I've been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK's first Internet of Things conference, Internetome. Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.
Here's my presentation "Marketing and Communications in the Internetome":
Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that's changed relates.
The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.
Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.
If you're an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.
Now it's the end of 2010, it's the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that's you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition's. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference, in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.
And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I'd urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.
Hope to see you on the 10th :-)
Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Read more
David Meerman Scott's new book is out, Real-Time Marketing & PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.
I've been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I'm in the midst of helping them prepare for the launch of a gorgeous new app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android in November. (Ping me if you're interested in social news readers and I'll make sure you get your hands on it as soon as.) And part of that preparation has focused on the active listening capabilities and the workflow management needed to keep on top of the conversation and in the conversation. Thanks to the team at Nielsen Buzzmetrics, we have prepared all the search terms and we've made use of existing infrastructure to make sure the team understands who needs to respond and by when, as efficiently as possible without headache!
GetSatisfaction is procured and configured to tempt the world to hang out in 'our place' to discuss things, but no organisation can insist the conversation takes place in one or two places of course... it's our responsibility to be listening and helping and sharing and working together with customers in defining the future roadmap wherever they want to do so. Facebook. Twitter. Blogs. Forums. Email.
I've only just got my copy of David's book but will be sure to post a book review as soon as I can (the manuscript for my book is due early November so I'm just slightly chocker!) But I can vouch for a cracking few pages in David's book on Social Web Analytics... 'cos he quotes me :-)
Here's a video of David presenting about real-time PR, and you can get the first chapter of his book here for free!
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:
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.
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
CIPR TV is underway!
I co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with Stephen Waddington (@wadds) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC's Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR's 2011 President, Paul was never stuck for an interesting and articulate response to a wide range of questions spanning public sector PR, reputation washing, graduate recruitment and internships, diversity, the CIPR's response to the ASA's misguided stance towards social media, and his plans for the CIPR next year.
And our second advantage was simply working with the highly professional markettiers4dc team. Thanks guys for making us feel like we were in safe hands!
Bookmark www.cipr.tv and track #ciprtv too.
And join us again at 5pm on the 29th when we'll be quizzing Mark Borkowski on all aspects of publicity, how his work best integrates into the marketing mix, and his comments on the latest news, roaring campaign successes and, perhaps, analysis of when things don't quite go to plan. But I'm most looking forward to grilling Mark on the repositioning of his firm:
Borkowski has evolved into something new for the digital age - an agency dealing with brand truths and the empowerment of the individual, changing Public Relations into Public Conversations.
@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.
My slidestack is embedded here FYI, but before I sign off I should thank David Phillips (@DavidGHPhillips / http://leverwealth.blogspot.com) for his most pertinent and enthusiastic contributions to the discussion. He's a man who knows his PR and semantics for sure.
And it appears I may have achieved my objective. As @jonnystark and @Mark_Wyatt put it:
@Sheldrake thanks for the talk. Sat with @dewilded and still talking about it. [link]
@Sheldrake Many thanks for the talk yesterday. Really engaged and informative. Discussion carried on late into the night with @dewilded [link]
[Note: the video links in the presentation don't appear to be working in Firefox at the moment, but they do if you cut and paste the URLs into a browser tab. Odd. Investigating.]
The last time I was on TV it was the BBC's Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe's first email money service at the time (before PayPal was available in these parts) and our servers were struggling quite a lot under the weight of our success on eBay UK. Facing up to a firm line of questioning, I was able to reassure Working Lunch viewers that any money they had stored with us was safe and sound.
Fast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn't even launched until 2005, before going on to be the fastest growing website ever. By 2007, the capacity consumed by YouTube exceeded that of the entire Internet in 2000. In May this year, over 24 hours worth of video was uploaded to YouTube for every single minute of the month!
And now we have . Read more
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 :-)
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?