone vaguely familiar with thin operator margins. Vodafone definitely wasn’t having any of it. But maybe this is just a big step along the ultimately inevitable path to complete commoditisation of mobile operations. The time has come for the rise of the device and equally the content now reachable following the relatively recent collapse of the walled gardens. This shift in the landscape also represents exciting opportunities to the marketing communicator looking to extend brand presence into consumers’ mobile life.

myChannel

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting.

The choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel.