Technology

After three months of social collaboration involving two dozen authors, we’re just a few days away from publishing Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR (Amazon UK ). The authors, all members of the CIPR Social Media panel or friends of, decided that that there was a need for a handbook that covers the full gamut of issues facing the PR practitioner in 2012. Incredibly, Lord Sugar provides the endorsement for the front cover :-) I’m delighted to have authored two of the chapters, Chapter 17 on real-time public relations, and the final chapter looking at the future, beyond social media. Here’s the introductory video featuring CIPR CEO Jane Wilson, and then the Table of Contents. Read the CIPR’s press release here . Pre-order your copy today! ...

[Originally written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup .] Public relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted. The way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse. The open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed. And what’s worse, the ITU won’t even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn’t used to public accountability. ...

Yesterday marked 150 years since the first ’trial ride’ on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the National Portrait Gallery in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery’s accompanying text is as follows… ...

http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed _code/12522700 The Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We’re expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I’m up immediately after the “Ask the engines” panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web’s development might take today’s SEO practitioners. ...

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 ...

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. ...

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .] This week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I’ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small. But there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that’s my term for it. I define machined media as content that’s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year’s CIPR Social Media conference. Machined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn’t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much. But semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup: Regular readers will know I’ve argued for some time that we’ve really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it’s the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a QR code , image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now. And yet in 2011 it’s probably still pertinent to make the distinction between ‘being online’ versus ‘offline’. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it’s just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you’ll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7. However, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we’re well down the line in moving from so-called ‘click and type’ interfaces to ’touch and swipe’. Think about someone just like you living a century ago… the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural. ...