Websitenew-Media on Philip Sheldrake

The unfreedom of filter bubbles – let's pop the bloody things

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We could see it coming. Sort of.

I wrote a post titled myChannel back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded:

… mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. …The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel … and they own it. It is myChannel.

The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in.

The quantified self

The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).”

And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.

That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :

We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.

The quantified organization

Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ :

… a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.

Taxi! Hailing a ride, but not too far into the future

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The controversy Uber is causing right now prompted me to delve into the archives. Way back. Back to March 2000 when I was pitching a proposition called Peoplestaxi to the likes of 3i and Avis. It got selected for First Tuesday’s “Wireless Matchmaking” events too. Here’s a quick extract:

Peoplestaxi leverages the latest technologies and customer-centric e-business philosophy to deliver the ubiquitous, convenient and intelligent taxi management service for business and consumers.

Likes and dislikes of curating Social Business Design magazine for Flipboard

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

Social Business is such a nascent, deep and wide topic that I couldn’t do my thinking or clients justice without reading a lot. Everyday. So it occurred to me that if I’m taking the time to do this, then it makes sense to take a few seconds more to act as a filter and pass on the best bits to others.

I began curating a Flipboard magazine at the tail end of 2013. Flipboard tells me that the resulting magazine, Social Business Design , currently contains 210 articles and has attracted 128 readers.

Here’s what I like and what I don’t like about the process. Perhaps the upsides might prompt you to curate one yourself, and perhaps the Flipboard team might take note of the downsides. They do listen – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (@mmccue ) has taken the time to respond to me via Twitter, as have several of his colleagues.

I like

Flipping

I like the simplicity. Drag the “flip it” bookmarklet from the Flipboard website to your browser’s bookmarks bar and you’re all set up. When I’m reading an article I decide to flip, I just click the bookmarklet and a little window appears, just like this:

Why I self-published this time

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Having gone down the traditional publishing route with The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011), I decided for a number of reasons to try a different route in 2013 with Attenzi – a social business story . Most of those reasons boil down to one simple fact, the publishing industry isn’t yet embracing social business principles. In fact, it’s perhaps a prime example of an industry continuously trying to manipulate the application of 21st Century technologies to maintain the 20th Century status quo.

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.)

Destroying the web

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

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The Internet is the most powerful, flexible and critical infrastructure ever invented. Every aspect of our daily lives is supported by this wondrous invention.

But here’s the important thing.

We’ve passed the point where the fabric of our societies is supported by the Internet – the all pervasive Internet increasingly defines that fabric. Its architecture is becoming our architecture, and that is why any motion to challenge or change the way in which the Internet is governed must be subject to the most critical eye.

I’ve been on tenterhooks the past fortnight watching the deliberations of WCIT play out – the World Conference on International Telecommunications. WCIT is a UN body that has played a vital role over nearly one and a half centuries coordinating telecoms standards and interoperability and radio spectrum and satellite orbits, and it has tried once again to wrestle Internet governance from the hands of the open community that has shepherded it so beautifully to date.

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.

Who are you?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

Identity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.

And in between we have many shades of identity.

Nightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you’ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.

OK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?

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.

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.

Finally, Google adds social analytics to GA

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2009, at that year’s Monitoring Social Media conference, I forecast Google’s entry into social analytics in Q1 2010 . Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!

So here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:

'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.”

Future Vistas for SEO

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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.

When is a mobile a tablet? And more useful questions.

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“When is a mobile a tablet?” was the high level strategic question (that’s sarcasm) that I was debating with our CIPR TV guests this week the minute before we went live.

We decided the answer is subjective. It’s a tablet at the point you think you look stupid holding it to your ear. (Actually that’s not verbatim. We used a more descriptive word than stupid.)

Fortunately, the show itself addresses more important matters. For me, the most important morsel emerged during the conversation about apps, in particular the idea that today’s obsession with apps is just a moment in time.

Social Media Week – something missing

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[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.

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 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:

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 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.

Don't forward. That could be illegal.

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how The Independent reports on this week’s Appeal Court decision to uphold the High Court’s decision that customers of media monitoring services – which provide digests of news from websites run by newspapers – need licences from the publications involved, in order to avoid breaching their copyright.

And as much as this might surprise anyone who thought they knew that the Web is made up of web pages with unique addresses that anyone can forward, share, bookmark, embed and access – I’m afraid you’re wrong. In fact, I may have broken UK law by including the link to The Independent article without having bought a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA ).

[Note to non-UK resident readers: This situation is acutely embarrassing for us Brits and I’d appreciate it if you kept this quiet. After all, our current coalition government really wants the rest of the world to think we ‘get’ digital.]

You see the trouble is the Court’s are dealing with horse and cart in the age of the automobile. The government commissioned May 2011 review of the state of UK intellectual property law, the Hargreave’s report , concludes that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth. An unequivocal conclusion if ever there was one.

How data is transforming digital marketing

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

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

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

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

Big data

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

What does this mean in everyday terms?

Profiting from the New Web – the video

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I posted about the Profiting from the New Web conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I’m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we’ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.

The Web this decade and what it means for your organisation

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the 6UK launch back in November, with keynote by Vint Cerf – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired Profiting From The New Web at the Royal Society with keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?!

[caption id=“attachment_28121” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)”] [/caption]

I worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week’s conference, and we set ourselves this mission:

Discover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise.

Web Innovation

The term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content.

A component of the Web of Data, known as Open Data , encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage.

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.

Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I’ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.

I mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they’ve done just that.

Today, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it’s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I’ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there’s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory… particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I’ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.

I consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional’s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew

Groupon is bad for business – no April fool

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

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

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

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

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

Do Not Track

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

Today, I’m in Paris. I’m working with the Mozilla Europe team to prepare for the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and Firefox Mobile. And this prompts me to write here on the subject of privacy – a hot topic and one on which your organisation can lead, to your customers’ advantage and yours.

Mozilla is a global, non-profit organisation dedicated to making the Web better. It emphasises principle over profit, and believes that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.

This means that whilst Internet Explorer must justify its existence to Microsoft, Safari to Apple, and Chrome to Google, Firefox is only answerable to you. Many consider Mozilla to be the sole reason we’ve all moved on from the terrible browsing experience Internet Explorer 6 gave over 90% of Web users back in 2003. And now Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe.

Back to privacy. Do you know what information your browser is reporting about your browsing habits? Do you know that some high profile websites add as many as 100 tracking devices to your computer?

Now, lest you think this is some kind of hippy essay, I’m a capitalist. I believe the for-profit motive is the best mechanism we’ve found to date to improve life. But we’ve also seen in recent times that some free markets require a bit of intervention now and then; a spot of regulation. Indeed, a recent Business Week article identified how free-marketers are as fond of regulation as they are more widely reported to dislike it.

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.

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.

Ethics in PR Measurement

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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…

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.

CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn’t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won’t be verbatim as I wasn’t party to it, but it’s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:

_________

Marketer: We need an iPhone app?

Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why’s that?

Marketer: Because they’re really cool and cool’s where it’s at for our target demographic.

Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who’s the target?

Marketer: Teenagers.

Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that’s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?

Marketer: Oh :-(

_________

The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and ‘other’, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones.

Chairing the Internet of Things mashup

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, hosted the Mashup Event in London last night, an event focused on the Internet of Things. As chair I knew it was important to establish boundaries for the evening’s discussion, but the problem is… there is simply no sector or discipline that is or will be left untouched by the Internet of Things.

Fortunately, I could lean on an expert panel to shoulder the burden of picking out the topics, although I was first to take a stab at defining the topic: a network of objects beyond the ‘usual’ including:

the device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)
the electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)
non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and
environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).

David Orban opened the evening in ten minutes with a fast, furious, compelling and fascinating slide stack. He could have banged us over the head with ten minutes about WideTag , but preferred to situate his company’s endeavours in the bigger picture. Videos from tonight will go up on the Mashup Event website, but if you can’t wait, here’s a video of David in action at Momo Amsterdam a month ago.

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.

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.

Blinkx and you won't miss it - myChannel comes a step closer

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian’s article “Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal ”.

Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy ), and Miniweb is into “next generation TV” with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.

Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.

But that’s not the point.

Just over four years ago I posted a blog about “myChannel ” which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there’s 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels. Everyone has their own.

myChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources…

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

________________________________

You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

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?

Wordle - extending the fascination of a tag cloud

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

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

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

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching harder - search panel at Being Digital

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just watched Giles Palmer’s presentation on search trends here at Being Digital . His company, Magpie , is one of those I’m including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life… yes, I have one).

[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].

Currently Microsoft’s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world… 3D search if you like. He’s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can’t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that’s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn’t know if he’s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he’s pointed out, we’ve had the panel on location today.

Jeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft’s cashback search I posted about recently .

The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Win a free ticket to Being Digital conference courtesy of Taptu

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

Hi,

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

A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information

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

Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

Zattoo... live content TV broadcast on your PC

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at RIPE56 today and tomorrow. RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond, and RIPE56 is, you’ve guess it, the 56th meeting.

This week-long event brings together the best minds on IP networks, and I’m here working predominantly on the issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake. This is a complex issue requiring some deft communications.

Right now however, I’m in a very interesting presentation by Thomas Billeter and Fredy Kuenzler of Zattoo . From their website:

Internet Best Practice Challenge - recognition for your Internet leadership

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.

The six award categories for 2008 are:

Best development project
Best security initiative
Raising industry standards
Personal safety online
Internet for all
Open Internet

If you think your organisation, or your client’s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in ! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.

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

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

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

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

Spam free, social search

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

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

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

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

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

UPDATE

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

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…

Convergence Conversation: The 21st century classroom - opportunities for digital education

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

The second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education.

What’s being talked about?

Jim Knight, the schools’ minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access ‘frequently-updated information on children’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems’.

Here then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education.

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

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

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

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

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

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

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

OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007

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

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

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

Interesting stuff for a Friday

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)

Daylife

“Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.

Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:

Local Content For Local People

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

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

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

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

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

You're in IT

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

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

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

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

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

Graphic engagement

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

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

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

The first post

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just had a look on the members page and found that the Marketing Director of The First Post , Mario Tilney Bassett, has joined the network. From their website:

The First Post is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.

I wanted to post about The First Post simply because I’m a fan. I think it has achieved one of the best online magazine formats I’ve seen to date.

The new mobile revenue split

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

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

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

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