Philip Sheldrake

Category: Social business (page 5 of 5)

15 May 2013 / 0 Comments

Attenzi – a social business story

Attenzi bookccover

My new ebook is out today.

I'm really excited about it because I'm excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here's how the book is presented.

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

The story is designed to galvanize the organization.

As the tale unfolds, you’ll consider aspects of organizational design, business performance management, marketing, public relations, branding, complexity, and the imminent empowerment of the individuals that make up any and all organizations. In fact, although you’ll likely be reading the book in a professional capacity, you’ll be noting the implications for your other roles in life too.

Perhaps most controversially, the story begins to explore the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated management thinking for the past two decades.

I could write more here, but I've been doing a lot of that lately, so perhaps I should just invite you to click over to the ebook now.

 

26 April 2013 / 1 Comment

What is social business?

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

I've been writing Friday Roundups for five and a half years and this is my last one. The circulation has grown from eleven to nearly eleven thousand, we merged it into the CIPR three years ago, and I'm delighted it's carrying on in their safe hands.

We have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render "social media" in font size 100!

Increasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name "social business", and it's increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

I've tried to design one question to both convey what social business might be exactly and to give the person attempting an answer real pause for thought in relation to their own organisation. I think I'm making progress with the following question, what do you think?... 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

7 January 2013 / 1 Comment

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

Econsultancy Social Media Management Buyer's Guide 2011[Originally posted to Euler Partners.]

We kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011. Here's a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for "buzz monitoring", and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and influence flows are the lifeblood of mutual understanding, knowledge building and decision-making. Maintaining technological islands for influence flows with one group of stakeholders (eg, customers) distinct from another island for influence flows with another group of stakeholders (eg, employees) effectively 'misses the trick'. It fails to recognise that today's organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll. Read more

6 December 2012 / 0 Comments

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision’s Media Research Supremo

Cision

The Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to social business, and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with Jay Krall and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.

I've known Jay since we started following each other online several years ago now, and he took part in an Influence Scorecard workshop I ran in New York in 2010. His contributions were invaluable then, and London is better off for having persuaded Jay to upsticks from Chicago. And if ever there was a guy with the most fabulous radio voice...

The webinar is now available on Soundcloud.

4 October 2012 / 0 Comments

This decade’s number one revolution

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006.

"Data is the new soil" said David McCandless in 2010.

In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner, said: "Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world."

I've long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it's the facility to work with data.

I'm asked increasingly often to define big data, in particular how it differs from the normal sized stuff. The technical answer is simply when there's so much of it that traditional data storage and database technologies aren't up to the job. The more interesting answer is this: data helps us answer questions; big data also helps us conceive new questions.

The Intention Economy Last week I was invited to the book launch of In Data We Trust (haven't finished it yet), a best-seller last year in the German language. This afternoon I'm meeting up with Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy (awesome), and thought leader on consumer / citizen data.

Last night I was invited to an event hosted by Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of RadiumOne and one of those chaps who has difficultly maintaining eye contact during conversation lest he misses something on his smartphone. His company sells a "Dynamic Audience Platform" that "combines first-party social interaction data with our patent pending ShareGraph™ targeting technology and 12 billion daily real-time bidding ad impressions to deliver superior results for the world's leading advertisers."

Got that?

Big data is impacting every aspect of life I can think of. Some might ask "even art?" And I'd say, "of course art!" But perhaps the biggest question remains to be answered – who owns the data?

Does the supermarket own your product buying data, or is that yours? Does the utility company own your customer data, or is that yours? Does your mobile service operator own your location data, or is that yours? Does Google own your search history, or is that yours? Does Facebook own your social graph, or is that yours? Does RadiumOne own your ShareGraph, or is that yours?

Or are there new ownership models?

14 September 2012 / 0 Comments

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme's guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer.

I think you'll agree the audience's questions and the guests' responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I'll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.

Read more

10 September 2012 / 0 Comments

Social media are the eggs in the social business cake

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning ... both an advantage and disadvantage.

So, we've been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we've been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.

Well I for one consider social business to be quite distinct from social media. Others use the terms synonymously. The lexicon battle is underway and it will be some years hence before the dictionaries document the victory. For now then, allow me the airtime to support the assertion ... social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

The video here is my take on social business.

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