Category: Communities/Social Networks (page 4 of 10)

17 March 2011 / 8 Comments

What’s the ROI of social media?

I was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum. It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.

I sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What's the ROI?...

Of the latest rebrand?
Of the office refurb?
Of the internal communications activity?
Of the training and development programme?
Of the upgrade to Windows 7?
Of the new standard issue smartphones?
Of the stakeholder engagement via social media?

If you'd like to see where we went from there, here's the presentation:

The ROI of social media

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Thanks to Julia Lampam (@JuliaLampam) for the invitation to speak.

4 March 2011 / 3 Comments

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

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 :-)

Influence in the age of the social web

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23 February 2011 / 2 Comments

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

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. Read more

25 January 2011 / 81 Comments

Content – an illustrated history

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired, Mashable, @dmscott, @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format.

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish. Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC.

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu's brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare's homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don't know why we didn't think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what's taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it. Read more

13 January 2011 / 9 Comments

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it’s not

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: Read more

19 December 2010 / 2 Comments

Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas

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. Read more

10 December 2010 / 0 Comments

It’s all about curation

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. Read more

21 October 2010 / 3 Comments

In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK

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.

Robert emphasises the re-emergent role of the citizen, an idea that appears to have played a distant second fiddle to the consumer in recent decades. And if this rings your bell you might be interested in Robert's Citizen Renaissance project.

I was particularly interested in Robert's assertion that social media is about behaviour; it is not a "channel", and PRs who regard it as one are getting it wrong.

And Robert capped this off by giving us his four outcomes for PR programmes (as opposed to outputs):

Increase trust – referring to Edelman's annual Trust Barometer
Deeper communities
Driving behavioural change; of citizens, consumers, business
And ultimately commercial success.

Lastly, Ben Matthews (@benrmatthews) gets a big thumbs up from Robert, and my co-host Stephen Waddington (@wadds). FYI, they're talking about Ben's Bright One initiative (@brightonecomms), a volunteer-run communications agency for the third sector.

4 October 2010 / 16 Comments

The fallacy of the influentials

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:

16 September 2010 / 4 Comments

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

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.

I need you...

But now it's time to collaborate. I need your input, insights, experiences and assessment of the current state of affairs in marketing and PR. I'd love you to complete my research questionnaire before the end of September; it shouldn't take more than 10-12 minutes. I'm delighted that fellow Wiley author Brian Solis (@briansolis) has just retweeted the link this evening, and thanks also to @behindthespin, @markpinsent, @RussGoldsmith, @stuartbruce. Stars.

The ebook still attracts over a thousand downloads every month, and it's just about to break through 90,000. Whilst the second half, focused on vendor information, is now out of date, I'm pleased to say the first half still makes sense. Here's hoping I can match its success this time round, with your help!

Thanks. #inflpro