Philip Sheldrake

Category: Communities/Social Networks (page 6 of 10)

9 July 2010 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – is social media good?

Is social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I've been asked in my consultants' capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the BBC's Question Time? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it's simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme's fans as the Twitter backchannel has allowed us all to join the debate.

But is social media "good"?

I hadn't seen Stephen Waddington's post this week about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of "digital rubber necking" makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn't too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer's facebook page now has 17,000 members.

So, my answer? Read more

8 July 2010 / 0 Comments

One Web. Many social networks. Facebook’s Achille’s heel.

Facebook will die.

When it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook's prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!

But social networks aren't subject to the same dynamics as the 'irrational exuberance' that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of 'softer' issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and 'harder' issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.

Economics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called 'network effect' eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market's network effect first. But that's more ecommerce than social networking. Read more

8 June 2010 / 0 Comments

Making sense of social analytics

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.

And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are: Read more

4 June 2010 / 1 Comment

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

There's a bit of a 'first' going on at the CIPR... yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.

CIPR Social Summer

So I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life's hard. Read more

26 May 2010 / 2 Comments

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

The CIPR hosted a smashing event on Monday focusing on the impact of digital and attracting delegates from all sectors as well as a mix of in-house and agency.

I was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I'd focus in on the following assertion:

It's my opinion that the things people think have change haven't, but some things have changed that aren't yet widely understood.

Here's my slidestack and I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if Amanda Brown, Head of PR at First Direct is picking up references to her name and company name in the big ol' Wide Web, I'd love to be able to point people to your presentation... loved it :-)

How digital changes everything and nothing

P.S. If you like this, and you're in London on Thursdays over the Summer, you might like this.

14 May 2010 / 0 Comments

Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel... the Social Media Measurement Group.

Some time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure 'column inches', a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).

My disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.

Without a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone's defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign's success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X out of the press? "Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm....". Read more

9 May 2010 / 0 Comments

How social media might help put UK politics on the right track

Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK's first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.

But that doesn't mean same-interest groups aren't coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It's just that the majority of the British public aren't that engaged with social media just yet. And don't start with that "but Obama did it in 2008" malarkey... sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority "online" effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone's definition of social media.

Let's take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election. Read more

22 April 2010 / 2 Comments

The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain

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.

Got your attention?!

Thanks to the following for their time and attention last night:

15 April 2010 / 0 Comments

CIPR social media group and the Semantic Web

The CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I've appended here for your convenience. I'm delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting.

One of the first things I'm going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0. Read more

31 March 2010 / 6 Comments

Influence – The bullshit, best practice and promise

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.

It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!

UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I'm delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that?

Read more

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