Category: Public Relations (page 15 of 17)

28 November 2008 / 0 Comments

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

7 November 2008 / 1 Comment

Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times

I received three emails on the back of my post last week "When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles". I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with "ways to get your marketing communications to the gym", and that's the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don't waste your time with activity that doesn't contribute to hitting those targets. They keep track of progress and get to know your strengths and weaknesses, literally, and often better than you.

In many ways, this is analogous to your public relations consultancy. As I said in my last post, your marketing communications is muscle and not fat. If you work with a great consultancy, this muscle will be toned and responsive to current market conditions and challenges (if it’s not, change it today). Read more

31 October 2008 / 0 Comments

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating – or why the tough need muscles

Times are hard. It appears that the people running our financial systems lost control. And whilst the pundits argue the difference between high finance and the so-called "real economy", your investors, your shareholders, will be demanding to know how your board is going to respond to scenarios including zero revenue growth and revenue decline in 2009.

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.

Here's a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods. Read more

5 September 2008 / 0 Comments

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

29 August 2008 / 0 Comments

Your first job in PR… questions you should prepare for and questions you should ask in the job interview

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You’ve just graduated and you’re looking for your first job in public relations. Your first interview is approaching, and you want to make the second interview stage, of course! You visit the company’s website, polish your shoes and get to their offices half an hour too early :-)

Now what? Can you talk about your approach to press releases? No. Can you discuss case studies? No. Can you describe the work environment in which you’ll thrive? Not articulately, without work experience. Should the interviewer really ask you any of these? No. So what goes on beyond the “Tell me about yourself” opener? How should you prepare?

Here’s my list of questions you should be prepared for, and the kind of questions you should consider asking. Actually, I’ve just made my co-directors a nice cup of tea to persuade them to contribute to this list too, so thanks to Blaise and Jay.

Questions you should prepare for

“Tell me about yourself.”

A gift. A lovely open question inviting you to present your best facets. If you can’t represent yourself in response to a question like this, then the interviewer will really wonder how you can represent their clients! Read more

19 August 2008 / 2 Comments

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

1 August 2008 / 0 Comments

The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that's almost Google's raison d'etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)?

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Google's highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website's content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.

This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.

But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? Read more

2 June 2008 / 0 Comments

The B2B Social Web – B2B video programming

My last post described the first half of my interview with Ecommerce Times. The second half of our interview focused on B2B video programming, or what the publication described as TV Media Relations. B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in...

Forget "Pop Idol" and "The Apprentice", B2B programming is the new hot programming. We're within sight of bespoke TV shows dedicated to your industry, your profession. Coming to a screen near you, a whole raft of new productions with names like Logistics Insights Live, The Coronary Care Beat, Patent Law Update, IT Compliance Bulletin.

But where is this "screen near you"? What is TV?

30 May 2008 / 0 Comments

The B2B Social Web – my interview with the Ecommerce Times

The B2B Social Web has arrived and it's not going to go away.

I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here's the first half of our conversation...

1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?

If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others' regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.

MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.

2) What major trends should my readers know about?

The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc. Read more

7 March 2008 / 0 Comments

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R's are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. "Radio" and "TV" over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing... Read more