Public-Relations on Philip Sheldrake

The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An email sent to all my friends and family.

There’s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica calls him the first genuine scientist. And it’s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago.

(That’s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!)

I read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012 , and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are:

Ethos – argument by character
Logos – argument by logic
Pathos – appealing to the emotions.

Q&A with CIPR Influence magazine

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was interviewed by Rob Smith, Editor, Influence magazine . Published in two parts , May 2016.

What does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional?

You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Unfortunately, the English language also has us using the word ‘influence’ in terms of something someone might possess.

I always prefer to work with the first meaning here for two reasons: first, the changing of hearts, minds and deeds is the actual object of interest to public relations professionals (reciprocally of course, more on which later); second, we might quantify the former better than the latter, and indeed many of the better attempts to score influence as something someone might possess rely to a certain extent on that capacity being demonstrated (ie, the former again).

What does this mean to PR practice right now? Well that depends on your flavour of practice, characterised rather usefully at this juncture by Andy Green as simply old school and new school.

"A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications" – a critique

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just been pointed to a recent post by Tim Marklein on The Measurement Standard, A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications . I can’t endorse it as it stands, as I understand it, and this post explains why.

For a bit of background, this summary of the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps is based on the one in my book, The Business of Influence , and is one of my post popular webpages attracting thousands of visitors every month ;-) Do check it out if the Scorecard is new to you.

Having been frustrated by the very narrow practice of public relations, by the plain wrong approaches to alignment and performance measurement, and by the seeming isolation of the PR function from the rest of the business at a time when its best qualities are more vital than ever, I sought in 2009 to crystallise my ideas to help organisations transition to a more relevant and mutually valuable model. Knowing that organisational change is hard, I focused on the dominant way some of the world’s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to tap into the monster’s own strengths, jujitsu style .

I called the resultant framework the Influence Scorecard , and I was delighted that Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned the foreword .

Recoding public relations

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Having co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that’s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR’s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.

I’ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I’ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn’t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying “that’s not PR!”

It does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.

21st Century public relations isn’t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply “communications” come to that. It isn’t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn’t a side function and it’s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.

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?

Introducing the hi:project

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The hi:project launches today. It’s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who’s monitoring our every action.

I believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization’s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :

How is PR changing and who's going to do it?

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a number of questions thrown at me by students in their dissertation deliberations these past weeks. I’m not going to post them all here as there is overlap as you can imagine, but this one complements nicely the Q&A with Phillip Casey (and here ) at Newcastle University.

[caption id=“attachment_29777” align=“alignright” width=“150”] Silvana Paules[/caption]

Silvana Paules is a post-graduate student undertaking a Masters in Strategic Management of Public Relations at the Higher School of Social Communication , Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa . (I took the main photo here on a trip to the Instituto Politécnico in 2011.)

Here are the answers I offered to some of her questions, and I start with a relevant extract from Chapter 10 of The Business of Influence .

The Chief Influence Officer (CInflO)

The incumbent [of this role] is charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organizational discipline – charged with executing the Influence Scorecard . They will be keen to network with peers in other organizations, to share best practice, to identify, refine and codify proven techniques, and to flag up unseen or unanticipated flaws in the processes described in this book [and others].

In my opinion, the role of Chief Influence Officer will be regarded as being on a par with the COO, as CEO-in-waiting.

Ideally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations – just the kind of trajectory frequently mapped out for ‘future leader’ types. They will probably have more experience in one or more of these over others of course, but will set out as a matter of urgency to orient themselves in the areas of the organization with which they have least experience, working hard to establish a thorough and lasting rapport with functional heads and all stakeholder groups. They will excel at interpersonal communication, inspire confidence and a can-do attitude, and know instinctively when to crack resistance one-on-one and when to draft in support from the CEO.

Given the not inconsiderable change management, collaboration and coordination challenges, boards will look in-house for candidates with extant strong organization-wide interpersonal relationships and a reputation for making change happen from both the hard and the soft side of things. Appropriate candidates will recognize that the task is not achievable alone, particularly without unanimous and unequivocal board support – which they will be intent on working hard to secure, if not already manifest by his or her appointment.

The candidates will be highly numerate, probably having taken a statistics or research methodologies component to their university degree.

They will be ‘digitally native’. They will be curious and indefatigable by nature, and able to identify and exploit opportunities as rapidly as they identify and learn from failure.

They will be comfortable living simultaneously in both the extreme, unrelenting real-time, and the future two to four quarters hence.

[…] They will particularly relish the harsh, unflattering light thrown on previously opaque and unconnected aspects of the organization, and the boardroom accountability this allows them to enjoy and demands they live up to.

"We called it influencing the influencers." Adobe. Late-80s.

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

In the 20th Century, the marketing department did marketing, the PR people did PR, and no job title included the word influence. To this day, no role or team or department in the typical organization incorporates the word, which is why I pivot my client workshops around the topic of influencing and being influenced – not only does it address the actual thing we’re all interested in, it helps lower ego defence and removes functional blinkers.

Learning to measure and measuring to learn

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR is in the process of updating its research, measurement and evaluation guidelines (PDF) . The current edition is dated March 2011 and harks back to when I used to chair the CIPR’s measurement deliberations; the current initiative is being led by Matt McKay and Martin Turner .

Here’s a short but important extract from the current guidance:

Every organisation should have a mission (why we exist), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there / achieve the objectives). Given that measurement isn’t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool in itself, a powerful way to align each employee’s day-to-day activities with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly.

People perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.

And as each marketplace is unique and as your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by.

Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q&A by Phillip Casey

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Having put my two penn’orth out there over the years I’m occasionally approached by students at this dissertation time of year. This week, Phillip Casey and I struck up conversation on Twitter. Phillip is a post-graduate student undertaking the MA in Media and Public Relations at Newcastle University (pictured) and his dissertation is titled Brand Image: PR in the UK non-profit healthcare sector.

[caption id=“attachment_29730” align=“alignright” width=“150”] Phillip Casey[/caption]

I enjoyed responding to Phillip’s questions, so, with his permission, I thought I’d make our Q&A public here. (It migrated to email in case you were wondering about a 140 character count.)

Where a reference consists of just a page number, it refers to The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age .

1) Is a strong brand image important for a non-profit organisation? Why?

A brand used to convey ownership of livestock. Then it was an “our name’s on it” quality assurance. This century, with product quality (defined as fitness-for-purpose) increasingly a given, a brand represents a nexus of values. If our values align with a brand, then I’m part of that brand. If they don’t, I look to take my time, attention and money elsewhere. [Attenzi ]

Organisations need to communicate their purpose and values in order to attract and assemble the right mix of people and resources to live up to its mission and pursue its vision. So brand, defined like this, lies at the heart of things.

Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The AMEC International Summit on Measurement played out in Amsterdam last week, and I tuned in from afar. On 18th June 2013 I published my thoughts on last year’s events in Madrid , and I’ll do the same now exactly one year on. Gladly. Gladly because I love the direction the AMEC community is going.

I don’t intend to repeat any of the substance and lengthy and valuable commentary to my post last year – which I just enjoyed rereading, thank you. But I have taken the opportunity to append here the Slideshare that accompanied my assertions and that has accrued over three thousand views would you believe.

Perhaps one of my responses to the comments on last year’s post is worth noting quickly, a response to Don Bartholomew:

I don’t think of myself as a member of the measurement industry for the simple reason that I’m not! Rather, my company is a management consultancy helping organisations benefit from social media and related technologies. Our purview is very much about business performance, about organisational alignment for brilliant execution.

It’s not about media

I believe the focus on outcomes in recent years is getting people to look up from media. AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not “of Media”, and I’d go further than that. Here are some of my core assertions of recent years:

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]

Employee advocacy – rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I described the relatively recent concept of employee advocacy in my last post as “rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced”, and I’ve been asked to qualify this description.

Firstly, it’s worth stating the obvious – the aspiration that employees might advocate the employer is hardly a new idea. But this relatively new desire to go about it more systematically is prompted by employees’ increasing social media activity. While recommending an employer down the pub leaves no discernible trace, doing so online does, and that appears to have internal comms, HR professionals and social media types hot under the dollar.

But here’s the rub. Genuine employee advocacy remains a consequence. That’s always been the case and will always remain so.

You can’t insist. You can’t take control of employee social media profiles. You can’t pick out people for failing to advocate, not without creating the kind of culture that’s counter to employee advocacy.

There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do .

The organization (a collection of people, mostly employees) influences the participating individuals (mostly employees) who influence those beyond the payroll. The culture and policies and behaviours that sway whether that influence is constructive or destructive play out long before Fred lets fly on Facebook and Tina trills on Twitter.

Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m no etymologist but it seems the verb organize appeared in the 15th Century a few decades before the noun organization . Sometimes we forget that the organization, in terms of the institution or firm, is merely a means to an end, and putting legal entities to one side for the moment, an organization is simply a group of people organized around a common purpose.

Reminding ourselves of such first principles is useful when considering how we might create and nurture new forms of organization and how we might improve the current dominant ones.

Jumping forward over 500 years, let’s get bang up to date on so-called social business, aka Enterprise 2.0 , aka Responsive Organization , aka Future of Work . The question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story exemplifies the new vista:

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?

The verb coalesce conveys the facility to combine, and so the facility to recombine, and re-recombine. The coalescence remains for just as long as shared value is created, and created faster than a new combination might afford. Such process appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And there’s equal appeal to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy.

Relationships

Sometimes I define social business as relationships at scale , and not just in the CRM 1.0 way:

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.

#PRredefined

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my recent post, The social business mutuality stack , I describe PR theory as the foundation for social business. (You might like to read the post if your understanding of PR is what might be described as mainstream – yes, PR has a reputation problem!) Given the import, I added that I’d joined a new initiative to kick the tyres of PR theory and make sure it’s fit for purpose in the 21st Century.

The initiative, #PRredefined, launches today and has a bold ambition – to stimulate and lead the way in new thinking about the theory and practice of public relations, and the first in the corresponding series of ebooks is published today, #PRredefined Vol I. (For Kindle and Kindle apps . Otherwise .)

The social business mutuality stack

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Can you tell by looking at a photo like this if it’s of a sunrise or a sunset? Absent knowledge of the time of day or the direction in which it was taken, I think not. Just as well I’m talking about both a start and a finish here then.

Sun-setting

First, the crap that’s finishing – that would be public relations as spin. That would be lying, or inauthentic manipulation at best. That would be attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone.

Enough has been written on this topic for me to hope that you’ll agree, or at least concur the trend is well established. As one of my characters in Attenzi points out :

If ‘perception is reality’ was the saying that characterized our approach to marketing and public relations before, we now have to consider that reality is perception.

Sun-rising

When I first learned of the excellence theory of public relations I was immediately attracted to it. What’s not to like? It’s constructed on the basis that we use communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders. It describes a management function focused on this two-way communication to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Big data. Big trust.

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with:

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.

As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.

Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.

Public relations

The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing.

Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.

Customer-centricity

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Customer-centricity is an organizational point of view, not a customer point of view. It’s actually the organization-centric-view-of-the-customer. … Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer?

Strategic Public Relations Leadership

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I learned this week about the Cockpit-in-Court , an early London theatre that stood where we find 70 Whitehall today. Apparently, it did as the name conveys host cockfights, although they stopped as long ago as the Jacobean times. The current building includes Kent ’s Treasury, built 1733-37.

I attended an event in Kent’s Treasury this week at the kind invitation of Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School , hosted by Alex Aitken, Executive Director of Government Communications, to celebrate the launch of Strategic Public Relations Leadership.

[Google books , Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com , Routledge , BookDepository , Waterstone’s , WHSmith , Blackwell ]

The vision we have for social business at Euler Partners is built up and out from public relations in its “excellence theory” manifestation (rather than the various flavours of publicity and spin with which some readers may be more familiar). It is a fundamental, and one that has too rarely contributed all it has to give to organisational success, and Anne and Paul believe the time has come for public relations professionals to step up to the mark. They cite the increasing complexity of the modern organisation as reason enough:

This context requires public relations professionals to be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness. This textbook provides public relations leaders with a framework to do this, as well as a checklist of essential capabilities which they must acquire and exhibit if they are to operate at the highest levels of any organisation.

I’m delighted to have provided a “product description” in Amazon’s terminology or, in the jargon of the publishing industry, a “book blurb” for the back cover:

The authors write “an organisation’s reputation is determined not by expert publicity programs, but the alignment of declared and enacted values as judged by those with whom it has a relationship.” If you understand what this means, this book will help you make it happen. If you don’t understand what this means, you should read this book. Given the compelling association the authors identify between public relations excellence and organisational leadership, it can only benefit your career trajectory.

An introduction to Web 3.0 for Social Data Week

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week . That’s well known. What’s less well known is that this is Social Data Week , and this facet of social underpins a lot of the stuff on next week’s agenda. Nevertheless, many people with social in their job description, from public relations to marketing to ‘digital’, are not yet fluent in the data foundations.

One aspect of social data that particularly excites me is the Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Web 3.0 describes the web as a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. It’s an awesome vision that’s playing out right now.

Share This Too

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since we started the CIPR Social Media Panel we’ve been a pro-active bunch. I haven’t got the stats to prove it, but I’d bet the panel is the most active CIPR group. We launched the successful “Social Summer ” sessions, developed Wikipedia guidance (subsequently adopted by equivalent organisations in Canada, Australia and South Africa), created CIPR TV , published the CIPR Social Media Guidance , updated the CIPR’s own social policy, published the CIPR Guide to Social Media Monitoring , and much more.

What, exactly, is social business?

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m kicking off #SCRM13 in London this morning. SCRM stands for social customer relationship management, and my role today is to get some energy into the room and, hopefully, encourage delegates to look up from simply slapping “social” onto business as normal.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what many have been charged with doing. Those with appropriate powers of persuasion will effect organizational change I’m sure, but more to the point I feel that more chief executives need to attend Luke ’s conferences, a sentiment I’m sure he’d endorse.

How dare they!

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

You should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.

This Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR’s Wikipedia guidance , published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)

'Masterclass' at Bournemouth University

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Professor Tom Watson (@tomwatson1709 , @historyofpr ) invited me to deliver a ‘masterclass’ lecture at Bournemouth University on Friday. (When asked about PR higher education in the UK, most people would mention Bournemouth and Leeds Metropolitan.)

Student elections were at fever pitch, and there was a real energy about campus. The students at The Media School were on top form – in fact, I usually only get the calibre of questions they threw at me days or weeks after someone has digested my book or a presentation. So thanks to everyone who attended and participated.

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.

GREAT (PR)ODUCT

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have asked six people with senior positions in techie professions who they thought “does great PR” in the tech sector. Now these individuals are not in marketing and PR functions, so you’ll forgive my casual turn of phrase I hope.

You might know I detest the idea that you might “PR something”, as if PR is as tactical and atomic as picking up the phone or putting a release on a wire, but I deliberately didn’t wish to infect them with my view of public relations excellence. I wanted to hear what they’d say unprompted, unguided.

Each proffered two or three companies. Samsung and IBM were mentioned twice. Google thrice. But out front with four mentions was Apple.

Now anyone who follows the world’s first or second largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization (it swaps places regularly with Exxon Mobil) will know that they’re actually quite a secretive bunch. Steve Jobs infected the company with the idea that it knows what’s best for the customer, and any idea that it should work with the rest of us in defining future products and services appears plain counter-cultural.

If you, like me, define public relations as pursuing mutual understanding to build goodwill , the PR function at Apple appears quite asymmetric. As and when it suits its agenda, they’ll tell you. Otherwise get back in line. End of. I always feel a reluctance on Apple’s part to discuss its contractors’ labour practices , its own environmental and business practices, and the occasional product mess up .

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World , the IABC ’s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it’s a publication for members’ eyes only, I can’t add a link here.

Do you believe it?

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The 2007 report from the Arthur W. Page Society, The Authentic Enterprise , identified four new leadership priorities and skills demanded of the Chief Communications Officer:

Leadership in defining and instilling company values
Leadership in building and managing multi-stakeholder relationships
Leadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools; and
Leadership in building and managing trust, in all its dimensions.

The report marked the beginning of a rethink at the Society that culminated last year in Building Belief: A New Model .

CIPR TV on journalism, PR and the Leveson Inquiry

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I hosted the CIPR TV show on the Leveson Inquiry on Monday. As you may have seen, I wrote about the inquiry for last week’s CIPR Friday Roundup, a day after the publication of the inquiry’s report – Public relations and the ’ethical vacuum’ .

Our guests were Michelle Stanistreet , General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists , and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to social business , and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with Jay Krall and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.

I’ve known Jay since we started following each other online several years ago now, and he took part in an Influence Scorecard workshop I ran in New York in 2010. His contributions were invaluable then, and London is better off for having persuaded Jay to upsticks from Chicago. And if ever there was a guy with the most fabulous radio voice…

Public Relations and the "ethical vacuum"

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility.” Newspapers have often demonstrated “a significant and reckless disregard for accuracy” and “misrepresentation and embellishment takes place to a degree far greater than could ever be thought of as legitimate or fair comment.”

I’ve just read the Leveson Inquiry , published yesterday and running to nearly two thousand pages. These quotes come from the forty page executive summary. For those of you beyond the UK’s shores, the Inquiry is about the freedom of the press in both the positive and negative manifestations of that expression, with a focus on how we can attenuate the negative.

The UK enjoys a pluralistic media of which other countries are rightly envious, and a free press is central to our national identity. The report quotes Sir Winston Churchill: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny … Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish … But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

The CIPR Friday Roundup +/- 5 years

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written, obviously, for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don’t believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup… to eleven recipients.

Five years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it’s gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let’s look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we’ve covered here for PR professionals.

Facebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively.

There was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves.

There was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that.

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.

Planning. Love it.

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s September already. How did that happen?!

As we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh.

But while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.

First up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January?

Who knows! Let’s face it, we live in uncertain times.

So having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway?

Too good

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid ‘ghost town’ claims .

For the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words.

FIR Interview: Neville Hobson interviews Stephen Waddington and me about Share This

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Share This , the new book from the CIPR Social Media panel and friends, is selling rather well indeed. Having shot straight in at number 1 on Amazon UK’s best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales & Marketing category.

Wiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don’t then register on the Amazon charts else I’m sure the book would be Amazon’s number 1 of course!

Gold

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

(Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .)

You’ll congratulate me for noticing there’s a sporting event starting today in London town. Too obvious then not to interweave some Olympic statistics into today’s Roundup.

It’s 2579 days (just over seven years) since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. The exact price tag is still to be totted up, but we’re looking at somewhere north or south of 10,000,000,000 sterling; four times the original estimate.

The hunt for a new universal measure – we will never find it

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The title of this post is one of my contributions to the recent PR Week video podcast on measurement where I was a guest alongside SpectrumInsight ’s Mark Westaby. PR Week’s Sara Luker was in the chair, and it was fifteen minutes of good conversation.

As I say upfront, I’m a bit more optimistic than Mark about the future of the measurement and accountability of public relations, if only because I have faith in the Influence Scorecard approach.

Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Update: Version 2 of the Wikipedia guidance was published May 2014 .]

I’m delighted that the first comprehensive guidance to public relations practitioners on engaging with the Wikipedia community is published today by the CIPR. Here’s the process we’ve gone through:

> Early January 2012 – The CIPR Social Media panel meets and recognises that current guidance is lacking (see my post of 6th January )

> Mid-January 2012 – PR Week’s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, calls on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely ("CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code ")

> January - April 2012 – The Social Media panel’s Gemma Griffiths leads the development of a first draft of guidance; “something to shoot at”

> 12th May 2012 – Neville Hobson and I take part in the Wikimedia UK AGM to call for their help in working up the guidance (see my post of 14th May )

> 14th May 2012 – The first draft is uploaded to Wikimedia UK’s wiki

> To 24th June 2012 – We collaborate with Wikimedians on more than 160 edits on the back of a discussion page running to more than twelve thousand words.

CIPR TV: Wikipedia guidance to PR practitioners to be published next week

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I swapped sofas on CIPR TV yesterday, seeing the studio from the guests’ perspective for a change. Gemma Griffiths presented the show and David Gerrard and I were the guests.

David is Wikimedia UK’s volunteer spokesperson. As you may know, I’ve been helping to lead a dialogue between Wikimedia UK and the CIPR to build mutual understanding, and specifically to co-develop definitive guidance to PR practitioners on how to engage with the Wikipedia community.

Influence - the use and abuse of the word in social media

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

The AMEC European Summit is taking place this week in Dublin. It’s a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC’s Barry Leggetter and the delegates’ enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it’s a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)

I’m here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I’m speaking in my own capacity… my slidestack is embedded above.

Q&A with Influencer Marketing Review

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally published by Influencer Marketing Review .]

This is the third installment of our ‘Q&A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q&A._

IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.

****Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)

IMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.

You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.

Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.

CIPR TV on ethics

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s CIPR TV addressed the topic of ethics, and ‘spin’. Joining me in the studio were Eliane Glaser, Guardian columnist and author of Get Real: How to tell it like it is in a world of illusions (Amazon , Waterstones ), and Dr Jon White, PR consultant, strategist, and author of the CIPR’s PR2020 report (PDF) .

It appears the world of public relations has a reputation problem. It’s almost schizophrenic, with one camp entrenched in persuasive ‘spin’, or perhaps publicity, and the other in working towards open, transparent, mutual understanding between the organisation and stakeholders. Max Clifford for example, whilst often introduced by the British mass media as a PR consultant, is actually a publicist; a distinction indeed that the Wikipedia community is able to make at the time of writing.

Reputation and Wikipedia, part II

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The public relations profession and Wikipedia community have not enjoyed a productive relationship to date; antagonistic may be a more accurate adjective. For a quick overview of this situation, do take a look at my January 6th post, Reputation and Wikipedia .

For my part, I think I understand both parties’ points of view and see no reason why good public relations practice (the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill) shouldn’t be employed to build bridges here.

CREWE

The Facebook group, Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement , has quite rightly stirred the pot, raising the profile of the issues involved. For those who practice public relations according to the definition in brackets above, Wikipedia can appear a frustrating community to work with. One asks: “Why, if I know facts on Wikipedia entries relating to my organisation / client are incorrect, can’t I jump in and correct them?” There are two answers to that, but firstly an update on that process of building bridges.

CIPR Guidance

PR Week’s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, called on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely, on 18th January 2012 ("CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code "). Fortunately, the CIPR Social Media panel had already got its heads together to review the situation.

Daily Telegraph article picked apart by Friends of the Earth in an advert in the FT

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I posted “‘Earned media’ is not a synonym for public relations ” late last night. One of the points I made in the post is that a PR campaign may well involve advertising, as odd as the application of the misguided Paid Owned Earned media taxonomy may make people think this might be.

And then I stumbled across this beautiful ad by the Friends of the Earth in the Financial Times today, literally identifying elements of a Daily Telegraph article they consider to be flawed or indeed down right incorrect. I would classify this as an attempt by Friends of the Earth to achieve mutual understanding with stakeholders; as public relations.

'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 Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.

Thanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.

PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in New York today at the PRSA’s Digital Impact Conference . In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I’m really looking forward to it.

And the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I’ve come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts…

First, most organisations don’t yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven’t yet wholly adapted to today’s social media and digital technologies.

CIPR TV – Mobile trends, tools and practices

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re in marketing or public relations you need to ‘get’ mobile. Period. So I was chuffed to be able to host a conversation on CIPR TV yesterday with Simon Liss , Managing Director of We Love Mobile , and David Murphy , Editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine .

Thanks Simon. Thanks David.

For information about upcoming CIPR TV shows, simply skip on over to www.cipr.tv .

PRSA, defining PR

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

And so concludes the PRSA’s Public Relations Defined (#prdefined) initiative. Launched 30th October last year, the initiative has garnered considerable interest, both positive and negative.

On the positive front, I have seen considerable interest from practitioners, predominantly but not exclusively in the US as one might expect given the PRSA’s geographic domain, grappling with the question of how to define what they do for a living with sincerity. No bad thing, particularly when some practitioners’ perspective turns out to be, well, a little far off the mark.

UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.

I first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a 2007 blog post suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I’m an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a Copyright Tribunal Interim Decision . [The square brackets below reference this decision.]

The NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, Meltwater . Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.

The result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision… do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.

[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]

Now the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)

Despite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is.

The PR agency is dead. Long live the PR consultancy.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

I delivered the inaugural CIPR Strategic Management Series presentation this week on the Influence Scorecard . We explored the future developments of social media, related information technologies and business strategy development and execution, all three of which are massively transformed in the past decade and a half, and continue to change rapidly.

And we discussed what’s encompassed exactly by the increasingly heard phrase, “socializing the enterprise”.

The following question, asked during the Q&A part of the evening, is perfectly formed to offer up a slice through the future as I see it: “What does all this mean for PR agencies?”. Let’s set the scene…

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:

CIPR TV with Howard Kosky on Broadcast PR and with Dr. Jon White on PR 2020, the future of PR

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

CIPR TV goes from strength to strength. As part of the hosting team, I had the pleasure this week to host an extended show – sort of a two-for-one.

CIPR TV is only possible courtesy of the team at Markettiers4dc , and it was about time we invited Howard Kosky, Markettiers4dc founder and chairman, on the show. Howard walks us through how the broadcast landscape has transformed over the past decade and a half, and gives viewers some tips for the top and pitfalls to avoid. In fact, when you consider the role broadcast plays in the public relations mix, I can’t believe we haven’t addressed the topic before!

Public Relations, today and by 2020

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m typing this post sitting on the front row at the CIPR’s PR 2020 event at Russell Square HQ. To my left, Stephen Waddington . To my right, Julio Romo . On stage we have CIPR CEO, Jane Wilson , Dr. Jon White , and ComRes Marketing Manager, Simon Thwaites.

ComRes annual survey

ComRes conducts an annual review of key market stats for the UK PR industry, and Simon is running through that right now. Interestingly, in light of the PRSA’s current Defining PR initiative, which the CIPR supports, only 44% of ComRes poll respondents agreed with the statement “My friends and family understand what I do for a living.”

Why the meaning of PR shouldn't be left to circumstance

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post specifically responds to a post by Eric Bryant , Director of Gnosis Arts , “an experience-driven public relations firm focusing on tech, social media & nonprofit PR” in the US. In the post, Eric addresses the PRSA’s Defining PR initiative (see my last two blog posts) and asserts that the definition of anything is simply a function of how the term is used.

He writes:

“We chose this definition because we think it expresses what is both essential to public relations practice, as well as what distinguishes it from other management functions. Our definition also takes into account what most PRs do, most of the time, in carrying out their job duties.”

And his company’s definition is:

“Public relations is the practice of producing publicity (excluding promotional materials and paid advertising, which typically fall under the purview of Marketing); managing media relations and communications (typically among members of the Fourth Estate); and managing reputation.”

First up, let me thank Eric for tweet-alerting me to his post. I particularly appreciate his diligent explanation of the definition, too often omitted by the more slapdash.

His firm’s definition melds two ‘what’s and one ‘why’, reputation, justifying it on the basis of Wittgenstein’s notion of “meaning as use” (ie, definitions are lent simply by the way a word or phrase is commonly used). While Wittgenstein’s approach to language has its advocates, I’m not entirely clear it’s helpful here, for two reasons.

Public Relations Defined – the anatomy of a candidate definition, ver 0.2

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]

Following the momentum the PRSA’s #prdefined initiative is achieving, and the CIPR’s statement of support , I thought I’d take a deeper dive into current definitions, and throw one in the mix myself.

I reproduced the section of my book that addresses the definitions of marketing and PR in my last post , and since then I’ve been able to have some insightful conversations, on- and off-line, with Jay O’Connor, Jon White, David Phillips and Terry Flynn.

Is it worth it?

There has been some valid criticism of the PRSA initiative pivoting around the question: shouldn’t we invest time and energy in improving practice to live up to current definitions than review those definitions we already have? The counter to this argument is apparent for those tracking the thousands of comments on line; it appears that more than a few practitioners indirectly criticised by those holding this point of view are actually questioning their own appreciation of public relations, if not actively revising it.

CIPR definition

PR is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.

My favourite definition, no word of a lie! I obviously love the reference to influence, but also the apparently unique and skilful avoidance (intended or otherwise) of communication, thereby emphasising the objective not the means. But when ‘reality is perception’, as is increasingly the case with the radical transparency lent by social media, reputation is built by everything an organisation does (or indeed does not do), not just what the PR team does; every one must be involved in “looking after” reputation.

Public Relations Defined – The PRSA invites you to help set a new definition of PR

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how the corresponding blog post by the PRSA describes its “Public Relations Defined” initiative:

As part of its mission to advance the public relations profession and professional, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has introduced a new initiative to modernize the definition of public relations and increase its value. As the digital age has caused significant shifts in how organizations communicate internally and externally, a question frequently asked by the public, media and practitioners is, “What is public relations?”

The PRSA explains the initiative in these simple terms:

Recent discussions, blog posts , tweets and mainstream articles have suggested that (1) public relations professionals (and, thus, the audiences we serve) continue to struggle with the question: “What is PR?”; (2) many industry professionals are unhappy with the current definitions; and (3) no one definition is considered “the” de facto industry definition.

What more justification do we need?

While my book The Business of Influence sets out to be a rethink of the ‘influence disciplines’, it starts by reviewing current definitions of marketing and PR. “Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we’re all at A to begin with.”

In hoping to contribute to the renewed debate, I’ve reproduced the book’s definitions section here. Now all I need to do is work out if the PRSA will be open to a definition leaning on the Influence Scorecard and the role of Chief Influence Officer. What do you think?

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 CIPR Presidential Debate

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I had the honour and pleasure of hosting the Presidential Debate on CIPR TV yesterday – the annual show giving the Presidential candidates the opportunity to set out their stall, and for members to ask them questions live via Twitter and the CIPR web form.

You can watch the video here and you’ll find the candidates’ election statements on the CIPR website .

Voting for the President-Elect 2012 / President 2013 closes midday Friday 18th November.

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?

Interview with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post UK

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently interviewed Carla Buzasi about her relatively new role as Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post UK . The interview went out as the middle part of October’s three-part CIPR TV episode, and the video below is set up to go straight to the interview. To watch the whole episode, simply skip back to the start using the YouTube player controls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqznzVgyY3Q&t=22m32s

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.

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.

Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup

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

We have a fundamental tenet in our Western societies – innocent until proven guilty. The problem we have now is simply that reputation pivots faster via the social Web than can be adjudged in the courtroom.

I have no idea whatsoever whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn did or did not rape or sexually molest the hotel maid. But he has already lost his job heading up the International Monetary Fund. His chances to run for senior government office are dashed. If he’s found guilty, then you might say all’s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where’s the “all’s well and good” in that?

This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.

And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I’ve been saying recently that ‘reality is perception’. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, ‘perception is reality’. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here?

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.

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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 ).

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone’s lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. Apart from that, it works just fine!

This summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC’s top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another.

Why? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps:

“Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…”

What does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment.

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.

Truth be told – Friday Roundup

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

According to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can’t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR’s current definition of PR does.

Despite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst ‘perception is reality’ may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders ‘reality is perception’ more appropriate.

But what is truth?

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.

Social analytics on CIPR TV – with Connie Bensen, Emily Dent and Marcel LeBrun

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Regular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation’s tool selection and procurement.

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.

The CIPR Conversation – a 1st

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR has just announced that it will be launching The Conversation this coming Monday, during its social media conference . The Conversation provides the facility to aggregate the best PR related blogs from members and non-members, in the UK and further afield. And it goes live under a full head of steam because The Conversation is the new face of MarCom Professional, the network I’ve been running for the past four years. Here’s what the CIPR has to say:

Money

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about money.

Michael Porter describes strategy as defining and attending to those activities at which an organisation must excel in order to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby create sustained value for its shareholders (or sustainable value in the case of non-profits).

Once you’ve articulated why your organisation exists (the mission), and what you want it to be (the vision), the strategy describes the what, who, how, when and where needed to pursue the vision, and specifically how these differ from the competition. How these help beat your competition.

However, as hard as strategy formulation is, the really hard part is putting it into action. The Balanced Scorecard Institute finds that 70% of organisations with a strategy simply fail to execute it. And this becomes the more obvious the further away from the sale / the product / the service you get; the more you get into the intangible assets pivotal to your success.

Marketing and PR are intangible assets. They are intangible investments. We all know that the right mix of the panoply of marketing and PR activities is essential to organisational success – to the successful definition of organisational strategy and its execution – but too often we’re not quite sure how so. This is most apparent when, particularly in harder times, marketing and PR are considered cost centres first and foremost, and cost centres that can be cut.

In conversation about the BP Deepwater crisis with Neil Chapman

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

Neil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years’ managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.

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 :-)

Real-time PR demands rigorous strategic alignment

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Real-time PR is a hot topic.

This is nothing to do with fashion, but the unavoidable pressures of modern PR. David Meerman Scott’s November 2010 book, “Real-time Marketing and PR ” is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and with Twitter responses frequently meaningless after an hour’s delay, if not minutes, and many conversations requiring a response within the hour or two, awaiting the Monday meeting to debate possible responses is now simply unrealistic.

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):

Thank you

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

Just over two years ago I posted about a ’lost cat’ poster stapled to trees in my neighbourhood, but a poster with a difference… this was a ‘cat found’ poster saying thank you to everyone who had helped recover the treasured pet.

Sometimes in business it’s too easy to think that the value exchange, where I give you what you want in exchange for what I want, is the be all and end all… the customer has the product or service they were looking for, and we get money (or other currency, like attention).

But every business must strive for a relational rather than transactional customer, moving the focus from the once-off purchase to the lifetime value of the customer and the network of friends and family he / she might bring with them; so emotion comes into it, not just economic arithmetic.

Moreover, perhaps the transaction doesn’t complete. I always check my shed to make sure I haven’t locked the latest lost cat in there – and whilst I wasn’t directly responsible for returning the cat in question above, I was thanked anyway.

Do you say “thank you”? If you do, do you do so in a way that’s believable? Authentic? Or in a “have a nice day” automated sort of fashion that communicates no emotion whatsoever and just constitutes pollution?

I have a hypothesis that only those that are passionate about what they do and what they sell can find genuine feeling when conveying their thanks. And I look for this enthusiasm when considering my lifetime patronage of a cafe, bank, web host and, well, everything.

Thank you.

Thank you for your attention, to this Friday Roundup and the previous 160 or so!

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

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:

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.

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.

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

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

I’ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK’s first Internet of Things conference, Internetome . Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.

Here’s my presentation “Marketing and Communications in the Internetome”:

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

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.

CIPR Presidents Debate

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

I enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR ’s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members’ questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen.

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!

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.

Friday Roundup – Goodbye AVEs

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Following establishment of the Barcelona principles in June this year and the annihilation of any idea that AVEs (advertising value equivalents) represent the value of public relations, AMEC (the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has moved on to ask two questions:

What are the “validated metrics” to replace AVEs?
How do you get started in measuring social media, and what are the definitions of relevant metrics?

This work is being led by the US Agency Research Leaders Group chaired by Ketchum’s David Rockland, and formed a significant chunk of the conversation at last week’s IPR 8th Annual Measurement Summit .

If you’re looking for one slidestack that walks you through the principles and explores the progress made to date in answering the questions above, check out this presentation: “Validated Metrics - Social Media Measurement”, delivered during the summit by Mike Daniels (Director, Report International and Chair, AMEC) and Tim Marklein (Executive Vice President, Measurement & Strategy, Weber Shandwick), and moderated by Peter Wengryn, CEO, VMS.

IPR Measurement Summit – Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations

View more presentations from Institute for PR Measurement Commission .

I think the work to date is most definitely going the right way; seeking to identify the desired outcomes of a public relations programme and working backwards so to speak to establish metrics that belie the programme’s success accordingly. And I was particularly pleased with slide 25 on influence rating / ranking which corroborates my recent contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, “the fallacy of the influentials ”.

This jigsaw is coming together. We will have some operationally sound frameworks available next year, and I’m hoping my own book, “The Influence Professional”, might make some useful contribution when it emerges from the publishing process in Spring. Whatever the timeline, you should have begun winding down any remaining reliance you have on AVEs by now. It’s not a case of waiting to transition from mediocity to good; AVEs don’t even make the cut as mediocre, they are specious, misleading and unprofessional. Period.

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:

Friday Roundup: Thanks for your permission

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for your permission to email you with the Friday Roundup today.

It’s been over a decade since Seth Godin published Permission Marketing and as the Wikipedia entry for the book and the term says, the undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. In short, if you have to interrupt me without my permission in order to attract my attention, then all you’ve done is distracted me from what I was otherwise interested in. And if you do that, you simply risk putting your brand on the back foot as a result.

I’ve been interrupted a lot this week.

Firstly there was the first episode of this season’s must-watch period TV drama on British TV (I know, but what can I say, I like them!) Downton Abbey has the perfect stoneware pudding bowl full of characters and plot lines, but it also had something else in abundance, and to a saturation uncommon for Britain, adverts. The Guardian was none too pleased either.

Second, how many of you enjoy those ads that take up your entire browser when all you want is the content? I’ve been counting… 9 this week.

Third, I followed a link to a video a friend said I’d like. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I do because I had no intention waiting for a 60 second car advert to show, particularly as I’ve just bought a car and I wasn’t interested in the marque interrupting me anyway.

Surely there must be better ways to connect marketers and content. I know the adverts pay for the dramas we love, but I won’t be watching any of the ads now; I’ll ’time-shift’ episode 2. Better four classy, memorable one-minute adds in the hour than seven bundles of hectic 30-second rubbish. I’d watch it live then.

And this all goes to show that I can empathise just a little with those poor journalists on the receiving end of so-called PR spam. Non-relevant interruptions to their day caused by the spray-and-pray practices of the lesser practitioner. If this matter concerns you, if you don’t want to be annoying the very people you hope to influence, do check out the Media Spamming Charter published this week by the CIPR, PRCA and IRS. If you know what’s good for business, do make sure your PR team subscribes to it and has the discipline to stick to it.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

CIPR TV featuring the High Priest of Publicity, Mark Borkowski

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Wadds and I benefited once again from the excellent work of the team at Markettiers4dc and another great guest this show, Mark Borkowski, MD of the eponymous Borkowski . Not exactly renowned for being a wallflower, Mark tells it how he sees it. We had some great questions submitted live via Twitter, and to be honest we could have chatted for twice the time!

My favourite comment relates to the attentiveness of advertising account managers to their clients needs. The quote won’t pass you by :-)

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 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.

Friday Roundup: Let's get emotional... a milestone for PR and marketing

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A very interesting thing happened at the end of July.

It affects every single practitioner in the public relations industry, indeed practitioners across all marketing disciplines.

And yet I haven’t found one reference to it amongst the PR digerati yet, so I’m going to put that right. Now.

The subtleties of digital

At its core, this digital world is just a set of 1s and 0s that have been applied with increasing sophistication and power. It revolutionised the more numerical professions first, such as accounting and engineering in the seventies, before moving through manufacturing in the eighties and retail in the nineties.

In the noughties, “digital” arrived big style in the lives of marketing and PR professionals simply because it arrived big style in the lives of the stakeholders we look to communicate with, learn from and influence.

My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg ! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit.

It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It’s this list you might visit when you’re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It’s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).

My browser history is mine. My wife’s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.

But whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.

Has your browser history been “sniffed” recently

You wouldn’t know.

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:

SEO changing up its game... it's called PR

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

My recent post “Where’s your brain at? Where’s your consultancy at? ” was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession’s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.

Well personally I’m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I’m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I’ve just found.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. “The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web ” identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity:

Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Do you ‘do’ search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who ‘get’ SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that’s how it should be.

Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening’s conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid.

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:

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….”.

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.

Your "Awesome Analytics Advantage" starts today

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the “Awesome Analytics Advantage”, making those organisations achieving this advantage “Triple A”!

Fundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases….

retail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!

Well, I’ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine , during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma ). My conclusion…

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.

How the Influence Scorecard radically transforms marketing and PR

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that we ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we’ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com .

This is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.

That’s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.

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 .

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.

Your website and how it would change if it had an "About You" section rather than "About Us"

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you) .” I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying “Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)” isn’t quite so catchy!

Think about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you’d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.

When you were tendering your PR contract, you didn’t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.

So, on that basis, why does your website have an “About us” section, or equivalent, but not an “About you”? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true.

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.

Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation

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

Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.

IBM’s awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text (“unstructured data” in the words of the experts). An analysis they’ve called “Phrase Net”. The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.

So I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto…

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.

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 2

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by not just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way .

After all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you’re talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.

My last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. For topical reasons I have another animation for your interest, but the main feature in this post is a call-to-action-microsite.

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.

Communication when you don't have anything to flog

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What a lovely thing to see at the start of the New Year, particularly this one! A photo of a loved tabby cat under the word “Found” rather than “Lost”.

And a thank you message to neighbours for the help they may have given in recovering said cat… I knew immediately that I’d take a picture of it and write a blog post.

Why?

Why did the cat’s owner feel compelled to go back to her PC, bring up the “Lost” file, edit to “Found”, print it, go outside and staple it to the tree? On the face of it, he or she obviously really loves that cat and might not have had anything else to do with her time… but that’s being cynical. Oddly enough, I now feel more compelled to check my garden and outbuildings next time someone posts up a “Lost” poster because I’ve been thanked in advance. I know someone really cares.

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:

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.

Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I received three emails on the back of my post last week “When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles ”. I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with “ways to get your marketing communications to the gym”, and that’s the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don’t waste your time with activity that doesn’t contribute to hitting those targets. They keep track of progress and get to know your strengths and weaknesses, literally, and often better than you.

In many ways, this is analogous to your public relations consultancy. As I said in my last post, your marketing communications is muscle and not fat. If you work with a great consultancy, this muscle will be toned and responsive to current market conditions and challenges (if it’s not, change it today).

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Times are hard. It appears that the people running our financial systems lost control. And whilst the pundits argue the difference between high finance and the so-called “real economy”, your investors, your shareholders, will be demanding to know how your board is going to respond to scenarios including zero revenue growth and revenue decline in 2009.

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.

Here’s a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods.

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.”

Your first job in PR... questions you should prepare for and questions you should ask in the job interview

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

You’ve just graduated and you’re looking for your first job in public relations. Your first interview is approaching, and you want to make the second interview stage, of course! You visit the company’s website, polish your shoes and get to their offices half an hour too early :-)

Now what? Can you talk about your approach to press releases? No. Can you discuss case studies? No. Can you describe the work environment in which you’ll thrive? Not articulately, without work experience. Should the interviewer really ask you any of these? No. So what goes on beyond the “Tell me about yourself” opener? How should you prepare?

Here’s my list of questions you should be prepared for, and the kind of questions you should consider asking. Actually, I’ve just made my co-directors a nice cup of tea to persuade them to contribute to this list too, so thanks to Blaise and Jay .

Questions you should prepare for

“Tell me about yourself.”

A gift. A lovely open question inviting you to present your best facets. If you can’t represent yourself in response to a question like this, then the interviewer will really wonder how you can represent their clients!

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 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?

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.

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing…

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.

Does your campaign measure up to search?

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you’re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.

Return on investment

The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia’s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia’s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client’s bottom line. “Creative” and “ROI” are not synonymous.

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….

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.

Foggy communications

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I’m used to analysing the difference between “winners” and “qualifiers”, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I’d forgotten about the donkeys.

I was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc ’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.

Nevertheless, I’ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn’t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all.

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.

Apple provides media training collateral

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What better way to communicate the DOs and DON’Ts in a media training class than by example. Here’s one for your training collateral. It is an extreme case; I mean how dare anyone mention Apple iTunes and monopolistic behaviour in the same question?!

Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing is featured being interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK.

The interview is brought to a rapid close when the interviewer asks “Are you acting in a sort of monopoly way?". Schiller can’t cope with this (whoops, poor media preparation) and looks to his PRs to intercept and take him away from this bad man.

Time

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I want to sound you out about time. More specifically, billing, prompted by a recent article in the current edition of Business Week.

And what’s happened to Business Week? I was so confused by the format changes that I decided to Google the reason for it, and we’re told the redesign is inspired by the design imperatives of the Web.

But, not being funny or anything, if I wanted Web I’d go to businessweek.com . Surely, if print is threatened by the big WWW, then differentiation is the key to success, not assimilation?

On the defensive with tech marketing

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When historians write up 2007, they will surely highlight three things. Of course there’s the subprime mortgage disaster and the reunion of the Spice Girls (a subprime pop group?), but my topic here is the mega marketing clash of the huge tech titans.

I’ve been in tech for some years now, but unless it’s a case of the nearer the clearer, I can’t recall such furiously fought marketing battles.

The last big battles, by popular concensus, were won by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s search. They appeared to trounce the competition, the first by anticompetitive practices according to the European Union, and the second by peer-beating capability. Do you recall an advert for IE or Google?

A press conference with one thing missing

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

FEMA External Communications… information for job applicants. Please check your answers to the following questions:

Question 1.

On calling a press conference, should you give the press…?

A. at least one hour’s notice

B. 17 minutes’ notice

Question 2.

If no press turn up, should you… ?

A. postpone the conference;

B. get your co-workers to stand in as journalists in front of the nation’s live broadcasting cameras.

How did you do?

If you answered “B” to all questions, please send your CV to the Office of the Communications Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 20472.

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.

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.

Public-Relations on Philip Sheldrake

The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle

Q&A with CIPR Influence magazine

What does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional?

"A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications" – a critique

Recoding public relations

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Introducing the hi:project

How is PR changing and who's going to do it?

The Chief Influence Officer (CInflO)

More questions of influence – size and complexity

Is influence harder to manage as an organisation grows in size?

"We called it influencing the influencers." Adobe. Late-80s.

Learning to measure and measuring to learn

Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q&A by Phillip Casey

1) Is a strong brand image important for a non-profit organisation? Why?

Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam

It’s not about media

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

Employee advocacy – rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced

Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy

Relationships

#PRredefined

The social business mutuality stack

Sun-setting

Sun-rising

Big data. Big trust.

Public relations

Customer-centricity

Strategic Public Relations Leadership

An introduction to Web 3.0 for Social Data Week

Share This Too

What, exactly, is social business?

How dare they!

'Masterclass' at Bournemouth University

Dell Social Media Predictions 2013

GREAT (PR)ODUCT

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Do you believe it?

CIPR TV on journalism, PR and the Leveson Inquiry

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo

Public Relations and the "ethical vacuum"

The CIPR Friday Roundup +/- 5 years

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

Planning. Love it.

Too good

FIR Interview: Neville Hobson interviews Stephen Waddington and me about Share This

Gold

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

The hunt for a new universal measure – we will never find it

Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners

CIPR TV: Wikipedia guidance to PR practitioners to be published next week

Influence - the use and abuse of the word in social media

Q&A with Influencer Marketing Review

CIPR TV on ethics

Reputation and Wikipedia, part II

CREWE

CIPR Guidance

Daily Telegraph article picked apart by Friends of the Earth in an advert in the FT

'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations

Incident 1

The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

CIPR TV – Mobile trends, tools and practices

PRSA, defining PR

UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications

The PR agency is dead. Long live the PR consultancy.

Reputation and Wikipedia

CIPR TV with Howard Kosky on Broadcast PR and with Dr. Jon White on PR 2020, the future of PR

Public Relations, today and by 2020

ComRes annual survey

Why the meaning of PR shouldn't be left to circumstance

Public Relations Defined – the anatomy of a candidate definition, ver 0.2

Is it worth it?

CIPR definition

Public Relations Defined – The PRSA invites you to help set a new definition of PR

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

Précis

Paid Owned Earned

The CIPR Presidential Debate