Technology

I first published this overview back in 2004. I’m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it’s interesting. No seriously, it is. When is a web page secure? Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts “https://” rather than “http://”. Saying that, this doesn’t mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you’re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design. If you’d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here: ...

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. ...

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. ...

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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post “Influence: From BS to Best Practice ” set the scene nicely. At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS . In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman’s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics: RT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? <– Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what’s acceptable to them!? #measurepr At Shonali’s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today… ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...