Category: Digital Media Relations (page 5 of 8)

Influence Scorecard update

Thanks

Whilst the volume of responses to the Influence Scorecard has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I've been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!

Nevertheless, I'm far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, "Thank you". And I'd like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I've added some reciprocal blog links...

Nielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest,  RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.

Questions

Where you've come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general... definitions and events. Read more

Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web

Larry Weber releases the 2nd edition of Marketing to the Social Web today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.

With a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”... he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.

Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard

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Last week I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard. The post was testing the water to determine the level of interest such an event might generate, and I was answered by dozens of emails, direct twitters, comments and even some direct editing of the post itself, as I'd hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)

I even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here...

Moreover, the interest was split almost 50:50 between Europe and North America, and it was spread fairly evenly amongst each of the required participant groups.

What is clear from all the queries and interest is that we now need to put some meat on the bones.  Here are a few top line thoughts on 'influence', 'scorecard' and what we hope to achieve.  Your thoughts are welcome.

Influence

Organisations want to influence the opinion and behaviour of their stakeholders. They do this via the various marketing and communications disciplines and approaches - PR, advertising, branding, community building, conversational marketing, direct marketing, events, product placement, public affairs, sponsorship etc..

Of course, stakeholders also influence each other and some will want to influence an organisation - how ready an organisation is for this dialogue is another matter.

Scorecard

The 'scorecard' is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as "business performance management" or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute: Read more

Influence Scorecard – defining influence measurement for organisational performance management

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When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:

  • Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
  • Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
  • Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives. Read more

What's the difference between the social web and social media?

social

I've been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the "Social Web" and not "Social Media". In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:

  • "social web analytics" - Google estimates 18,600 results
  • "social media analytics" - Google estimates 20,100 results

Interestingly, however, the term "social media" attracts more than twice the search count estimate as "social web":

  • "social web" - Google estimates 8,250,000 results
  • "social media" - Google estimates 19,700,000 results

So what's going on? What is social media?

Social media is a subset of the social web. Read more

Influence… it's a numbers game

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday "Where are the PR Numerati?" (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he's right and I'm numerate and I'm in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book "The Numerati" by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don't mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence.  The best PR professionals will: Read more

Where the social Web goes from here

It's good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics: “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter-fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed, you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal. Read more

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

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!

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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. Read more

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics – vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I'm being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn't know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July.  They're keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year.  The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I'm sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as 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. Here's a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling "organizations to know what's being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy's SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time." Read more

Can you see it? Making influence visible.

There's a revolution coming in public relations... visualisation.

[Courtesy Christopher Baker]

Picture the scene

You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the  positive networking such an event should catalyse. You're also aware of a few potential personality clashes.  But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?

It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there's 300 relationships in that room!  Wow,  and compared to the big 'World Wide Web', or the even bigger 'World' come to that, this is a relatively  insignificant number of people.

Let's go a step further. Say that there's just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has  just three positions, say "for", "against" and "no position", then each stakeholder can have one of 243  combinations of points of view.

To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?

Welcome to the world of data visualisation. Read more