Category: Public Relations (page 7 of 17)

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

8 November 2011 / 1 Comment

The CIPR Presidential Debate

I had the honour and pleasure of hosting the Presidential Debate on CIPR TV yesterday – the annual show giving the Presidential candidates the opportunity to set out their stall, and for members to ask them questions live via Twitter and the CIPR web form.

You can watch the video here and you'll find the candidates' election statements on the CIPR website.

Voting for the President-Elect 2012 / President 2013 closes midday Friday 18th November.

28 October 2011 / 0 Comments

What our publics are telling us

Public relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect mutual understanding. Right?

Well, from my experience, the vast majority of practitioners are looking to exert influence but invest considerably less time divining insight from stakeholders and feeding that back into the organisation to improve decision-making.

For the best part of this week I've been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what's going on in the minds of customers and prospects.

Miami beach ESOMAR describes itself as "the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide". With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members' contribution to effective decision-making.

This particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far...

Firstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in 'traditional' marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we're all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently? Read more

17 October 2011 / 0 Comments

Interview with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post UK

I recently interviewed Carla Buzasi about her relatively new role as Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post UK. The interview went out as the middle part of October's three-part CIPR TV episode, and the video below is set up to go straight to the interview. To watch the whole episode, simply skip back to the start using the YouTube player controls.

6 October 2011 / 6 Comments

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

I'm in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow's European PR Congress 2011. I'm the first session of the day so I have the challenge of exciting the delegates, with getting some energy in the room. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm from the audience when I presented last month in San Francisco, so it'll be interesting to compare the two.

Now, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov&Partners.Ukraine) that social media in Ukraine has not yet gained the momentum it has in Europe and the USA for example. She estimates that household broadband Internet penetration is just 26% [updated following the first comment below]. Interestingly, however, according to Total Telecom in July last year: "Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions... putting penetration at 121.2%."

Whilst I haven't been able to find a breakdown of feature phones and smart phones, the waiting staff in the restaurant this evening indicated that such devices are booming. In the car to the hotel I also noticed that Nokia is investing in quite a big outdoor advertising campaign here for its feature and smart phones.

My stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month's Dreamforce, so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it's more the narrative I intend to tailor for this event. The emphasis tomorrow is simple – Public Relations, as defined by the Excellence Study, has a very bright future. Read more

2 September 2011 / 0 Comments

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I'm doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I'm attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce.com conference and with 45,000 registered delegates this year it is now, or so CEO Marc Benioff assures us, the largest corporate tech event of its kind. There is a palpable enthusiasm for the theme, regularly articulated as "awesome" by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order: Read more

1 September 2011 / 1 Comment

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It sure is one helluva a show (and I particularly appreciated the Metallica and Will.i.am gig last night!)

The theme for this year's conference is the socialization of the enterprise and the reason for my invitation to present to the Executive Summit yesterday and delegates at large today. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Dreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

There can be no doubt that Salesforce.com is on a mission to help its customers make the social transition with as much emphasis placed on increasing the social exchange with employees and partners as customers and prospects, and this mission entailed the acquisition of Radian6 earlier this year.

When I spoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn't appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking. Read more

12 August 2011 / 0 Comments

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media... the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.

First up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: "... we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality." Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don't use.

I think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form... Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren't. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased... How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?

The primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can't blame social media or society's enthusiastic adoption of it. Yet this belies or at least underplays its influence in my opinion. I would never resort to such tabloid misrepresentation as when the Daily Mail labels one photograph of a London bus ablaze "Twitter riot", but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots. Read more

1 July 2011 / 0 Comments

Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup

We have a fundamental tenet in our Western societies – innocent until proven guilty. The problem we have now is simply that reputation pivots faster via the social Web than can be adjudged in the courtroom.

I have no idea whatsoever whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn did or did not rape or sexually molest the hotel maid. But he has already lost his job heading up the International Monetary Fund. His chances to run for senior government office are dashed. If he's found guilty, then you might say all's well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where's the "all's well and good" in that?

This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.

And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I've been saying recently that 'reality is perception'. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, 'perception is reality'. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here? Read more

Précis

Paid Owned Earned

Thinking or just acting?

BT's woeful social inadequacy