Category: Digital Media Relations (page 1 of 8)

22 May 2015 / 0 Comments

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story, the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

... No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between 'doing' social (bolted on) and 'being' social (built in), and you know which one you're on the receiving end of in any given situation right? Read more

5 April 2013 / 0 Comments

How dare they!

[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.) Read more

11 February 2013 / 2 Comments

Setting the standards for influence

I'm a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I'm part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create "something to shoot at", and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we're an open and transparent working group, I thought I'd post it here too. Do get in touch if you'd like to tell me what you think. Now's the time for dialogue – particularly if you can't attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting. Read more

28 January 2013 / 0 Comments

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World, the IABC's member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it's a publication for members' eyes only, I can't add a link here.

Fortunately, Jessica has given me permission to reproduce the article right here, "A Measure Of Influence" (PDF). I hope you find it interesting.

The article pulls out one quote up front. At the risk of stating the obvious:

The best way to exert useful influence remains to deliver great products and services so that your customers evangelize your brand to friends and family, and to be a well-run organization so that your employees and partners evangelize working with you.

5 October 2012 / 1 Comment

Who are you?

[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?

9 July 2012 / 0 Comments

Reputation and Wikipedia

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]

What does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of Wikipedia's "five pillars", you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?

Let's face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn't the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia's potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that'll work. Not.

And yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there's the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.

This week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, spotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson's interest in Wikipedia and PR practice. He found Watson's contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page: Read more

14 November 2011 / 9 Comments

The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than ‘paid, owned, earned’

[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: Read more

25 October 2011 / 0 Comments

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

An interesting start to the day today... over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

I can't tell you what they are (well, without being retained by you anyway!)

Thanks to Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit) for being in the chair, and for Andrew Ross (@AJMRoss) for putting the session together.

CIPR Freshly Squeezed 25th Oct 2011

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.