[{"content":"\nWe’ve reached an uncanny milestone in tech. We are building intimate conversational bonds with AI chatbots, yet the software infrastructure surrounding our daily lives remains as rigid, silent, and fragile as ever.\nLLMs tease us with their facilities to write code, but forcing this new form of intelligence to work with programming paradigms that pre-date the World Wide Web is driving a silent crisis of structural decay in large-scale software systems.\nThis post introduces the Software 4.0 era. Informed by biological processes, it turns software into a living, self-verifying organism that provides the perfect complement to LLMs. It transforms how we build and co-evolve the digital fabric of our world.\nThe state of the art in AI-assisted software development is both phenomenally exciting and deeply frustrating. Some would say alarming, or as one Chief Security Architect put it recently:\nWhat we’re going through today with AI is bananas.\nSoftware development could well be the largest commercial workload for frontier AI labs. While the companies don\u0026rsquo;t disclose detailed revenue breakdowns, an April 2026 analysis found that 34% of LLM usage was devoted to software coding tasks — more than any other category.\nThe demand is clearly there. Nevertheless, perhaps the simplest description of where we find ourselves might just be: so near and yet so far.\nI have just co-authored a paper on the topic with my friend and colleague Dirk Scheffler. We describe a superior way to bring human and artificial intelligences together when it comes to developing, maintaining, and revising the software in our world. As every single one of us is impacted by both AI and all that software, and as the paper itself requires a reasonably high degree of specialist knowledge, I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post to talk about it in a way that\u0026rsquo;s far more accessible to a far greater number of people.\nMy goal is to help you understand the gist of things. Ideally, you\u0026rsquo;ll come away with sufficient grasp to share the core ideas with others, whether on a conference panel, in a team meeting, or over dinner — if this is your idea of scintillating conversation.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to answer the following questions just as briefly as I can while still ensuring this post makes sense.\nWhat is meant by artificial intelligence (AI)? What are large language models (LLMs)? What is software development? How has software development changed in recent years? What\u0026rsquo;s the problem? What is Software 4.0? I finish by describing our technology — a work in progress — and how this shifts things for everyone .\nWhat is meant by artificial intelligence (AI)? To understand why the future of software is changing, we first have to distinguish between two completely different types of artificial intelligence.\nThink of Symbolic AI as the pedantic engineer. This type of AI represents knowledge explicitly using structured rules, concepts, and logic. Instead of just running conventional code like your phone runs its apps, a Symbolic AI can actually reason through complex problems, deduce new facts from clues, and explain its chain of logic step-by-step. Being reliant upon rigid, pre-defined rules, it has the advantage of being fully deterministic, transparent, and auditable, but is less suited to the fluid, pattern-rich ambiguity of natural language and perception.\nThink of Neural AI as the creative artist. This is modern machine learning, and it\u0026rsquo;s what the popular press actually means right now when talking simply about \u0026ldquo;AI\u0026rdquo;. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t use pre-written logical rules or concepts but excels at statistical pattern recognition. It learns by looking at millions of examples until it gets a fluid \u0026lsquo;feel\u0026rsquo; for things. It is accomplished at recognising a human face, translating languages, creating many kinds of images, and of course AI chatbots, but it deals entirely in probabilities and mathematical guesses, not absolute certainties or logical truths.\nWhat are large language models (LLMs)? Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek) belong entirely to the Neural AI family. As they can write fluent essays, pass medical exams, and argue points of philosophy, we humans naturally assume they possess immense intellect. But the most important thing to understand is that LLMs don’t actually know anything at all.\nLLMs do not possess a mental model of reality, nor do they understand facts, logic, or truth. At their core, LLMs are incredibly advanced, multi-billion-dollar versions of the autocomplete feature on your smartphone. Based on the patterns they observe in trillions of sentences written by us humans, they simply calculate a mathematical guess as to which word should come next.\nYou can think of LLMs as massive curators, compressors, and pattern finders operating over much of humanity\u0026rsquo;s digitally recorded knowledge and expression.\nThey map words to other words, not words to reality.\nWhat is software development? Conventional software is the absolute opposite of an LLM\u0026rsquo;s guessing game. Software belongs to the land of determinism — which is a very good part of the reason we became very fond of software in the first place and why it\u0026rsquo;s now to be found everywhere.\nDeterminism means that a system\u0026rsquo;s actions are entirely fixed and predictable. If a human clicks a button in an app, the computer must execute the exact corresponding piece of software code and update the user interface accordingly every single time, without exception. There\u0026rsquo;s zero room for the software to come back with something like, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m 90% sure this is how you log in today.\u0026rdquo;\nThis demand for certainty makes the human process of software development incredibly intense. Typing the actual code is only a small fraction of the job. Most of the software engineering effort is spent building a detailed mental model of the system\u0026rsquo;s purposes and contexts and getting that down in some form on which everyone can agree, and then designing the shape of the software, and then, yes, writing lines of code. Engineers have to map out how data flows through an invisible web, anticipating for example how a tiny change on line 5,233 of one piece of the software might accidentally cause a catastrophic crash in another piece. It requires total structural discipline.\nHow has software development changed in recent years? Now that we\u0026rsquo;re looking back, we can refer to the first era of software as Software 1.0. There was a brief flirtation with the idea that neural forms of AI might simply replace conventional software. Dubbed Software 2.0 , it transformed specific domains but never replaced the broad landscape of software development.\nOver the last few years, we have instead handed over more and more of the task of writing software code to LLMs, a development attracting the moniker of Software 3.0 . We describe it as having moved through three eras:\nSoftware 3.0 — The Suggestion Box: An LLM acts like a simple assistant. You ask it for a block of code and it types it out for you. It feels magical at first, but because the AI is just guessing words, it frequently hallucinates fake computer commands or leaves typos in the text. It\u0026rsquo;s left to software engineers to look through the code manually to find the bugs and fix them. The phrase vibe coding was coined at this time, coming to imply a blind faith in the output.\nSoftware 3.1 — The Automated Tester: It was soon realised that LLMs need feedback to be useful. In this era, engineers connected the language models directly to code-testing tools. Now, when the model generates code, the testing tools leap into action. If the program fails any of the tests, the tools pass the error messages back to the model so it can have another go. This is a massive upgrade because the LLM can clean up its own basic errors before a human might ever see them.\nSoftware 3.2 — The AI Committee: This is the current state of the art. As software projects are too big for one LLM, we now wrap the language model inside a massive engineering framework. First, we essentially stuff the LLM\u0026rsquo;s short-term memory with a textbook of custom background information before it writes a single word — a process known as context engineering. Second, we build a detailed automated pipeline where teams of different AIs pass code back and forth, reviewing, testing, and boxing each other in until the system forces a finished product. This arrangement is known as a programmable harness.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the problem? If you read many of today\u0026rsquo;s popular headlines, it sounds as if AI coding is completely solved. Many frontier labs offer their own coding tools. Relatively new companies such as Replit and Lovable enable anyone to build beautiful, functioning web apps in a matter of minutes just by describing what they want in plain English. It looks at least as if it\u0026rsquo;s working flawlessly, and indeed the underlying problems might not matter greatly for a throw-away prototype or personal website.\nBut when anyone tries to build massive, heavy-duty enterprise systems, things break catastrophically. Here are three root causes:\nNo World Model or Grounding: Because the AI committee is just passing text blocks back and forth, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually \u0026lsquo;see\u0026rsquo; or understand the digital architecture it\u0026rsquo;s creating. It can\u0026rsquo;t assess its suitability for the world in which it will operate because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t understand that world. It has no anchor (or grounding) in the living reality of the running program.\nInsufficient Breadth and Depth: Complex software can enter millions of unpredictable states. A neural AI simply cannot anticipate or handle the breadth and depth of the system, no matter how much paraphernalia we surround it with. In the lexicon, we say it lacks the requisite variety.\nThe Wrong Tool: Fundamentally, today\u0026rsquo;s programming languages — e.g. Python, Java, Rust — were designed by humans, for humans. They were meant for human eyes to read and human fingers to type and, importantly, relied on human brains to maintain some of the contextual understanding. Forcing a fluid, probabilistic neural AI to do its thing by typing out thousands of lines of rigid text files is a fundamental mismatch. It\u0026rsquo;s like inviting a brilliant artist to build a highly complicated Swiss watch using a paintbrush.\nWhat happens when an AI committee builds a large software system this way? As the combination of LLM and harness gubbins is so good at writing text that looks convincing and is, importantly, designed to pass the tests, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t trigger the alarms. Nevertheless, it\u0026rsquo;s stacking statistical guesses on top of statistical guesses, and the software is developing deep, silent structural decay.\nGiven the size of these systems, the decay can take months and perhaps years to become apparent. Eventually, an engineer takes a look under the hood, takes a deep breath, and asks for a strong cup of coffee. The system has become a fragile, indecipherable jumble that\u0026rsquo;s primed to collapse under its own weight. If the engineering team puts off the inevitable, users will soon be on the receiving end, which is never good for business.\nUltimately, we consider this to be a software problem, not an LLM problem. We are going about software in a way that\u0026rsquo;s incompatible with the phenomenal talents of large language models.\nWhat is Software 4.0? We have to stop forcing LLMs to adopt a plainly unsuitable paradigm. We need a new paradigm, and with astonishing creative ingenuity we decided to call this era Software 4.0.\nWhen looking for a way to maintain order within a messy, changing environment, we look at the work of what you might call the ultimate engineer — Mother Nature. Living organisms don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026lsquo;do code\u0026rsquo; the way conventional software development does, yet they manage to survive and maintain their structure brilliantly.\nHere are four core biological principles that influence our work deeply:\nSelf-production: Living cells continuously produce both their own internal components and the membrane boundary that separates them from the outside world. These processes prevent cells, organs, and organisms from dissolving into chaos. Biologists refer to this self-production as autopoiesis.\nAnticipation: More complex living systems — including us — constantly build internal expectations about their environment so they can adapt appropriately to both opportunities and threats.\nResilience: Your body automatically shifts its internal systems — such as your heart rate or body temperature — to absorb external shocks and stay alive.\nProtective Memory: Your immune system retains a record of past infections, allowing it to mount a faster, stronger response the next time without starting from scratch.\nThese four biological dynamics exhibit a completely different architecture from the flat, dead text files of conventional software. To make a software system truly self-reflective, self-regulating, self-producing — to make it life-like like this — it must be envisaged as a strange loop.\nCoined by the cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter, a strange loop occurs when you move through the layers of a hierarchical system and find that the top level and the bottom level are engaged in a cycle of mutual creation. Think of M.C. Escher’s famous drawing of two hands , where each hand is actively drawing the other into existence. In fact, the idea of \u0026lsquo;up\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;down\u0026rsquo; implicit to the idea of a hierarchy starts to look a bit silly; the more accurate terminology is heterarchy.\nFar from being an abstract novelty, this looping serves a profound engineering purpose. Here\u0026rsquo;s an example snapshot of this never-ending looping in our Software 4.0 contexts:\nThe humans\u0026rsquo; high-level goals shape this new form of software,\nAnd these intents and the software’s native rules prompt, shape, and constrain the LLM’s next contribution directly,\nAnd that contribution prompts the human to restate an intent in dialogue with the LLM,\nWhich then collaborates with this new form of software to instantiate a corresponding change,\n\u0026hellip; and so on and so forth.\nAs the channels of communication continuously cross and cross-check one another, the system doesn\u0026rsquo;t just run static code — it is an unbroken circuit constantly observing, validating, and reshaping its own internal reality in real time. It allows a fluid, unpredictable neural AI to safely rewrite and help co-evolve a heavy-duty enterprise system in real time, without the risk of structural collapse.\nIn our manifestation of Software 4.0, this new form of software is called supersoftware. Think of supersoftware as software that is itself symbolic AI. LLMs and supersoftware play to each other\u0026rsquo;s strengths and make up for each other\u0026rsquo;s weaknesses — the ideal collaboration, naturally.\nIn the lexicon, the combination of supersoftware and LLM is said to form constitutively coupled neurosymbolic AI.\nThe software development eras and paradigms\nEra Paradigm Mode Source of intelligence 1.0 traditional software instructions source code 2.0 neural AI parameters model weights 3.0 the suggestion box prompts weights + short-term memory 3.1 the automated tester agent feedback loops weights + external testing tools 3.2 the AI committee optimised pipelines weights + structured engineering harness 4.0 supersoftware strange loop life-like system Recognitive — the programming language designed for LLMs Traditional software, however beautifully written, is essentially a silent instruction manual — it simply tells a machine what to do. It cannot explain itself to anyone or anything else reading it from the outside. Data, configuration settings, error messages, business rules, and interface definitions are all packaged and transmitted in a cacophony of bespoke and incompatible formats.\nNature solved problems such as these aeons ago. Therefore, the design and development of a programming language we call Recognitive is directly informed by nature\u0026rsquo;s mastery — it\u0026rsquo;s the language in which supersoftware is expressed.\nRecognitive is different in kind. Every component of a supersoftware system continuously declares what it is, what it can do, what it expects, and what it guarantees — not as a separate document that might be out of date by Tuesday, but as a living property of the structure itself.\nFollowing nature\u0026rsquo;s lead, Recognitive uses a single unified structural format through which everything travels. Data, logic, errors, configuration, and behaviour, all speak the same structural tongue. The Recognitive language provides the equivalent to nature\u0026rsquo;s universal genetic code, while the specific application authored within it acts as the DNA blueprint. To translate this blueprint into action, the platform uses a universal communication standard that acts like a cell\u0026rsquo;s ribosome — the molecular engine that reads the genetic code and projects its reality into the living cell. These encoded instructions are finally enacted as a living, functioning digital organism — supersoftware.\nFor an LLM, this environment is heaven-sent. Rather than navigating a fragmented Tower of Babel, it engages with a system that expresses its entire living reality in one coherent, readable form. The supersoftware has a sense of itself, represents itself, and can govern and modify itself. The LLM doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to fall back on committee conversation to guess at blind architecture.\nThe entire dynamic changes. Much like the human brain delegates autonomic reflexes and motor coordination to the cerebellum, the LLM is freed from managing low-level execution. Importantly, it\u0026rsquo;s not off-loaded to something extraneous to the software, but to the software itself.\nThe LLM simply expresses its creative, probabilistic intentions — acting as the system\u0026rsquo;s cortex — and supersoftware translates that intent into a deterministic, structural shape in real time. And in actual fact, the LLM only expresses sub-intents because the ultimate intelligence in the mix — and the one setting the top-level intents — remains strictly human, driven by the wisdom, strategic vision, and lived experiences of domain experts and software engineers.\nThe supersoftware layer acts like the cellular membrane for that specific application. If the LLM makes a creative leap that threatens the system, this structural boundary makes that action impossible to execute. This turns verification from a test you run after the fact into a live built-in safeguard.\nAnd if that wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough, the way in which supersoftware presents itself is far easier for LLMs to grapple with than software written in traditional programming languages. As the LLM doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to waste immense computational energy trying to decipher hidden connections or translate messy, fragmented code and structures, the entire relationship becomes drastically faster, cleaner, and cheaper.\nHow things shift for everyone The impact of this technology will ripple far and wide. It will fundamentally rewrite the rules of how we work, how we think about companies and other forms of organising, and how we interact with and through the digital fabric of our world. Importantly, given its natural heritage, we\u0026rsquo;re intent on it feeling more natural than computer systems have ever felt. You will, I hope, have noticed that we\u0026rsquo;re engaged in a process of human-centred rather than AI-centred design.\nWe’ve dreamed for decades of a world in which software engineers are true strategic partners with the rest of the organisation, rather than isolated mechanics tasked with installing and fixing the plumbing. Supersoftware finally manifests this reality in the LLM age. When code is no longer a dead, flat text document, it becomes a digital organism in relationship with us. Engineers move from being literal translators of syntax to high-level architects of intent, working side-by-side with every stakeholder to co-shape the digital reality of the organisation.\nWhen I say it touches the very essence of organising, I mean it gets to the heart of how any complex system holds together — right up to the fabric of our social life, our families, and our communities. And this brings us to something that deserves to be said plainly.\nThere is well-founded anxiety sweeping through society today about the centralising consequences of massive LLM service providers. Nobody wants a few tech giants holding the keys to intelligence, so to speak. The more dependent we become on vast, opaque neural systems we cannot inspect, verify, or govern, the more we cede our autonomy and agency.\nSoftware 4.0 offers a fierce, necessary route forward. Supersoftware remains as decentralised as software has always been, but it is now radically accessible to everyone concerned. It encodes human intent and boundaries. It forms a naturally beautiful collaboration with LLMs, and ultimately keeps those LLMs in check in precisely the way we need.\nWe’ve been conditioned to think of human-machine collaboration as something cold and mechanical. Today, we are in an intermediate stage — forming conversational relationships with chatbots that feel human, even while the traditional software environments around us remain rigid and fragmented.\nI believe Software 4.0 changes that narrative completely. It takes us past this conversational veneer to give us technology where the underlying architecture itself mirrors the resilience of life, entirely shaped by human intent.\nIn this light, we may well begin to see ourselves differently — not as passive users of fragile, alien machinery, but as something more integrated and more intentional. Each of us combines with our chosen technologies in ways that suit ourselves, our families, and our communities.\nBy leaving behind the brittle software structures of the past, we aren\u0026rsquo;t just adapting to the intelligence age — we are building the tools to thrive in it.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2026/06/software-4-0/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Photo titled \u0026ldquo;MicroRNA Delivery\u0026rdquo; by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.\\n\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/mrna-1024x500-1.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe’ve reached an uncanny milestone in tech. We are building intimate conversational bonds with AI chatbots, yet the software infrastructure surrounding our daily lives remains as rigid, silent, and fragile as ever.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLLMs tease us with their facilities to write code, but forcing this new form of intelligence to work with programming paradigms that pre-date the World Wide Web is driving a silent crisis of structural decay in large-scale software systems.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post introduces the Software 4.0 era. Informed by biological processes, it turns software into a living, self-verifying organism that provides the perfect complement to LLMs. It transforms how we build and co-evolve the digital fabric of our world.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Software 4.0 — A New Neurosymbolic AI"},{"content":"\nA 2022 article in Noema magazine describes apophenia as \u0026ldquo;faulty pattern recognition. People see faces in clouds and alien ruins on Mars. \u0026hellip; Humans are pattern-recognizing creatures, and so apophenia is built in.\u0026rdquo;\nA Google engineer had claimed an LLM to be conscious, sentient, and indeed a person, and the article explores reasons for why he had reached such a conclusion. It\u0026rsquo;s well worth a read, particularly its observation that we apply concepts that have wholly anthropomorphic heritage and meaning to LLM technology. Pehaps we need new vocabulary.\nThe technology\u0026rsquo;s stochastic prowess is much advanced 42 months later, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s all the more reason we continue to see things that aren\u0026rsquo;t there. Matt Shumer\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Something Big Is Happening \u0026rdquo; is the latest example.\nShumer argues that we are witnessing a phase transition: a shift from conversational AI to genuine autonomous agency. His claim is that large language models have crossed a threshold insomuch as they can now perceive and act within digital environments, execute multi-step workflows, and operate for extended durations with minimal supervision. From this, he infers an accelerating feedback loop in which AI systems increasingly contribute to building their successors.\nHowever, this thesis rests on a crucial and under-examined assumption*: that the behaviours we observe amount to reasoning in any substantive sense. What we call “reasoning” in contemporary LLMs is better understood as high-dimensional probabilistic pattern completion. When I asked a frontier model to comment on that last sentence it describes its like as massive indexical over-achievers!\nThese systems do not construct causal world models or maintain stable internal representations, but rather simulate reasoning traces because they have learned the statistical structure of reasoning-like language. We see reasoning-like and conflate it for reasoning. Apophenia.\nThis limitation constrains the recursive acceleration Shumer anticipates. Flattens it. For an intelligence explosion to occur, each generation must meaningfully improve its ability to design the next. That requires stable abstraction and reliable long-horizon planning — capacities that stochastic next-token predictors approximate only within narrow distributional bounds. Without genuine reasoning mechanisms, the transition remains one of engineering orchestration rather than emergent autonomous cognition.\nThis is where supersoftware steps up.\nBy being software that is itself symbolic AI, supersoftware offers a neurosymbolic synergy that mitigates the inherent instability of pure LLM agents. It ensures that the agent’s operational logic is not merely a fleeting statistical inference but is governed by a persistent, interpretable, and — vitally — evolutionary symbolic structure. This eliminates the need for the external paraphernalia of tool wrappers and textual guardrails (i.e. implemented within the same probabilistic medium they aim to constrain), achieving governance of the requisite complexity with architectural simplicity.\nObjectively, the \u0026ldquo;Something Big\u0026rdquo; Shumer senses is the birth of the General Purpose Digital Agent. But for these agents to achieve the reliability required for the tasks he mentions, they require ontological stability. Supersoftware provides this by allowing stakeholders to bake reflective symbolic logic directly into the software the agents inhabit. Within this framework, the LLM acts as a non-sovereign co-architect — a valued team member in a collaboration of symbolic, neural, and human intelligences.\nSupersoftware acts as the governance and reasoning layer for the agentic explosion, bridging the gap between phenomenal non-deterministic leaps of pattern-matching and the deterministic demands of any software application. Something big could be happening.\n* unless you\u0026rsquo;re Gary Marcus of course :-)\nImage by Nano Banana Pro_._\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2026/02/something-big/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Abstract image that looks vaguely like a planet rotating at speed.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/something-big-1024x500-1.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.noemamag.com/the-model-is-the-message/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eA 2022 article in Noema magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n describes apophenia as \u0026ldquo;faulty pattern recognition. People see faces in clouds and alien ruins on Mars. \u0026hellip; Humans are pattern-recognizing creatures, and so apophenia is built in.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA Google engineer had claimed an LLM to be conscious, sentient, and indeed a person, and the article explores reasons for why he had reached such a conclusion. It\u0026rsquo;s well worth a read, particularly its observation that we apply concepts that have wholly anthropomorphic heritage and meaning to LLM technology. Pehaps we need new vocabulary.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe technology\u0026rsquo;s stochastic prowess is much advanced 42 months later, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s all the more reason we continue to see things that aren\u0026rsquo;t there. Matt Shumer\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSomething Big Is Happening\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; is the latest example.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Something Big Could Be Happening: A response to Matt Shumer's post"},{"content":"\nTrillions of dollars are flowing into LLM technology and services — that\u0026rsquo;s not an exaggeration — and yet LLMs can’t grapple with enterprise software. When we invite them to code, to update schemas, to modify configurations, they break things. Constantly.\nBut this isn\u0026rsquo;t an LLM problem. It\u0026rsquo;s a software problem.\nToday\u0026rsquo;s software was designed for the pre-networked era. Every application is its own siloed world. Even if your LLM could take it all in, it would just see a bunch of islands connected with duct tape and crossed fingers. It’s left generating code that violates security policies, breaks architectural constraints, and creates unpredictable cascading failures.\nThe more an organisation relies on LLMs for software development and operations, the more glaring this weakness becomes.\nIntegrating intelligences While others attempt to ease the symptoms, we’re resolving the root cause. We’re building the tech to help everyone develop software that understands itself. Software that is itself symbolic AI. It’s superior software in itself, and truly shines in collaboration with LLMs. We call it supersoftware.\nSupersoftware and LLMs are intelligent in different yet highly complementary ways. The LLM provides intuition, intent, and context, and supersoftware provides a world model, grounding, validation, security, and architectural guarantees. LLMs generate accurate, explainable, and policy-compliant responses when guided and constrained by the supersoftware\u0026rsquo;s verifiable logic.\nIt’s a neurosymbolic synergy.\nOur approach mirrors how biologists understand life — you might say nature has been giving us some big hints. The core principle in question inspired fundamental ideas in early computing (like Lisp), but the idea was never carried to its logical conclusion. We extend that principle to every domain of a system, and our core technology is already enterprise-proven in adjacent contexts.\nThe big question Every company racing toward AI-first operations is building on a 1970s software paradigm. They\u0026rsquo;re trying to make AI work despite their architecture, not because of it.\nCompetitive advantage comes with speed, resilience, and adaptability, while security is mission critical. Supersoftware transforms all four in collaboration with LLMs. It catalyses value everyone hoped those trillions of dollars would deliver.\nIs your organisation approaching the AI-age intelligently? Or are you just hoping your AI will figure it all out for you? Because hope isn\u0026rsquo;t a strategy and LLMs will only ever get you so far.\nOur white paper We\u0026rsquo;ve just published our white paper . Let me know what you think and if you\u0026rsquo;d like to collaborate in some shape or form.\nImage created by Nano Banana Pro in response to the prompt: The image is vibrant and dynamic. It may have a more natural feeling than science fiction. It\u0026rsquo;s abstract art inspired by the phrase \u0026ldquo;supersoftware — software that is itself symbolic AI\u0026rdquo;.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2025/11/supersoftware/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Abstract image created by Nano Banana Pro in response to the prompt to create an abstact image in the theme of this post\u0026rsquo;s title\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/supersoftware-blog-post-image.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTrillions of dollars are flowing into LLM technology and services — that\u0026rsquo;s not an exaggeration — and yet LLMs can’t grapple with enterprise software. When we invite them to code, to update schemas, to modify configurations, they break things. Constantly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut this isn\u0026rsquo;t an LLM problem. It\u0026rsquo;s a software problem.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Supersoftware — software that is itself symbolic AI"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;m never quite sure if the phrase is that we\u0026rsquo;re blessed or we\u0026rsquo;re cursed to live in interesting times. Either way, we\u0026rsquo;re definitely here and it\u0026rsquo;s definitely interesting.\nBoth the internet and the web were designed purposefully to be decentralized. No-one could take control let alone turn them off. Since then we\u0026rsquo;ve witnessed many power grabs — from privately owned social networks to nation states \u0026lsquo;protecting\u0026rsquo; their citizens — interspersed with a series of community action and associated projects to re-decentralize things.\nDecentralizing done well is a means to some very welcome ends, but it has proven to be a harder design challenge than centralizing. And just as you think you\u0026rsquo;re making progress, along comes the next centralizing innovation.\nThe rate of generative AI adoption is faster than for PCs or the internet, and yet so much power is required in training the large language models (LLMs) brute-forcing this phenomenon that retired nuclear power stations are being recommissioned . Clearly, unless we all get a nuclear fusion machine under the stairs any time soon, LLM training is going to remain the domain of a tiny minority.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a new age of centralization. But maybe not for too long \u0026hellip;\nYes, given their training biases , we need to be careful how and where we apply them. And yes, they make mistakes and increasingly so . Nevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;m optimistic that LLMs may be the most wonderful stepping stone technology. But stepping to where exactly? And how?\nMy colleagues and I at Unnamed Labs launched Transition9 today in partnership with the wonderful Kernel community . Please check it out and don\u0026rsquo;t hesitate to join in. If your organization would love to be considered a partner, please get in touch.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2025/04/transition9-natural-integration-of-ai/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Transition9 logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/transition9-1024x500-1.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m never quite sure if the phrase is that we\u0026rsquo;re blessed or we\u0026rsquo;re cursed to live in interesting times. Either way, we\u0026rsquo;re definitely here and it\u0026rsquo;s definitely interesting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBoth the internet and the web were designed purposefully to be decentralized. No-one could take control let alone turn them off. Since then we\u0026rsquo;ve witnessed many power grabs — from privately owned social networks to nation states \u0026lsquo;protecting\u0026rsquo; their citizens — interspersed with a series of community action and associated projects to \u003ca href=\"https://dwebcamp.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ere-decentralize\u003c/a\u003e\n things.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDecentralizing done well is a means to some very welcome ends, but it has proven to be a harder design challenge than centralizing. And just as you think you\u0026rsquo;re making progress, along comes the next centralizing innovation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Transition9 — the natural integration of human and next-level artificial intelligence"},{"content":" We’ve needed purpose-designed address books for every technological wave, from the postage stamp to cell phone numbers. Web3 is no exception.\nYet any old address book simply won\u0026rsquo;t cut it when it comes to web3. As a valuable part of the decentralized web, there are certain things you just have to get right.\nAddresso is the first purpose-built web3 address book that isn\u0026rsquo;t welded to a specific wallet application. We\u0026rsquo;ve designed it so we can say with just a hint of pride:\nAddresso is yours\nYou have sole control\nIt runs solely on your devices\nThe data lives only on your devices\nIt’s always encrypted with your passphrase\nYou sign additions and changes for complete security.\nFor the more technically fluent, Addresso is local-first, peer replicating, git-like, self-custodial, and — of course — secure. And it\u0026rsquo;s going to serve you beautifully when it comes to getting your personal AI up to speed.\nOur core address book software will always be free. And that includes everything we\u0026rsquo;ve built so far, and more to come.\nCheck out https://addresso.com for further information. And please don\u0026rsquo;t be shy letting us know what you think — we crave feedback as you might just imagine. 🙏🏼\nP.S. We\u0026rsquo;re currently scoping the design of collaborative Addresso Books. If that sounds like something you and your colleagues / fellow DAO members / friends / family have been waiting for, please get in touch now. The more we understand your needs, the more likely we\u0026rsquo;ll make you smile. 😁\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2025/02/addresso-your-web3-address-book-and-a-bit-more-besides/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://addresso.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Addresso logo and a rocket icon.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/addresso-launch-1024.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe’ve needed purpose-designed address books for every technological wave, from the postage stamp to cell phone numbers. Web3 is no exception.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYet any old address book simply won\u0026rsquo;t cut it when it comes to web3. As a valuable part of the decentralized web, there are certain things you just have to get right.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://addresso.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAddresso\u003c/a\u003e\n is the first purpose-built web3 address book that isn\u0026rsquo;t welded to a specific wallet application. We\u0026rsquo;ve designed it so we can say with just a hint of pride:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAddresso is yours\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou have sole control\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt runs solely on your devices\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe data lives only on your devices\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s always encrypted with your passphrase\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou sign additions and changes for complete security.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e","title":"Addresso — your web3 address book, and a bit more besides"},{"content":"\nAre we our own worst enemy?\nOriginally posted to the generative identity website .\nAldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term global village as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).\nI wrote that paragraph 👆🏼 in 2018. I first wrote about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in 2014 and received a call that June from a nascent project going by the name Ethereum. And I have been somewhat obsessed with the potential of decentralized and distributed systems since learning about the key design influences and considerations that shaped the development of the Internet (late-60s) and the Web (late-80s) way back in the day.\nI make this clear because what I\u0026rsquo;m about to say can be mistaken for a reluctance to decentralize. Or a dissatisfaction with decentralization. It is neither. It is a caution about attempts to decentralize in ways that undermine common purposes of decentralizing.\nWe know decentralization is a means and not an end in itself (Schneider 2019 ). We know that some forms of decentralizing in some contexts may be compatible with desirable goals expressed in such terms as prosocial and human flourishing. We also know that other forms in other contexts might produce undesirable outcomes and my focus right here is such an exemplar, so-called reusable KYC.\nKYC KYC stands for Know Your Customer. Financial institutions must confirm your legal identity to a certain level of confidence to satisfy regulators intent on preventing money laundering, i.e. where illegally obtained money is made to appear legitimate. KYC is needed in finance contexts such as opening a bank account, investor accreditation, and web3 fiat on- and off-ramping.\nChainalysis reports illicit ledger addresses sent $22.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency last year, up on 2021 but down from the high of $31.5bn in 2022. By way of a fiat comparison, one money laundering network laundered $4.2bn through HSBC between 2014 and 2017. It was unearthed by an independent monitoring team \u0026ldquo;installed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) as part of a deal not to prosecute HSBC in 2012, when the bank admitted allowing Latin American drug cartels to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its accounts.\u0026rdquo;\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want criminals to think they can profit so easily from their crimes. If KYC frustrates money laundering, then that\u0026rsquo;s a plus. If it has negative consequences in the contexts of the functions that money performs in society — and recall that cash payments are anonymous — then that\u0026rsquo;s something that warrants continued research and action, but that\u0026rsquo;s not an area of expertise I can claim. My research is useful when it comes to the consequences it might have in other contexts, specifically the contexts of identity and system health more broadly.\nWho? Consider the question “Who are you really?” And by corollary, “Do you know who you are really dealing with?”\nAs with all writing and dialogue, these questions come laden with contexts, both historic and contemporary, i.e. appreciation for when such questions may typically arise and the immediate circumstances in which they are invoked.\nIf I rephrase the question with the goal of discarding some of those connotations, it might be: “Who are you to whom in a given context?”\nWhen it comes to legal identity, the whom is the nation state and corporations adhering to that state’s KYC laws, and the context is making you legible for such bureaucratic purposes. Importantly, it is no more ‘who you really are’ than loving daughter or loyal friend, great cook or fanatical cyclist, trusted family doctor or slightly eccentric neighbour.\nSo what? Relationships matter. All variety of contexts matter. And legal identity too easily rides roughshod over both, especially when supercharged by software designed with less than appropriate diligence.\nWeb3 websites and slidestacks and memes leave you in no doubt — we want to explore other ways to organize society that might at a minimum be less inequitable, less bureaucratic, and less damaging to the web of life of which we are part. I\u0026rsquo;m up for that.\nSo where does this leave \u0026lsquo;reusable KYC\u0026rsquo;?\nReusable KYC may well be highly prized in such tightly constrained contexts as anti-money laundering and investor accreditation procedures, but it\u0026rsquo;s also a pollutant beyond such contexts. And it gets worse. In light of the shared bureaucratic heritage of both KYC processes and the concepts underpinning computer science, the pollutant finds itself quite at home in its new environment, spreading readily. Let me try and explain its polluting qualities.\nFrom experience, too many technologists subscribe to the neoliberal fallacy of individual choice and control. Would anyone share sexually explicit digital photos and videos that could be used against them? No! But of course they do. Would anyone sign up to these egregiously invasive terms and conditions? No! But of course they do. Would anyone keep using social media to the point they cannot concentrate on more important things? No! But sadly. In short then, as for all digital innovations, all parties involved in reusable KYC will inevitably do things that its current advocates either haven\u0026rsquo;t thought about or don\u0026rsquo;t wish to bring to anyone\u0026rsquo;s attention.\nThis kinda indicates that those advocates are some blend of negligent and dishonest, but let\u0026rsquo;s give them the benefit of the doubt. Let\u0026rsquo;s assume they have given it some thought and came to the conclusion that their cryptographic magic has everything covered.\nIt does not. They are wrong.\nDo not confuse information security techniques for some ultimate defense against poor systemic outcomes.\nThink system Perhaps enchanted by the fact that the absolute minimal information is imparted as a consequence of their work, our protagonists here crack on working their new found techniques into all variety of life\u0026rsquo;s interactions. But as systems exhibit qualities that cannot be traced to the nature of a single interaction, systems thinking requires consideration of the system as a series of relationships and as a whole. Let\u0026rsquo;s do a bit of that now.\nVerifiers: Would anyone ask for KYC credentials when doing so would be considered by anyone investing a few minutes thinking about it as overkill for the application at hand? Yes. It\u0026rsquo;s so easy. If it might help the verifier\u0026rsquo;s business in some way, what\u0026rsquo;s the harm?!\nPresenters: Would anyone present KYC credentials when asked in the moment, even when it\u0026rsquo;s unrelated to any regulatory imperative? Yes. I mean it only takes a click. If it helps them get what they want right now, what\u0026rsquo;s the harm?! In fact, they should just set this up programmatically \u0026hellip; again, what\u0026rsquo;s the harm?!\nIssuers: Having figured out provision of the reusable KYC credential, would anyone consider offering verifiable credentials for the various separable information gathered during the KYC determination? Age? Sex? Nationality? Wealth? Yes! If it\u0026rsquo;s what the customer wants, if it\u0026rsquo;s what the businesses in their lives want, then what\u0026rsquo;s the harm?\nAnd of course there is no harm for each of these example actions \u0026hellip; in isolation. On the contrary. And that\u0026rsquo;s the point here. The actors involved cannot be criticized for being unable to answer \u0026lsquo;what\u0026rsquo;s the harm?\u0026rsquo; at the systemic level, or even for failing to ask the question at all. The responsibility lies squarely with the system architects. It is a professional and ethical obligation (see Live or Die ).\nWhen the outcome of a KYC process is made reusable without ongoing governance constraining its use and application, it will be used and applied in ways that make it a pollutant at the system level, which by definition has very poor social outcomes for system participants. How does this happen?\nI describe such concerns more broadly and in more detail in Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science , but it\u0026rsquo;s always a good idea to find different words to describe more specific aspects in the never-ending pursuit of effective communication. So how does this read? \u0026hellip;\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t need legal identity for the vast majority of social interactions in your neighbourhood, at work, down the gym, or even online, etc. Human identities (by which I mean not legal identities, not bureaucratic identities) are in the eyes of the beholders. You mean different things to different people in different contexts. Human identity is a set of never-ending dynamic processes that helps each of us figure out what everyone else means to us in varying circumstances, and indeed we \u0026lsquo;show up\u0026rsquo; differently according to our own current expectations and our appreciation for others\u0026rsquo; expectations and the corresponding social norms. We rely on recognizing someone again socially and contextually and most definitely not via some comparatively abstract bureaucratic tabulation. The corresponding skills are innate and integral to our outstanding evolutionary success as cooperators.\nQuite naturally then we carried this into digital life. The vast majority of readers here will have or have had multiple email addresses and profiles and handles and avatars and social groups and channels. It\u0026rsquo;s a personal and social freedom. A beautiful complex, entirely compatible with and necessary for those web3 hopes and dreams I noted earlier. And while we\u0026rsquo;re at it, it\u0026rsquo;s wholly compatible with the sentiments of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (even if its sentiments perhaps stretch a little too far in light of more recent insights into the qualities of a healthy digital fabric in our lives).\nNow I need your imagination.\nImagine that the behaviours I describe above for verifiers, presenters, and issuers play out — they each make sense in the moment after all. Very few of these actors, bordering on absolutely none of them, give any time to considering the emergent consequences of their role in the big scheme of things in much the same way we all say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m stuck in traffic\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;I am traffic.\u0026rdquo;\nThe encroachment is slow at first, too negligible for the poor social outcomes to be apparent. We all crack on. We all behave in ways that serve our self-interest in the moment and emulate those who have already done so. The credentials are used in previously unimagined ways and participation is compelled when the only alternative is exclusion.\nSome bright spark for example suggests that reusable KYC could be useful in terms of securing widespread Sybil resistance (ensuring every account is human and every human is represented only once in the system) forgetting that Sybil was a human. She/they may have been an extreme example, but we are all Sybils. It\u0026rsquo;s our nature. It\u0026rsquo;s a psychological and sociological imperative. If we cannot secure well-governed Sybil resistance tightly constrained to those very few contexts where corporeality matters (e.g. wealth distribution and democratic process), it\u0026rsquo;s far far preferable to live without such a mechanism at all than to have it loom large over everything.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a governance theme emerging here don\u0026rsquo;t you think.\nIn just the same way that everyone piled on Facebook without personal responsibility for the significant societal downsides of such authoritarian surveillant homogeneity, bureaucratic identity and KYC process contaminates the web3 ecology and so then the accompanying hopes and dreams. In setting out to leave the machinations of nation state bureaucracy and the old financial system behind as much as we might without giving criminals a free pass, instead of designing for psychological, sociological, and ecological health in digitally mediating and augmenting human identity, we recreated the rigid old system on digital steroids by accident.\nNot only did we welcome the Trojan horse in, we designed and built it ourselves.\nNote: A 2000-word blog post is ill-suited for giving the critical concepts here the attention they deserve. As suggested in the post, please refer to Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science for a deeper analysis.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2024/05/reusable-kyc-when-a-dedication-to-decentralization-self-sabotages/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. An 18th Century painting depicting the citizens of Troy pushing and pulling the horse into their city.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/The-Procession-of-the-Trojan-Horse-into-Troy-Tiepolo-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAre we our own worst enemy?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/reusable-kyc/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally posted to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Reusable KYC: when a dedication to decentralization self-sabotages"},{"content":"\nThe paper falls far short in its appreciation for human-centred design, and this is quite typical of contemporary approaches to digital identity.\nOriginally posted to the generative identity website .\nThe OpenID Foundation has invited comments on a draft paper titled _Human-Centric Digital Identity: a Primer for Government Officials (_July 7, 2023), referred to from here on simply as \u0026rsquo;the paper'.\nIt is critical to understand how the paper\u0026rsquo;s authors understand human-centricity, so I begin there. I contrast this with a necessarily broader and deeper scoping of the human-centred design approach; when human is confused for individual, as here, human-centric concerns can only be addressed by de-centering the individual.\nI argue the imperative to move beyond the human-centric paradigm if only to best serve what most people will think of as human-centric; at least with the future\u0026rsquo;s benefit of hindsight.\nI conclude that this paper does not achieve its stated purpose of priming government officials sufficiently or accurately. I offer an explanation relating to a non-human-centric standpoint shared by too many members of the OpenID community and too many actors in government and civil service. As this standpoint has informed the design of digital identity for decades, it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to retrofit a contradictory design approach.\nWhere I have had the choice to write a thesis or offer something people might actually read, I\u0026rsquo;ve opted for the latter. I point this out for any academics ready and eager to critique my critique!\nThe paper\u0026rsquo;s regard for human-centred design The paper attributes (Nyst et al 2016 ) with pre-supposing \u0026ldquo;human-centric objectives\u0026rdquo; (line 298). The reference in question doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually refer to human-centric at all but rather uses individual-, user-, person-, and consumer-centric, without distinguishing one from another. The reference describes associated qualities:\nEntailing \u0026ldquo;greater control over their data\u0026rdquo; through the provision of personal data stores\nGreater control over access to attribute data\nPrivacy preserving approaches\nEncouraging the system to be \u0026ldquo;focused around the individual\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Making the individual the control point for their digital identity\u0026rdquo;.\nThe paper\u0026rsquo;s main section describing human-centred design comes later (lines 481-594). Reference is made to (de Brisis and Brennan, 2022, Universal Digital Identity Policy Principles to Maximize Benefits for People: A shared European and Canadian Perspective ), specifically that its human-centric principles epitomise those of a variety of other sources. This reference uses human-, people- and user-centred, again without distinction. The aspiration is framed in terms of ensuring that \u0026ldquo;[p]eople\u0026rsquo;s needs and rights are prioritized\u0026rdquo;, with five assertions:\nDigital identity must be inclusive\nDigital identity adoption must be voluntary\nDigital identity must be resilient\nDigital identity policy must be intuitive for both institutions and people\nPrivacy must be central to digital identity policy.\nReference is made to (Trust Over IP Foundation, 2022, Overcoming Human Harm Challenges in Digital Identity Ecosystems ), a draft report that was published as version 1.1 in May 2023. This is an odd reference to make here. The ToIP report only mentions people- and human-centric in passing. Rather than a human-centric approach per se, it focuses on claims of following a socio-technical systems (STS) approach. As I argue in (Sheldrake, 2023, Live or DIE ), the ToIP report does not in fact evidence the claims but rather conveys significant shortcomings that can only lead the reader to reach the opposite conclusion.\nThe OECD reference (2023, Recommendation of the Council on the Governance of Digital Identity ) sticks with \u0026ldquo;user-centred\u0026rdquo; where user \u0026ldquo;refers to a natural person or a legal person, or to a natural person representing a natural or legal person.\u0026rdquo; It asserts that developing user-centred and inclusive digital identity entails responding to the needs of users and service providers, and minimising barriers to entry. It all feels very perfunctory, as one might expect when user is preferred to human.\nWhile reference is made to (unicef, Human Centered Design 4 Health ), the reference is too brief. It picks up solely on the need for engagement and iterative design but leaves the rest.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no arguing the paper\u0026rsquo;s inclusion of inclusivity under the heading of human-centred design, ditto value-sensitive design (VSD). But again, the paper is too selective in bringing VSD into the process. The selectivity is not noted let alone explained.\nI speak to both of these selections / omissions below.\nHuman-centred design (HCD) today Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.\nZulu: A person is a person through other people.\nNdiri nekuti tiri.\nShona: I am because we are.\nHCD today — by which I mean practiced as well as we understand it — incorporates such relationality, such complexes, as encapsulated by these African philosophical phrases.\nWithin dynamic relationships, within our communal complexes, we find the fundamental process of meaning-making. It\u0026rsquo;s what we do together. It\u0026rsquo;s what we do together better than any other species on Earth. In fact it\u0026rsquo;s essential to what makes us human, so it really doesn\u0026rsquo;t get much more human-centric than this!\nMy use of complexes is deliberate. Two potatoes are two potatoes. Ten thousand bricks are ten thousand bricks. Potatoes and bricks don\u0026rsquo;t exhibit emergent properties as they come together. People do. The meaning of human in human-centred must be read therefore as being human in relationships, in communities, and most definitely not individual or user or consumer.\nInvoking indigenous wisdom doesn\u0026rsquo;t always succeed in conversation within the contexts of the conventional western mindset, so I will also pull from one of the paper\u0026rsquo;s references. While the paper notes (line 499) that \u0026ldquo;human-centred design processes involve broad engagement and iterative design test sprints that build empathy for those who will rely upon the system\u0026rdquo;, citing (unicef, Human Centered Design 4 Health ), it makes no mention of one of the key messages on the reference\u0026rsquo;s homepage, i.e. the unavoidable need to take \u0026ldquo;a system’s view of an ecosystem affecting people’s behaviour.\u0026rdquo; The referenced website never talks in terms of the individual, not once, but rather people, groups, families, and communities.\nTo take a human-centred design approach is to necessarily emphasise dyads, family units, local communities, and society as much as the individual, and to reflect deeply on relationships and learning and \u0026ldquo;the ultimate meanings which the product, system or service will either occupy or create within the psychological, sociological and societal space of the individual.\u0026rdquo; (Giacomin 2014 )\nHuman-centred design is concerned less with assuring that artifacts work as intended (by their producers, designers, or other cultural authorities) than with enabling many individual or cultural conceptions to unfold into uninterrupted interfaces with technology. (Krippendorff 2004 )\nIn truly stark contrast, the paper talks in terms of the individual throughout, most notably in the very first sentence (line 2) and in fact in its very definition of identity. To be fair to the authors, this error is endemic.\nAnd so to understanding human identity …\nConceptualisations of identity across all variety of the social sciences consider identity to be a capacity for and never-ending process of sense- and meaning-making. I find this surprises many technologists working in digital identity. This understanding produces a fascinating and vital reflexivity (a social science term referring to circular relationships between causes and effects).\nHuman-centred-design actively supports meaning-making. Human identity encompasses a continuous process of meaning-making. And so human-centred-design-for-digital-identity may be re-stated as meaning-making for meaning-making, a continuous and ideally virtuous loop.\nAs this is a forever dynamic process, any technical device that might disallow, resist, or attenuate contextual meaning-making and so change — generativity — is inevitably being misapplied here. How do the celebrated qualities of the cryptographic fundamentals of digital identity feel to you in this human-centric light?\nValue-sensitive design (VSD) \u0026ldquo;This paper recommends an inclusive, value-sensitive approach to Human-Centered Design that is underpinned by standards.\u0026rdquo; (line 495)\n\u0026ldquo;Pillar #1 Recommendation #2: Deliver a Values-Sensitive design process that reflects the risks and benefits to stakeholder groups.\u0026rdquo; (line 803)\nAccording to the authoritative website on the topic (vsdesign.org ), VSD engages \u0026ldquo;human values in the design of tools and technology to support human flourishing\u0026rdquo;. A value is \u0026ldquo;what is important to people in their lives, with a focus on ethics and morality.\u0026rdquo; It considers \u0026ldquo;individual, group, and societal levels of analysis\u0026rdquo; and observes that \u0026ldquo;in the complexity of human relations, values sit in a delicate balance with each other. This framing positions designers and researchers to emphasize moral and ethical values, but to do so within the complexity of social life, and with recognition for how culture and context implicate people’s understanding and experience of benefits as well as harms and injustice.\u0026rdquo;\nThe paper\u0026rsquo;s section on VSD (lines 544-567) presents some advantages of adopting VSD to the reader. Here we find the sole reference to groups that isn\u0026rsquo;t preceded by \u0026lsquo;working\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;stakeholder\u0026rsquo;, although it remains too strong a possibility that the authors consider this shorthand for stakeholder groups, else a group considered as merely the sum of its parts. Either way, the true power of VSD is kept at bay for some reason.\nThe paper makes no reference for example to human flourishing or ethics or morality. Nor does it point out that values vary from community to community and from time to time whereas current digital identity schema offer a one-size-fits-all with some fearsome path dependencies. (Variations within a schema should not be confused for variations of schema.)\nBeyond human-centred design As valuable as human-centred design undoubtedly is, it\u0026rsquo;s most often stretched to the point of inadequacy in the contexts of complex adaptive systems and, as (Jones 2022 ) notes, it is now being combined with systems thinking, futures thinking, and change theory to set up the conditions for learning experiences that are responsive to such design challenges. We are undoubtedly in such contexts here.\n\u0026ldquo;Systems thinking is \u0026lsquo;contextual,\u0026rsquo; which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole. … [It] means a shift in perception from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life.\u0026rdquo; (Capra \u0026amp; Luisi 2014 )\nSystems thinking is integral to socio-technical systems (STS) approaches. STS considers the intermixing of technical and social systems with the diligent application of the respective disciplinary knowledge, and ideally the development and application of transdisciplinary knowledge. Both (large scale) technical systems and social systems demand systems thinking, and so then does their inseparable interweave.\nIn (Sheldrake, 2022, Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science ), I argue that the technologization of human identity is a complex of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition (Smart et al 2017 ), and when life is considered a trilogy of biological structure (autopoetic unit), environment, and cognition (Capra \u0026amp; Luisi 2014 ), the technologization of human identity is in fact a living process. We should design for psychological, sociological, and ecological health — self, culture, and nature — rather than mere process efficiency or convenience.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve found a similar conclusion presented by Fjord (2020) , a design and innovation consultancy owned by Accenture, albeit applying more expansively. Inspired by a conversation (2018) between Gerry Scullion and John Thackara , itself riffing off Thackara\u0026rsquo;s 2005 book In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World , Fjord writes:\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; people’s focus of desirability, viability and feasibility is moving from \u0026lsquo;me\u0026rsquo; toward \u0026lsquo;we\u0026rsquo;. As this accelerates, user-centered design will feel increasingly selfish … [We can] see an evolution in design from user-centred to human-centred and now life-centred design \u0026hellip; starting to edge away from designing for one to designing for collective — i.e. the entire planet.”\nThe following diagram (Borthwick et al 2022 ) portrays life-centred design principles adopted from (Gibson 2001 ) and supporting frameworks and actionable methods.\nI can only think of life-centred design approaches to the digital mediation and augmentation of human identity. As I have written previously , we must approach the technological augmentation of human identity as a living process and its domain an ecology.\nConclusion The paper\u0026rsquo;s description of human-centred design is insufficient and inaccurate for its omissions and for its dedication to the individual object rather than being human. It might be said to invoke those qualities that could throw a warm light on the OpenID community\u0026rsquo;s work while leaving out the qualities that might leave the reader concluding otherwise.\nIts nod to value-sensitive design is guilty in the same way, but perhaps all the more so given, well, the values underpinning VSD.\nIt is imperative that we find a way to work together to remedy the paper after this request for comments, but as should be evident from this comment right here, there is no shortcut.\nThere is no shortcut for the simple reason that the cause is paradigmatic. Computer scientists, information technologists, and those serving in our governing bureaucracies share one paradigm of identity that I refer to as noun-like. The social sciences and the humanities acknowledge the development of such a paradigm, but recognise that it\u0026rsquo;s not ontologically equivalent to the verb-like paradigm. The latter attempts to describe how life is, how we humans understand each other and ourselves and the world around us, whereas the former attempts to find a way to \u0026lsquo;run things\u0026rsquo;, so to speak. Governments. Large organisations. Bureaucracies. i.e. the kind of things that are rarely if ever described in terms of being human; often quite the opposite.\nWhen our lives only infrequently bumped into the \u0026lsquo;running of things\u0026rsquo; this may have been fine, but the technological manifestation of the bureaucratic noun-like paradigm is being set up to pollute the information ecology of human nature and human culture, as I explain in some detail in (Sheldrake, 2022, Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science ). This is anti-human-centric.\nThe authors of this paper risk appearing to engage in some serious \u0026lsquo;HCD-washing\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;VSD-washing\u0026rsquo; in a remarkable parallel to the \u0026lsquo;STS-washing\u0026rsquo; evident in the recent ToIP report on the human harms of digital identity. I\u0026rsquo;m putting that as politely as possible. We must all be more blunt if this carries through to the final version.\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; human-centred design is increasingly seen and applied to achieve short-term gains for businesses and investors. This economic focus has diminished the potential of design to serve as a tool that enables deep exploration of decisions before they are made (Dunne \u0026amp; Raby 2013 ) to ensure that they are the right decisions. Focusing on short-term gains has also drawn attention away from genuine global problems, future generations and the health of the planet — in many cases, human-centred design has even contributed to these problems.\u0026rdquo; (Borthwick et al 2022 )\nUpdate 27 September 2023 The OpenID Foundation published the final version of the paper 25 September 2023. The very poor but lamentably expected news is that nothing changed materially in the context of my critique here.\nThis critique and my subsequent conversation with one of the paper’s lead authors last month did have some small influence. The final paper now notes (p35) a distinction between human-centred and merely person- or user-centred, and incorporates part of the (Krippendorff 2004) quote. But it’s just a fleeting acknowledgement rather than anything that might be said to have been recognised anywhere else in the paper. It certainly appears to have had no impact on the contributors’ worldview, which should be nothing less than deeply concerning for the rest of us.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2023/08/once-more-with-meaning-a-review-of-a-draft-industry-paper-on-human-centric-digital-identity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Two children on steps with a clipboard trying to figure something out together.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/rachel-o3tIY5pIork-unsplash-1024x500-1.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe paper falls far short in its appreciation for human-centred design, and this is quite typical of contemporary approaches to digital identity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/once-more-with-meaning/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally posted to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Once more with meaning — a review of a draft industry paper on human-centric digital identity"},{"content":"\nDear lawmakers and regulators, this draft industry paper doesn\u0026rsquo;t do the job. I explain why in the hope that you will act.\nFirst published to the generative identity website .\nIn my first public critique of self-sovereign identity (Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty , 2019) I began to explore ways in which its founding principles are fatally flawed and made a first attempt at describing the technology\u0026rsquo;s very poor social consequences. I concluded with an invitation to its evangelists to point out errors in my analysis and to explain \u0026ldquo;how it might not contribute to such tragic outcomes let alone help avoid them.\u0026rdquo;\nI got reactions but none that engaged meaningfully with the critique.\nI followed up a year later (The dystopia of self-sovereign identity , 2020), then with the only dissenting chapter in the most comprehensive book on the matter (see SSI: our dystopian nightmare , 2021), and most recently and most comprehensively with last year\u0026rsquo;s essay (Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science , 2022).\nWhile a few useful but top-level conversations have ensued, as reported on the generative identity website, no detailed response emerged. Now here we are in 2023 and we can finally review a draft of an industry paper exploring how SSI mitigates and exacerbates human harms.\nThe draft paper — Overcoming Human Harm Challenges in Digital Identity Ecosystems — has been produced and published by the Trust Over IP Foundation, \u0026ldquo;an independent project hosted at the Linux Foundation, working with pan-industry support from leading organizations around the world.\u0026rdquo; Its mission is \u0026ldquo;to provide a robust, common standard and complete architecture for Internet-scale digital trust.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd the draft paper\u0026rsquo;s conclusion? As summarised in the accompanying blog post:\nCan SSI harm people in the real world? Our paper says “yes” and why that’s so.\nHoorah! you might cry. Finally! you might say. But no. This paper isn\u0026rsquo;t going to help anyone in the ways it should. I\u0026rsquo;ll explain in overarching terms what I think has happened here and then illuminate a selection of the draft paper\u0026rsquo;s significant shortcomings. But first allow me to explain why SSI, the poster child of decentralized digital identity, deserves special attention amongst the plethora of approaches to digital identity.\nTo self-quote from my 2022 essay:\n[SSI] is fundamentally a mutation carrying computer science’s false premise [of identity] further into community.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what decentralization does.\nI wholly embrace biomimicry and I am therefore a qualified advocate of decentralization i.e. when both the ends one is working towards and the qualities of decentralization as a means are well articulated. I detest abuses of the concentrations of power arising in centralized systems as much as the next person, but I also know that just any old form of decentralizing effort won\u0026rsquo;t automagically represent an improvement. Things could well go in the other direction.\nNature is complex and has had just a little longer to \u0026rsquo;think\u0026rsquo; about things if you know what I mean. We needn\u0026rsquo;t take quite so long given that many disciplines find themselves voracious students of Nature, but SSI is not a product of this interdisciplinary knowledge.\nThe whole \u0026lt; Sum of the parts So what do we have here?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s be fair, many of us have tried in our time to contribute to the dreaded group report. They are never easy if only because the lowest common denominator appears to be the only thing to ever secure consensus. Look no further than this paper\u0026rsquo;s title for evidence of design-by-committee; that\u0026rsquo;s one weird-sounding headline!\nBut imagine now the greater challenge of participating in an industry group forced to come together to tell the world about the ways in which the thing you\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for years, the thing you\u0026rsquo;ve told investors will secure a 10x return, the thing on which both your company\u0026rsquo;s future and your own personal reputation and livelihood depend, is bad for the world.\nIf this wasn\u0026rsquo;t so urgently needed in the context of the digital innovation that smashes into the human condition like no other, you\u0026rsquo;d almost feel sorry for them.\nThe process resulting in this draft paper has been led by Nicky Hickman. Nicky is deeply knowledgeable in this space and quite frankly she\u0026rsquo;s awesome. (You will see she was one of the dozen most diligent reviewers of my essay last year.) Of the paper\u0026rsquo;s contributors I know personally or have at least interacted with on occasion, I can say without a moment\u0026rsquo;s hesitation that they\u0026rsquo;re all lovely human beings. There\u0026rsquo;s no reason to doubt the others are too, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you\u0026rsquo;re awesome or lovely, an impossible task is an impossible task. Objective and useful reports cannot be authored through the lens of largely mono-disciplinary commercial bias, and herding cats can only be as successful as herding cats usually is.\nI should note that Nicky invited me to join ToIP and specifically this undertaking. I declined for two reasons. First, doing so required I subscribe to ToIP\u0026rsquo;s goal of realising SSI in the world. Second, I was told that SSI\u0026rsquo;s founding principles would not be up for discussion.\nThat doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean we don\u0026rsquo;t enjoy collaborating personally. Nicky helped me fix some errors in a draft version of this post. And on that note, thanks go to David Wither too. 🙏🏼\nNow then, let\u0026rsquo;s dive in.\nHarms? Yeah But \u0026hellip; Perhaps the defining feature of this report is what is not said.\nSSI\u0026rsquo;s founding principles are wrong, by which I mean Cameron 2005 , Allen 2016 , and Principles of SSI 2020, and this is by far the greatest and gravest cause of harm as I\u0026rsquo;ve discussed previously. From here on, I will restrict myself to what is said.\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s start at the top. That title again: Overcoming Human Harm Challenges in Digital Identity Ecosystems. It reads awkwardly because it\u0026rsquo;s desperate. If I was asked to proffer an alternative title having read the paper\u0026rsquo;s contents I would propose: Harms? Yeah But \u0026hellip; You see the participants couldn\u0026rsquo;t bring themselves to explore and discuss harms without trying to balance talk of harms with talk of benefits. Every \u0026ldquo;exacerbation\u0026rdquo; of harm must be accompanied by a \u0026ldquo;mitigation\u0026rdquo; as if the working group is telling the world that the latter should be considered as some sort of harm offset.\nThe muddiness of this thinking, the shoddiness of the implied ethics, is laid bare by one of the 20th Century\u0026rsquo;s foremost moral, legal and political philosophers, John Rawls:\n[Justice] does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. (A Theory of Justice, 1971)\nHarm is not offset by benefits. Harm is harm. This paper should make harm its sole focus simply on the basis that every other piece of content produced to date by the SSI community strives to big-up its acclaimed advantages. There\u0026rsquo;s no shortage of it. How exactly is the community to respond as it needs to, as we all need it to, without a crystal clear explication of the harms?\nTrust me Trust me when I say that trust is a social concept, i.e. occurring between people, and yet the paper\u0026rsquo;s main section kicks off with the phrase \u0026ldquo;trust technologies\u0026rdquo;. Later we\u0026rsquo;re treated to \u0026ldquo;trust layer\u0026rdquo;, the layer in question being something slotted into an information technology stack. And let\u0026rsquo;s not forget that the identity the group producing the paper selected for themselves, ToIP, conveys that they believe trust per se is transmissible over Internet Protocol.\nNow we might say in everyday parlance “I trust my [tech thing]” but we actually mean we trust those who have designed and delivered it, and perhaps those who have tested and certified it, etc. We are willing to take the risk of making ourselves vulnerable to the product of this combined intelligence and labour. But everyday parlance simply doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide the required analytical rigour. If the paper’s authors wish to engage social scientists or alert technologists to social science insights in some part, this is not a good start. It\u0026rsquo;s a terrible start.\nTrust us, this is STS architecture Many of SSI\u0026rsquo;s flaws emanate from ignorance of social science amongst the community\u0026rsquo;s technologists. I can empathise. I am a chartered engineer dedicated to the application of digital technologies in complex systems, and only a mere student of social science. But I am a keen student of nearly ten years and it\u0026rsquo;s plain to me that technologists striving to design social technology at scale should invite social science expertise to the table. I appreciate this will involve money but lack of funding for interdisciplinarity cannot excuse its omission in this context.\nThis imperative is perhaps beginning to dawn for we find an intriguing thread running through this paper exemplified by this assertion:\n\u0026ldquo;The key feature of SSI is that it is not a technical system architecture but a socio-technical system (STS) architecture.”\nThis is a misrepresentation, putting it politely. OK, less politely, it\u0026rsquo;s a lie. For this claim to be true one would see social science contributions in this domain as much as one sees computer science. To paraphrase the last generative identity blog post, of the SSI-related job vacancies you\u0026rsquo;ve seen, what\u0026rsquo;s the ratio of techie roles .v. social science roles? I haven\u0026rsquo;t stumbled across one example of the latter. But more rigorously, let\u0026rsquo;s take the most comprehensive book (2021) on the topic as the counterfactual here. The social sciences aren\u0026rsquo;t discussed specifically in any chapter other than in the sole dissenting chapter I contributed. STS is referenced on ten different pages in this paper and yet didn\u0026rsquo;t warrant one teeny tiny mention anywhere in the entire book.\nWe do find the following admission in the paper:\n\u0026ldquo;The work of social scientists, creatives, legal experts, natural scientists, policymakers and laymen, is not typically part of these standards or product development processes.”\nAnd we are told that:\n\u0026ldquo;This leaves many gaps in the STS.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026hellip; but this is wholly disingenuous. If the sentence about the exclusivity of standards and product development stands then clearly the development of SSI hasn’t followed a socio-technical systems approach at all. Not so much “gaps” then as being significantly and so dangerously devoid of any meaningful social science input. If social science was in the mix, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t find sentences such as:\n\u0026ldquo;SSI recognises human identity as a social process because it is relational rather than nodal, every exchange of digital data begins as a P2P interaction with protocols such as DIDComm.”\nAs I wrote in my essay last summer, SSI is functionally relational and not co-emergently relational. The former is a technical quality and the latter describes social process.\nIn moving this draft paper forward to a final version, the sentence above acclaiming a STS architecture should be changed to:\nMany of SSI\u0026rsquo;s harms emanate from or are amplified by the fact that the architecture should have been developed as a socio-technical system but wasn\u0026rsquo;t.\nAnd to the list of items under the heading Common Features of Harm I would add:\nIdentity harms may be caused by incompetence and/or unethical behaviour in system design, especially refusal to establish and have the patience to pursue interdisciplinary deliberation and knowledge building. The paper positions the ToIP work as the social bit of the STS caboodle but ToIP came together way down the line. From observation, the ToIP Technology Stack Working Group appears to consider governance-related tech development as all the \u0026lsquo;social sciency stuff\u0026rsquo; needed, and even that narrow focus appears to have unavoidable contradictions at its heart. Such governance requires institutional oversight but has no means to mandate it, and SSI exemplifies a group of decentralizing technical protocols set on eroding the institutions it relies upon for governance.\nDIE! A diagram portraying STS components has the words \u0026ldquo;Digital Identity Ecosystem\u0026rdquo; emblazoned at the centre, or DIE for short. (I kid you not. A group so very clearly concerned with how this paper might make them look chose DIE as a defining acronym. But back to STS \u0026hellip;)\nIn conversation with Phil Windley in 2020 I noted:\nThe system architecture to which I refer encompasses human behaviour, human community and society, and the natural living world. \u0026hellip; The system architecture to which you refer is technical. Period. There is no way, contrary to your assertion, that the distressing consequences with which I’m concerned ought to follow from this system architecture. There may be some, but my focus is SSI in the real world.\nAny ecologist and/or systems thinker reading this will know that my subject here is boundary drawing. When everything in the known universe is connected to everything else, where exactly might we draw boundaries? (See that last link for more on this.)\nHere’s (Di Maio 2014 ) on the topic:\nModeling large scale, complex systems is non trivial, in particular addressing boundary issues between the technical system and the environment: “Considerations of large-scale engineering systems often present a dilemma of where to draw the line between a system and its environment. How are social, political, economic, and institutional issues addressed? How can the techniques of engineering science be connected with a modern understanding of human decision making, organizational behavior, and institutional inertia?” (Laracy 2007). To build joint optimization into a STS from inception, the system boundary must necessarily include people and environment, resulting in what can be defined as an extended boundary. It is not possible to achieve joint optimization if the socio and the technical aspects are modeled separately as different things, because all the modeling, development and engineering activities that follow are influenced and guided by the boundary. Setting an inclusive boundary results in the STS being considered as a whole, rather than emerging from the interaction of different sub-systems.\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t say it better myself, which is why I didn\u0026rsquo;t. So how appropriate is it to adopt the “Digital Identity Ecosystem” as the scope of the STS design?\nThe paper\u0026rsquo;s glossary defines DIE as:\nA set of at least two (autonomous) parties (the members of the ecosystem) whose individual expressions of digital identity are recognised by other members, and whose individual work is of benefit to the set as a whole.\nAnd digital identity as:\na form of digital data that enables a specific entity to be distinguished from all others in a specific context. Identity may apply to any type of entity, including individuals, organisations, and things.\nSo this draft paper tells us that the SSI community draws a boundary excluding (1) the non-digital, (2) any operation of identity based on alikeness, and (3) any description of identity that doesn\u0026rsquo;t invoke an entity, a thing. This third point means the boundary encompasses a noun-like conceptualization of identity but excludes verb-like conceptualizations. (See my essay last year for an explanation of noun-like and verb-like conceptualizations.) Given that every discipline with an interest in identity — other than law and computer science — conceptualizes identity as verb-like, this is a big red flag.\nIn summary then, the authors of a paper addressing harms to people in the real world present the boundaries of their work as excluding the real world. This simply wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have happened in a STS design process.\nLive! Overall, Part 3 is by far the stand out section of the paper. I like the list of \u0026ldquo;harms countermeasures\u0026rdquo; for example, although I would propose adding two more:\nEnsure interdisciplinarity in design\nApproach the technological augmentation of human identity as a living process and its domain an ecology (per the conclusion of Web3\u0026rsquo;s Future Fail is Avoidable ).\nClearly these two are related but the imperative of regarding this system as a living system is worth picking out. Heck, it should be made into a neon sign and hung above whichever door ToIP community members most often walk through. (And all the more reason to be amused by the acronym DIE.) Clearly, (Nguyen-Phan 2022 ) is a start. More please!\nLet\u0026rsquo;s discuss life by way of the paper\u0026rsquo;s 101 on differences between western and non-western cultures. I write \u0026ldquo;101\u0026rdquo; as the American slang term for the most basic knowledge in some subject, and so then not in a flattering sense. This is a paper supposedly addressing the social harms of rolling out a much championed technology around the world. This is NOT then, I would argue, the time to write for high schoolers. I sense that groupthink in action again.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re told that \u0026ldquo;in many non-western cultures the individual is subservient to the group\u0026rdquo; in contrast to \u0026ldquo;a western philosophical tradition that prioritises individual agency, choice and freedoms.\u0026rdquo; This is reductionist at best. A harsher critic might wonder if it hints at an exceptionalism intimating that American software companies shouldn\u0026rsquo;t concern themselves too greatly with such differences.\nIt might typify the extremes — the American myths of the lone cowboy and self-made man, say, versus Confucianism — but one wonders what the continental Europeans in the room were thinking for example.\nThis line of writing serves to set up this humdinger: we are told that interrelatedness is \u0026ldquo;at the heart of many non-western conceptions of sociocentric identity.” I was quite sure American culture still emphasised family and some remnants at least of the bowling alley camaraderie, but that\u0026rsquo;s not the most pertinent observation here.\nInterrelatedness and interconnectedness are in fact at the heart of the global scientific and (I understand although it’s not an area of expertise I can claim) spiritual consensus on the nature of living processes. Of life. If SSI harms might be all the more toxic in the contexts of this 101 on non-western culture, as the paper notes, then by corollary it\u0026rsquo;s bad for human life.\nWhile already emphasised in a quote I\u0026rsquo;ve used above, the paper\u0026rsquo;s authors most obviously write their own coup de grâce with this:\n\u0026ldquo;SSI is one of the only digital identity architectures to be specifically designed from the outset to give equivalence to identity for people, organisations and things.”\nI\u0026rsquo;m still reeling from reading this, written it seems without a moment\u0026rsquo;s reflection. Not one nanosecond. Allow me to offer a rewrite for the final version of the paper:\nSSI is designed specifically for the thingification of people. It does not distinguish the qualities of the animate from the inanimate, the cognitive from the non-cognitive. If there\u0026rsquo;s anyone out there thinking that we\u0026rsquo;re special or different in any kind of way from the computing resources and things the Internet has enmeshed to date, think again m̶y̶ f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶ you cryptographically triangulated and regimented object.\nLook who\u0026rsquo;s alive and well Talking of living, it appears that the notorious homo economicus is alive and well in the Mitigations sections, animated by the fallacies SSI technologists tell themselves about rational control and consent. Woody Hartzog (2019) explains this well .\nThe following assertion for example is celebrated with not one iota of supporting evidence. For the avoidance of doubt, I mean of course supporting evidence relating to the real world, i.e. the one with beautiful and messy human beings that are nothing like homo economicus — you know, the ones studied by social scientists.\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; the requirement in SSI for holders’ consent and participation in transactions means that many of the technological harms that come with separation of the technical from the human process, are mitigated by SSI.\u0026rdquo;\nThe audacity to include this here and celebrate SSI\u0026rsquo;s programmatic / automation possibilities elsewhere, but back to the actors \u0026hellip;\nSuch (imaginary) rational actors possess the capacity to reflect on the emergent consequences of their actions it would seem, on the poor personal and systemic consequences to which they might otherwise have contributed had they not been so wonderfully prescient, for how else would they know when to exert control / withhold consent? This would of course represent nothing short of a superhuman capacity given that the SSI community itself exhibits no talent in anticipating the emergent consequences of its own schema.\nOn legal identity Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 sets out to ensure that everyone on Earth has legal identity. Having had the opportunity to speak with just one person who did not have legal identity for many years, I have just the smallest appreciation of how awful it is to be stuck in a world institutionally organised around legal identity when you don\u0026rsquo;t have it. It\u0026rsquo;s important to note that while vitally important when it is needed, proof of legal identity is rarely required from one month to the next today, and the right to legal identity does not infer a right for everyone to demand presentation of legal identity. And yet SSI sets things up for its programmatic integration. Legal identity becomes structurated. It ends up permeating everyday interactions through a series of cryptographic triangulations.\nIf we consider for a moment that even economists have killed off homo economicus, on what basis would an ethical SSI designer sign-off a system we know will have people integrating legal identity left, right, and centre? I refer to a protocol stack that we\u0026rsquo;re already seeing wielded to effect legal-identity-as-a-trivial-service (e.g. \u0026ldquo;current KYC is ‘single-use’ while KYC’d SSI makes KYC ‘recyclable’ \u0026rdquo;, kycDAO ).\nThe section on mitigations of legal harms is most obviously authored with disciplinary blinkers. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing on structuration, nothing on the poor consequences of a dedication to corporeality (i.e. one person, one physical body, one identity), and nothing on compatibility with the essential operations of non-bureaucratic conceptualizations of identity. This however is not the time to relitigate my critiques over the years but just to point out that they go largely unrecognised by this paper.\nThere is one sweeping statement in this section that needs challenging:\n\u0026ldquo;Translating SSI into existing centrally controlled identity systems as a technical substitute rather than a full interpretation of what it means to implement a new socio-technical system with re-aligned incentives, open and transparent governance, and respect for human rights can only exacerbate the existing harms of those systems.”\nI can’t agree. Switching relatively abruptly from one well-understood governance paradigm to one that is completely untested at scale and admits to having developed with mono-disciplinary blinkers is very far from a comforting prospect.\nWith all that said, this is the best section in this part of the paper, which is less of an accolade and more of an indictment of the other sections. I’m guessing that’s because the legal domain shares some structural and cognitive patterns with information technologists given the long association of the IT industry with the provision of services to government and other bureaucratic organisations.\nDear lawmakers and regulators Please know that SSI is evidently not the product of a socio-technical systems approach. SSI has not been the subject of interdisciplinary design or development. You should not trust (make yourselves and the rest of us vulnerable to) the claim made in this draft paper that it is.\nHowever, the paper is accurate by my reading in noting:\nThe more we explore unwanted side effects from digital identity ecosystems, the more questions we have. It may take decades of international, interdisciplinary collaboration to find those answers, but this is a starting point.\nAs I have written in my critiques to date, if society does not tightly constrain applications of SSI then we will witness pollution of the information ecology of human nature and human culture that will cause unprecedented human suffering. The effort required now to move beyond SSI with diligent interdisciplinarity is nothing compared to the effort required to clean up such pollution and its effects after the fact.\nWhen the community writes about \u0026ldquo;felt harms\u0026rdquo;, they mean psychological and physical harm. When they conclude that \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;do nothing\u0026rsquo; or \u0026rsquo;technology is neutral\u0026rsquo; defences are no longer acceptable” you will know that such defences have never been acceptable and appreciate I hope that this was and still might be a mindset underpinning SSI.\nWhen you read in the very same paper that \u0026ldquo;SSI is better adapted to represent human identity\u0026rdquo; and also that human identity \u0026ldquo;is dynamic, fluid and made up of complex processes; the mere idea of expressing such a nuanced and subtle thing as human identity as a series of data items causes many harms, both intentional and otherwise\u0026rdquo;, your sense-making faculties will determine I hope that the SSI community makes too little sense to itself let alone the rest of us.\nMy first public critique explicitly invited constructive response and engagement that never came — with the exception of the invitation to join ToIP and subscribe to its view of the world! I will point out the kind invitation to contribute a dissenting chapter to the SSI book, but also note that its inclusion was very much touch-and-go, it did not make the print edition, and no-one other than one of the book\u0026rsquo;s lovely editors had any desire to talk about it.\nI write now for you dear lawmakers and regulators in the hope that you will rein this in tightly, and sooner than later. I write for those who wish to pursue generative identity — digitally mediated and augmented human identity approached primarily for psychological, sociological, and ecological health.\nPlease let me know how I might help.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2023/01/live-or-die-a-review-of-a-draft-industry-paper-on-the-harms-of-ssi/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/DALL%C2%B7E-2023-01-26-114938-eddy-current-abstract-graphic-art-red-spectrum-dynamic-sized-1024x500-1.jpeg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDear lawmakers and regulators, this draft industry paper doesn\u0026rsquo;t do the job. I explain why in the hope that you will act.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/live-or-die/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Live or DIE — a review of a draft industry paper on the harms of SSI"},{"content":"\nThe point of failure is precisely where Web3 technology meets you and me. We must change our approach, not just to avoid failure, but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.\nFirst published to the generative identity website .\nThere are varied definitions of Web3. If I\u0026rsquo;m going to talk about its future #fail, I\u0026rsquo;d better offer up my working definition.\nWeb3 is a subset of the decentralized web (dweb ) describing the relatively recent application of novel cryptographic techniques to the challenges of distributed computing. Distributed ledger technology is a subset of Web3, of which blockchain is one form. For me, information-centric networking (e.g. IPFS, Hypercore, Maidsafe, and Swarm) and so-called self-sovereign identity (SSI) also come under the Web3 banner.\nA distributed system is a collection of independent entities that cooperate to solve a problem that cannot be individually solved. Distributed systems have been in existence for millions of years. From a school of fish and a flock of birds to entire ecosystems of microorganisms, there is communication among intelligent agents in nature. Distributed computing is a distributed system typified by a collection of computing resources that share neither a common physical clock nor memory, and are usually separated geographically with autonomy and heterogeneity.\nA system is decentralized when it doesn’t have central components through which information flows, thereby avoiding concentrations of control and power. E.F. Schumacher considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes.” (Small is Beautiful, 1973 )\nInfluenced by Paul Baran\u0026rsquo;s seminal paper (On Distributed Communications Networks, 1962 ), the idea of a distributed network may be taken to represent extreme decentralization. His diagrammatic representation is referenced widely, so let\u0026rsquo;s not be the exception here \u0026hellip;\nHowever, Valdis Krebs conveyed to me in conversation that he\u0026rsquo;s never mapped a social network that looks anything remotely like Baran\u0026rsquo;s archetypal distributed topology. Post-Baran then, distributed has achieved currency in describing techniques for coordinating digital computation, whereas decentralization is the clarion call one hears whenever contemplating human systems with the desire to avoid those concentrations of power (see Schneider 2019 ). For example, we talk in terms of decentralized organising (DAO) and distributed ledgers.\nRegardless, human systems are inevitably in the mix.\nDistributed systems are the result of complex, innovative processes in which technological components cannot be separated from social ones. While centralized systems can be developed without considering the social fabric in which they will be implemented, this is impossible when the technological solution in question is a distributed one. In fact, the more a system is scattered and networked, the larger and more connected is its interface with society and the more the social side of innovation has to be considered. \u0026hellip; we can say that no distributed system can be implemented \u0026hellip; without social innovation. \u0026hellip; Being localized, small, connected and open, these promising social innovations actively contribute to the realization of resilient, distributed socio-technical systems. (Manzini \u0026amp; M’Rithaa 2017 )\nTechnology that isn\u0026rsquo;t centralized requires the participation of many people to do at least several of: learn about it, pay for it, instantiate it, learn to use it, configure it, maintain it, govern it, explain it, develop it, audit it, fork it, improve it, and merge it. One uses the technology and is used by it in a deeper, more involved sense than for centrally-managed software. In other words, whenever technology isn\u0026rsquo;t centralized it\u0026rsquo;s not just plain old technology but fully-fledged sociotechnology, i.e. necessarily involving the application of insights from the social sciences to design policies and programs (see Bunge 1999 ). All the more so of course when the immediate design goals are definitionally social, e.g. social networking, identity, reputation, conversation, organising.\nFor the avoidance of any confusion then, I don\u0026rsquo;t write sociotechnology simply to refer to technology used by people. The socio prefix relates to the diligent design process, i.e. calling on social science expertise. Such expertise has helped some companies create addictive products and services, but my framing here relates to healthy, ethical, and generative outcomes.\nIf you are drawn to the dweb, if you are keen to help it progress, then you will improve the odds if you do a find-and-replace wherever you have editing rights. Adding socio prompts us to think differently and so act differently.\nSocial scientists study people, our relationships, our sense- and meaning-making, our communing, our cooperation and our conflicts. They may take human flourishing as a worthwhile object of study for example, exploring it in terms of a broad range of states and outcomes, \u0026ldquo;certainly including mental and physical health, but also encompassing happiness and life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.\u0026rdquo; (VanderWeele 2017 )\nOther concepts of primary interest include agency, freedom, power, behaviour, identity, reputation, culture, democracy, rights, justice, and jurisprudence, many of which pepper the slidestacks and homepages of Web3 projects.\nWhereas information technologists may label you a mere user and perhaps treat you as nothing more than a used-by, sociotechnologists ground their work in an appreciation for such vital human processes as sentience, conversation, cognition, identity, social norms, social interaction, and structuration. That last one is the name for the enduring accretion of patterns of social arrangements which are in turn a medium of the practices they organise. Popular software protocols and code are structure.\nWhat word might imbue greater dignity than user? Calling a human human is undoubtedly more respectful then reducing them to a mere user (or worse, consumer), but there\u0026rsquo;s no denying that it can sound a bit ridiculous simply swapping in human where one might traditionally use user. I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a habit of substituting in Alice instead.\nAnd Alice is changing.\nShe is never static, by the very qualities of being alive, but there\u0026rsquo;s also an unprecedented reshaping underway; a rearrangement.\nAlice can no longer be described or understood solely in terms of the biological, psychological, and social. Today, she is an assemblage including information technology. Her sensing, her sense-making, and her actuation are digitally enabled. She is cyborg. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean that in the Hollywood sense of having a robotic limb or two, or perhaps x-ray vision, but rather that a good part of the information flows and processing on which she relies in sensing, making sense of, and acting in the world are digitally mediated. These are essential living processes (Capra \u0026amp; Luisi 2014 ).\nThis may be too much of a stretch for some readers, in which case I invite you to carry on reading on the basis that Alice is simply inseparable from her digital interfaces. \u0026lsquo;The digital\u0026rsquo; is deeply interwoven into many aspects of her life, of the life of her communities.\nEither way, as noted above (\u0026ldquo;there is communication among intelligent agents\u0026rdquo;), it\u0026rsquo;s critical to any good purpose you may describe in the contexts of Web3 to ensure that everyone in your team appreciates that Alice / the cyborg Alice is the intelligent agent of interest here, not the technology per se.\nAnd so here we are.\nWeb3 meet Alice.\nAlice meet Web3.\nWe have then a new \u0026lsquo;quality\u0026rsquo; of Alice. How might we \u0026rsquo;look at\u0026rsquo; Web3 through, in, and as Alice?\nIf we want to learn a bit more about her living and being and becoming in various groups, communities, and societies, if we want to see how we might help her, if we want to ensure we don\u0026rsquo;t harm her, then it should be obvious that a social scientist is more immediately useful than a computer scientist. That\u0026rsquo;s not to say that computer science isn\u0026rsquo;t relevant; we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be having this wonderful conversation without it! Nevertheless, in light of our duty of care to Alice (i.e. to ourselves, to our loved ones), computer science must come to social science so to speak, must learn from social science, must work into social science.\nThis is not an original observation, far from it, but one might perhaps claim that it\u0026rsquo;s common sense to the point that it\u0026rsquo;s largely glossed over. Of the Web3-related job vacancies you\u0026rsquo;ve seen, what is the ratio of techie roles .v. social science roles?\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a short Twitter thread on the topic started by Vlad Zamfir, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation.\nTwitter link So we have a bit of a problem.\nWhile undoubtedly an over-simplification, it\u0026rsquo;s not wholly inaccurate to characterise computer science as predominantly Newtonian and bureaucratic in nature, drawn to arborescent structures, assembled from elementary entities, and predicated on rendering entities legible to the system (aka making them universally addressable). Alice is considered an addressable thing. The system might strive to correlate identifiers representing Alice in the system until her \u0026lsquo;singular thinginess\u0026rsquo; is represented singularly. (Indeed, give Alice something of very small but immediate value and it seems she will happily self-triangulate and self-correlate in her innocent ignorance of the poor systemic consequences.)\nBy contrast, social science is immersed in complexity, in community, and observant of heterarchical / rhizomatic structures. There is no elementary set of entities by which to ground everything else. When it comes to \u0026lsquo;addressability\u0026rsquo;, social scientists adopt a more localised, more contextualised, more subjective, more dynamic, and more cognitive view of the world. Relationships and individuals are of equal importance because to consider one is necessarily to consider the other. Human identity may be described more in terms of a capacity for and continuous process of sense-making rather than, say, anything to do with a national identity card. Identity processes are regarded as nothing less than a defining essence of the human condition and of our comparatively successful evolution as a species.\nAll in all, it\u0026rsquo;s far more challenging than rocket science, as Elon Musk is finding out.\n(Just to note, social scientists also study the social contexts and consequences of all variety of identity systems, but in the context of how these systems impact people\u0026rsquo;s lives. To my knowledge, the existence of such digital systems has not prompted a revision of their conceptualizations of human identity.)\nFor more on the essentially human question of identity in the context of Web3, I can point you to my essay co-published by the AKASHA Foundation and the Kernel community earlier this year, Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science .\nThe #fail So we\u0026rsquo;ve arrived at the conditions for Web3\u0026rsquo;s future #fail:\nToo many working in Web3 appear to conceive of Web3 wrongly, as mere technology rather than sociotechnology; social scientists are too few and far between\nSociotechnology is a challenging undertaking given that the dominant paradigms of social science and computer science appear to clash in some fundamental ways.\nThe question then arises:\nCan Web3 deliver the social advantages promised by its evangelists when these longed-for benefits pivot on demanding Alice and her community adopt systematizations of computer science\u0026rsquo;s conceptualization of identity rather than of social science\u0026rsquo;s?\nOr to put it another way, in the context of a blog post I wrote earlier this year :\nWhen social graph connection trumps human connection, where exactly does that leave Alice, and where does that leave community?\nNot in a good place by my analysis (see my essay 👆🏼).\nUnless there is a flaw in my essay\u0026rsquo;s rationale that I\u0026rsquo;ve not seen, and the dozen reviewers didn\u0026rsquo;t see, and readers haven\u0026rsquo;t seen (including a good handful of academics steeped in this stuff), then for as long as we continue to code for computer science\u0026rsquo;s conceptualization of identity and not social science\u0026rsquo;s, ALL of the work carried out under the banner of Web3 (and the dweb more broadly) will not be for nothing. No, not for nothing. It\u0026rsquo;s worse than that. At scale, it will produce outcomes opposite to those intended.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s ALL the work because all the work is sociotechnology, no decentralized tech stands in isolation, and we will have failed in the socio contexts. Specifically, instead of being sensible and meaningful (i.e. taking full advantage of our deep and beautiful capacities for perception and for making sense, making meaning), the interface between \u0026rsquo;the digital\u0026rsquo; and the sentience and mind of the human species is collapsed down to the mindless, contextless, individuating and regimenting programmatic structure of the digital side of the equation.\nWe can avoid this.\nNot with a solution, as Nora Bateson (2016 ) points out \u0026hellip;\nThe promise of increased knowledge is that it might help us to solve the problems we face. But the problem with problem-solving is the idea that a solution is an endpoint. There are no endpoints in complex systems, only tendrils that diffuse and reorganize situations \u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip; but with a never-ending process.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I (think I) know:\nMind will be the pre-eminent consideration, with focus on its augmentation rather than substitution\nWe are necessarily contemplating a complex of codebases: technological (protocols and software), legal (law), and social (norms and patterns)\nThe necessary processes, their encodings, and their (re)combinations will be public goods per the right to freedom of thought\nOutside tightly constrained contexts requiring we treat identity as noun-like (e.g. democratic process, wealth distribution, a good part of law), we will design for human identity as verb-like, as a capacity for and continuous process of sense-making\nWe will approach the technological augmentation of human identity as a living process and its domain an ecology\nThe requisite complex of codebases will manifest differently in a plurality of contexts and cultures and times, respectful of Alice\u0026rsquo;s and her communities\u0026rsquo; agency, dignity, and culture\nWe will bridge the computer science and social science disciplines with the anti-discipline of cybernetics, and bridge cybernetics and design with conversation\nThe technological augmentation of conversation will facilitate more effective dialogue; from the Greek dia·logos meaning a flow of meaning, considered a cornerstone of civic practice by the Greeks (see William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, 1999 ).\nCybernetics is a way of thinking that bridges perception, cognition and living-in-the-stream-of-experience (the involvement of the observer), which gives important value to interaction and what we hold between ourselves and others – whether animate or inanimate. \u0026hellip; It comes from a mechanical metaphor for the animate, which is now partnered by an animate metaphor for the mechanical. \u0026hellip; [F]or me its interest lies in the significance given to the involved observer and the consequent individuality of and responsibility for his/her actions. (Ranulph Glanville 2007 )\nAs if the dystopia avoided (hopefully) and the psychological, sociological and ecological benefits accrued were not enough, adopting such an approach could be the gift that keeps on giving beyond the immediate design challenge of human identity (see Dubberly and Pangaro 2015 ).\nNow, we just need to figure out how to fund this work, these public goods, as a matter of urgency.\nWith thanks to Ray Schmitz for his comments on a first draft.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2022/11/web3s-future-fail-is-avoidable/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Graphics_16a-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe point of failure is precisely where Web3 technology meets you and me. We must change our approach, not just to avoid failure, but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/web3s-future-fail-is-avoidable/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Web3's future #fail is avoidable"},{"content":"\nIf your work involves architecting or designing or developing or policymaking for the interweave of people and digital technologies, or researching the consequences, may I invite you to check out my new essay: Human identity — the number one challenge in computer science .\nWonderfully, I\u0026rsquo;ve been helped by thirteen reviewers offering more than two hundred questions and suggestions over six months. The work has been funded 🙏🏼 by the AKASHA Foundation , and is co-published with the brilliant Kernel community. Here\u0026rsquo;s a very quick outline \u0026hellip;\nComputer science conceptualized digital identity to serve its initial market — selling its wares to governments and large organizations to manage inventories of users, citizens, and customers. Computer science adopted the tenets of legal and bureaucratic identity wholesale, inclined to consider people as just another machine for lack of any imperative to think otherwise at the time.\nDigital identity has not been designed to rise up to the roles and operations that the vast majority of other disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, cultural studies, history, political science) attribute human identity. It\u0026rsquo;s designed explicitly not to be contextual, malleable, multiple, social, temporary, subjective, dynamic, emergent. Most fundamentally, whereas digital identity is merely a thing to render users legible to the system for authentication, authorization, and/or record keeping, human identity is a socially vital process and sense-making capacity. In short, digital identity as it\u0026rsquo;s currently conceived and operationalised is not what you might call human at all.\nThis disparity may have been OK(ish) when ‘the digital’ was somewhat detached from ‘the real world’, but we’re at least fifteen years on now from that being the case. \u0026lsquo;The digital\u0026rsquo; is irreversibly fused into the fabric of our lives with the growing pervasiveness of social media, the mass migration from big screens to small ones, and the astonishing growth in the computing and sensory capabilities of those small screen devices. It is inappropriate to continue referring to such devices as phones; they represent our exobrains and exo-peripheral nervous systems. They are our interface into and through \u0026rsquo;the digital\u0026rsquo; just as we are the interface for digital systems into the analogue world.\nRegardless, the operations of human identity remain forever essential for dignity, autonomy, cooperation, and flourishing. The exponential expansion of digital identity now being contemplated — cheered on by technologists and policymakers alike — threatens the continued operation of human identity. What are they not yet seeing? How are the celebrated protocols toxic? And how must we proceed from here?\nThe drawing used at the top of this blog post and for the front cover of the essay © Marc Ngui . All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2022/07/digital-identity-is-not-human-identity-and-that-matters/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A drawing outlining two people and the information flows without.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/human-identity-hero-image-1024.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf your work involves architecting or designing or developing or policymaking for the interweave of people and digital technologies, or researching the consequences, may I invite you to check out my new essay: \u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/human-identity-the-number-one-challenge-in-computer-science/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHuman identity — the number one challenge in computer science\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWonderfully, I\u0026rsquo;ve been helped by thirteen reviewers offering more than two hundred questions and suggestions over six months. The work has been funded 🙏🏼 by \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation\u003c/a\u003e\n, and is co-published with the brilliant \u003ca href=\"https://kernel.community/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKernel\u003c/a\u003e\n community. Here\u0026rsquo;s a very quick outline \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Digital identity is not human identity, and that matters"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA blog .\nWho doesn’t love a good concept?! Concepts are the fundamental building blocks of thinking, of designing. While there are plenty of things in the mix when it comes to contemplating system design, if the primary concepts remain unchallenged and unchanged from what came before, then the outcome will likely look very familiar. If you want system change , start with changing the paradigm — the system of concepts and patterns that form the worldview.\nBy way of a quick example, if the economy of your new system picks up on the concepts collectively known as capitalism — e.g. private ownership, capital accumulation, scarcity — then perhaps it should not be a huge surprise when your new system turns out to be capitalist too. New code. Same concepts. Familiar outcome.\nTechnological decentralization isn’t magic dust. Merely decentralizing the technical structures or components manifesting a concept is no guarantee of different outcomes; technological decentralizing doesn’t even guarantee decentralization.\nSo with that said, this post is about a concept known as “the social graph”.\nI put the phrase in quotation marks to convey that it’s considered a BIG thing. To help you get in the right sort of mindset for this post, I invite you to say the phrase again in your head — or even better out loud — in dramatic Hollywood voice-over style.\n🎥 🎬 I’ll wait 😆\n\u0026hellip; So let’s start this movie at the beginning.\n⚠️ Spoiler alert: there are two cuts with quite different endings and so then quite different implications for the part you might play.\nA very brief history of the social graph The measurement and study of networks of relationships among members of a social group took off after the First World War culminating in Jacob L. Moreno’s groundbreaking 1934 book on sociometry, Who Shall Survive? (see Freeman 1996 ).\nWhile studying truancy at the New York Training School for Girls, Moreno developed the sociogram, the now famous representation of people and their relationships as nodes and edges. Commonly referred to as the social graph these days, here’s an example graph from his book and its more modern presentation.\nEvolution of Groups, Who Shall Survive?, Moreno, p36\nMartin Grandjean, BY-SA 4.0 What was Moreno’s goal? Well, here’s something that might interest you from the foreword to his book (courtesy of the Internet Archive ):\nForeword to Who Shall Survive?\nWhile we might appreciate nearly nine decades later that interpersonal relationships might not be quite so compliant, nor the pursuit of “efficiency” quite so mechanistic, that’s not the point. We find out here that social graphs were conceived not merely to understand groups but in fact to help control them. As Moreno himself noted:\n\u0026hellip; this superimposition of a mechanical-social network upon a psycho-social network produces a situation that takes society unawares and removes it more and more beyond human control.\nJacob Moreno, Who Shall Survive? Fast forward ⏩ to Facebook’s popularization of the social graph from 2007 integrating this property into its business model, and it’s no wonder many of us wish to digitalize things differently. But let’s not make this entirely about Facebook. Let’s take a look at some decentralizing initiatives and their founding concepts in chronological order, and then we can talk about those concepts.\nIn solidarity I’m going to take a short visit to a chapter in Google’s history and then onto some dweb (decentralized web) projects. As I’m going to be critical, I want to be clear about something up front.\nWe want to shout out RESPECT ✊🏼 to anyone innovating in the dweb context with the aim of making the world a better place for everyone. For example, dsocial (decentralized social) should be a means to some most welcome ends, not least in prompting Emperor Zuckerberg to renounce his throne and engage with society as one of us rather than one above us. Nevertheless, if dsocial was easy, the likes of Facebook et al would already be little more than Wikipedia entries for historical reference. But here we are.\nDsocial is complex and it’s going to need a heap of innovation and cooperation, so the more ideas and the more experiments and the more conversation, the faster we can all get to where we want to go 😍. Criticism is offered only with that shared goal and shared effort in mind.\nGoogle social graph API, 2007 Google aspired to produce a sort-of-but-not-really-decentralized social graph with its Social Graph API project, 2007 - 2012. It was sort of decentralized because it relied on everyone ‘out there’ publishing structured data about themselves and their relationships on their own websites and blogging profiles that the company could then ingest to spit out an API anyone might use to quiz the graph. Here’s a brief presentation (PDF) from one of the project leads at the time.\nThe assembly of the graph and the provision of the API are centralized, but then so are the likes of Infura and Alchemy and aspects of the AKASHA framework currently.\nClearly, the project inherited one concept without question, the concept of the social graph. One assumes Google was intent on profiting with its Social Graph API or more likely, in line with its typical modus operandi, because of it, per Facebook’s social graph API today. We will never know.\nThe project was shelved when adoption fell short of expectations. As Facebook was IPOing and achieving a userbase of one billion monthly active users in 2012, I’m guessing only a teeny tiny fraction of that userbase also published the requisite structured data some place, and of those that did, it was likely set-and-forget.\nAKASHA, 2015 The AKASHA Foundation has pioneered dsocial since 2015. Our early experimental products published a social graph to the blockchain — as the saying goes, we’ve been there done that — but our latest incarnation does not.\nWe are learning by doing. Openly. And we aren’t taking any conceptual ideas from earlier digital innovations and initiatives for granted for fear, as I indicated above, of merely repeating history. This might mean we keep some facets centralized as a public good for now until we can crystallize new conceptual models and put them to the test with community in community. That process is well underway .\nProject Liberty, 2021 Are you ready to create a web that works better for all?\nThe homepage continues:\nProject Liberty includes the development of a new infrastructure to serve as a foundational layer for the next generation of the web. At the core is a groundbreaking open source protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) \u0026hellip; The key to change lies in the power of combining our social networks in one unified social graph that is free from corporate control.\nThe proposition could not be clearer: replace privatized social networking platforms with “an open architecture” featuring “one unified social graph” that is owned by everyone as a public good. Rather than having to “surrender ownership and control” over our data, the Project Liberty team believes that “giving people ownership and control of their own data is the first step to break the cycle and shift the balance of power.” In short, the project aims “to reclaim the social graph ”.\nThe project inherits three dominant concepts without question:\nthe concept of the social graph\nthe concept of treating data as property\nthe concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.\nDeSo (previously often referred to as BitClout), 2021 The DeSo initiative presents itself as “the decentralized social blockchain”, and describes social media as “one of the biggest markets for blockchain”.\nIt’s not entirely clear to me why social media should be described so prominently in terms of it being a market other than to recognize the imperative to deliver ROI for early investors — the homepage lists no fewer than fourteen VC firms. It could be argued that the primacy of commercial motivations in the context of social networking has already been shown to be \u0026hellip; well, shall we say \u0026hellip; sub-optimal.\nNevertheless, putting this urgent need for DeSo to one side, what can we learn about the initiative’s conceptual grounding?\nThe DeSo initiative’s documentation (especially here ) and a fleeting reference to the social graph in a blog post appears to confirm that the project inherits two dominant concepts:\nthe concept of the social graph\nthe concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.\nLens, 2022 The Lens Protocol is a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.\nEasy? Bless those marketing communicators! “Social” includes human beings, so never easy.\nLens renders a singular social graph publicly on a blockchain, and the introductory overview talks in terms of people owning their data and owning the links between them with shared ownership of the resultant monolith. So just for clarity:\nUsers will own everything.\nThe project inherits three dominant concepts without question:\nthe concept of the social graph\nthe concept of treating data as property\nthe concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.\nConceive to conceive The word concept has its roots in the Latin for conceiving, i.e. creating, forming, devising, generating. To rephrase my opening point here, we are very much less likely to get anywhere new if we don’t create or generate anew.\nThere’s a critical meta implication here too given our context.\nWhat if the ongoing facilities for all social networking participants and communities to conceive wonderful new generative futures pivots in some way on the fundamental conceptual choices we make right here right now? Are we not, in this moment, conceiving a social system for conceiving? If a dsocial system falls short of being generative in this way, is it degenerative?\nMisconceptions Project Liberty, DeSo, and Lens inherit three concepts to varying degrees. Social graphing is the main focus here, so let’s address the other two very briefly.\nThe propertization of data is a category error. It is not property. Moreover, to try to treat it as such is unethical. I couldn’t put it better than the European Data Protection Supervisor who likened the possible emergence of markets for personal data with markets for live human organs. To find out more, I can point you to a series of three blog posts on the topic: The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of “personal data” .\nThe dominant computer science conception of identity is inherited entirely from the bureaucratization of identity, of which legal identity is a well known example. Just to be clear, this is not good news when it’s extended into every aspect of life. Its dominance is not surprising however given that bureaucracy, in the form of governments and large companies, was the IT industry’s first customer. But there is a chasmic difference between the bureaucratic approach to identity and how human identity works as a sense-making capacity in human community. For more on this topic, check out the generative identity website.\nOf course, it is not really possible to separate interpersonal data and identity from social graphing \u0026hellip;\nYour graph or mine? Human identity might be described as a dynamic, contextual, multiple and subjective social location of persons in relationships with others for the purposes of sense-making and cooperation. It is about being and becoming, together. On the other hand, bureaucracy must render each and every citizen legible to the state, to the system. The bureaucratic machinery applies a singular, rigid, enduring and non-contextual identifier. You are in fact just a number as far as the state is concerned, and the accelerating process of digitalization is advancing the bureaucratic concept adeptly everywhere you look. 👆🏼👇🏼\nFacebook necessarily renders its users legible to its system. The Facebook social graph is not yours nor mine but the Facebook system’s. The graph is singular and reifies the informational contexts as required by the system’s encoded goals rather than your needs or preferences or values, or mine. This stands whether the social graph is operated by a for-profit company, a non-profit company, or as a public good (or is that a public-not-so-good?) For the sociologists out there, the social graph is deep and wide and stubborn structure.\nThe social graph’s role is transformed with use and with growth. It begins as nothing more than a miserably (or perhaps beautifully?!) imperfect description of a rich and diverse human network but, in the total absence of alternative digitally-accessible graphs or stories, it is soon confused for “the truth”. The system wields its graph to determine who ‘knows’ who, who is interacting with whom, and to determine what’s important, what’s trending, according to its inevitably imperfect guesses at your contexts. We are nothing more to the system or then to each other (“social” anyone?) than a weak signal. We no longer constitute a “we” — adoption of the singular social graph concept sets the system up to atomize us and demarcate us for the purposes and assumptions encoded in its architectures and algorithms. Just for the avoidance of doubt, this purpose cannot constitute meaningful human connection by definition. Graph connection trumps that.\nIt is frustrating to have no direct agency over the social graph in the instance of Facebook but at least the distant and opaque megacorp in charge must comply with regulations our democratic representatives develop on our behalf (with some jurisdictions more on the front foot than others), with concerns for privacy being foremost of course. Only the Facebook system gets to ‘see’ the whole graph so your privacy could be respected in principle but for the accompanying business model requiring the company to farm and sell your attention.\nAttempts to write a monolithic social graph to a distributed ledger introduce a different technology ‘on the back end’, but the social graph concept remains unchallenged and unchanged. The mechanics of the protocol necessarily renders you legible once again to the system. When this is also in plain sight (in the absence of prohibiting regulation), the individual’s response will be the same response as always when caught in a panopticon — self-censorship. As and when commercial motivations are embedded as deeply as for Facebook, it will very likely and very quickly start to look all the more remarkably like Facebook.\nA modern-day Pink Floyd (ref ) might sing \u0026hellip;\n🎼 It’s no laugh — you’re just another node in the graph.\nRather than one graph assimilating billions of people, imagine now what we might actually want from the digital components of our cyborg selves to help us achieve our goals and better live up to our values in combinations with others; the very definition of autonomy . And perhaps, given that our multiple selves in this respect are reciprocally defined by and co-evolving in relationships with others’ selves, the idea of a billion small graphs is a more real, more natural, more decentralized and innately more human pattern more likely to produce outcomes that may be described in terms such as dignity, agency, autonomy, intelligence, flourishing, and well-being. The ROI will be immense, just of different and more valuable kinds.\nDoes this feel like the makings of an edgy concept?\nPlaying your part Which combination of concepts you chose to pursue or support will come down to the part you’d like to play and the parts you’d love to see your friends and family play, and so then the ‘edit’ you prefer.\nIn one edit of the movie, the system, monolithic and stubborn beyond the scale of any meaningful or contextual governance, collated the weak signals relating to the thicket of global super-wicked problems and reflected them back at you and your friends and family, but lacking autonomy and the freedoms to self-govern and self-organize at human scale, the changes came faster than community could respond. It’s a tragedy. Game over. May the next dominant species properly grasp the lessons Nature has to teach.\nIn the other edit, the end credits begin to roll as plural, autonomous, cyborgian communities determine their own micro-structures and delight in the generativity that allowed them to rise up together to the movie’s thematic storyline with an unexpected freedom of mind and resilient collective intelligence. Participating as nature, these transhumans live to tell their stories another day.\nHeader image from pxfuel .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2022/03/we-need-to-talk-about-the-social-graph/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/silhouettes-1024-1.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2022/03/22/we-need-to-talk-about-the-social-graph\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the AKASHA blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho doesn’t love a good concept?! Concepts are the fundamental building blocks of thinking, of designing. While there are plenty of things in the mix when it comes to contemplating system design, if the primary concepts remain unchallenged and unchanged from what came before, then the outcome will likely look very familiar. \u003ca href=\"https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIf you want system change\u003c/a\u003e\n, start with changing the paradigm — the system of concepts and patterns that form the worldview.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy way of a quick example, if the economy of your new system picks up on the concepts collectively known as capitalism — e.g. private ownership, capital accumulation, scarcity — then perhaps it should not be a huge surprise when your new system turns out to be capitalist too. New code. Same concepts. Familiar outcome.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTechnological decentralization isn’t magic dust. Merely decentralizing the technical structures or components manifesting a concept is no guarantee of different outcomes; technological decentralizing doesn’t even guarantee decentralization.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo with that said, this post is about a concept known as “the social graph”.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"We need to talk about the social graph"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA blog .\nOur monthly AKASHA Conversations explore critical facets of decentralized social networking, with a focus this quarter at least on all things moderating. We welcomed Murat Ayfer as our expert speaker last month.\nMurat is our kind of guy. Having experienced the lows, highs, and more lows of moderating a 60k+ member community, he has been thinking of ways to make moderating more scalable, so that decentralized social networking is more scalable. But more than thinking — he has been coding too, as you can see at https://beta.spiel.com/ .\nScalability refers to the ease with which a system can adjust its size, its capacity, as needed. There’s no doubting that computing resource is now fully scalable, almost trivially so, but humans don’t work the same as machines. I make this point quite often. In digital identity for example, machine identity is quite different from the digital mediation and augmentation of human identity in digitalised social networks. In our context here, centralized social networking scales people in ways that are proving, increasingly, to lead to very poor outcomes. Decentralized social networking very likely needs to learn more from the social sciences than, say, Facebook.\nhttps://youtu.be/xsw4CngRFss About the AKASHA Conversations AKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way, AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of decentralized conversation.\nHeader image by Raeann Buskey on Pixy .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2022/03/akasha-conversations-3-an-idea-called-fractal-localism/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/fractal-art-spiral-mathematics-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2022/02/25/akasha-conversation-03-decentralized-moderation\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the AKASHA blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur monthly AKASHA Conversations explore critical facets of decentralized social networking, with a focus this quarter at least on all things moderating. We welcomed \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/mayfer\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMurat Ayfer\u003c/a\u003e\n as our expert speaker last month.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMurat is our kind of guy. Having experienced the lows, highs, and more lows of moderating a 60k+ member community, he has been thinking of ways to make moderating more scalable, so that decentralized social networking is more scalable. But more than thinking — he has been coding too, as you can see at \u003ca href=\"https://beta.spiel.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttps://beta.spiel.com/\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScalability refers to the ease with which a system can adjust its size, its capacity, as needed. There’s no doubting that computing resource is now fully scalable, almost trivially so, but humans don’t work the same as machines. I make this point quite often. In digital identity for example, machine identity is quite different from the digital mediation and augmentation of human identity in digitalised social networks. In our context here, centralized social networking scales people in ways that are proving, increasingly, to lead to very poor outcomes. Decentralized social networking very likely needs to learn more from the social sciences than, say, Facebook.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"AKASHA Conversations #3 — An idea called fractal localism"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA blog .\nHere’s how we set up the second AKASHA Conversation \u0026hellip;\nWhere does #web3 go after #DeFi? It gets social! 💫 And the difference between social and antisocial = new designs for moderating.\nYou can read about the first Conversation in this series on moderating here FYI, and I will just borrow the bit that describes what it’s all about \u0026hellip;\nAKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action.\nWe were delighted to be joined in Conversation #2 by Joseph Seering , a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. Joseph focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of moderation systems, and pulled out some wonderful insights from his many years of studying the art and science of moderating.\nhttps://youtu.be/R5bFCulEE9M I will keep this post short so you can watch his presentation, but one over-arching message gives us confidence that we can do this together. Joseph’s research indicates that people want to moderate community. I guess it’s a natural urge, a social necessity, and so we need to find the patterns and structures to translate pre-/non-digital moderating into the digitalized world so that we can move out from underneath the centralized corporate surveillance that typifies web 2 social networking. Everyone is invited to the conversation, and indeed to the collaboration. The AKASHA Foundation intends to fund and co-create moderating systems for decentralized social networks, and the wider the participation, the more interdisciplinary the participation, the faster the progress. Just get in touch !\nHeader image by Mostafa Meraji on Unsplash .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2022/01/akasha-conversations-2-lessons-from-moderating-web2-social-networks/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"yellow flowers on blue background\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/yellow-flowers-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2022/01/24/akasha-conversation-02-decentralized-moderation\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the AKASHA blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere’s how we set up the second AKASHA Conversation \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere does #web3 go after #DeFi? It gets social! 💫 And the difference between social and antisocial = new designs for moderating.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou can \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/12/akasha-conversations-1-designing-for-moderating-decentralized-social-networks/\"\u003eread about the first Conversation in this series on moderating here\u003c/a\u003e\n FYI, and I will just borrow the bit that describes what it’s all about \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe were delighted to be joined in Conversation #2 by \u003ca href=\"https://joseph.seering.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJoseph Seering\u003c/a\u003e\n, a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. Joseph focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of moderation systems, and pulled out some wonderful insights from his many years of studying the art and science of moderating.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"AKASHA Conversations #2 — Lessons from moderating web2 social networks"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA blog .\nAKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way, AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of decentralized conversation.\nDecentralized social networking is, effectively, the design for decentralized and civilized information exchange — conversation and other forms of interaction. Immediately adjacent to that of course is then the facility to code for (in the combined technological and sociological sense) whatever agreements have been reached through conversation.\nEsko Kilpi nails it :\nKnowledge that used to be understood as the internal property of an individual should now be seen as networked communication. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about education, competencies and work itself. What is also needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Work is communication and the network is the amplifier of knowledge. The process of communication is the process of knowing. Knowledge work is about a community-based cognitive and emotional presence. Bridging, bonding and belonging. … Work is communication. Conversations and narratives are the new documents. Conversations cannot be controlled. The only way to influence conversations is to take part in them.\nOur first such conversation on 9th December began to explore the complexities of moderating decentralized social networks. Moderating is the subset of governing that structures participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse (reference ). In the web 3 context we\u0026rsquo;re effectively asking ourselves, how do we do this without needing 30,000 moderators on payroll? And without subjugating ourselves to some machine learning algorithm?\nMartin Etzrodt kicked off the webinar by outlining the very first steps the AKASHA team has taken on this journey — we are developing and testing a simple moderation tool in the Ethereum World alpha . It gets us off the starting line, importantly, but it is also the last part of the journey AKASHA will take by itself. It is and can only be community-designed progress from here on in, a transition marked by a presentation by Dr. Amy Hasinoff, author of Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent .\nAmy explored three dimensions: moving from content to community; from rules to dialogue; and from maintenance and repair to fundamental change, which I paraphrased as from malignant growth to regenerativity.\nClearly, it\u0026rsquo;s important to identify the questions before we can attempt answers, and here are three good ones that cropped up in the ensuing discussion:\nEd: \u0026ldquo;Who is the gatekeeper? Who is in control? And how is moderation in a decentralized social context different from its current form in web 2?\u0026rdquo; Mitko: \u0026ldquo;How can we accommodate different cultures as well as different contexts?\u0026rdquo; Ben: \u0026ldquo;If there is a perpetrator, how could we have a method of making amends?\u0026rdquo; https://youtu.be/dKt8WHD _brY\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/12/akasha-conversations-1-designing-for-moderating-decentralized-social-networks/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Cat in astronaut outfit\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/AKASHA-space-cat-1024.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2021/12/13/akasha-conversation-01-decentralized-moderation\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the AKASHA blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way, AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of decentralized conversation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDecentralized social networking is, effectively, the design for decentralized and civilized information exchange — conversation and other forms of interaction. Immediately adjacent to that of course is then the facility to code for (in the combined technological and sociological sense) whatever agreements have been reached through conversation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"AKASHA Conversations #1 — Designing for moderating decentralized social networks"},{"content":"\nIt is important to understand the ways in which software may be conjured into the world for the simple reason that software and information technologies more generally have immense social and economic impact. The genesis of such process has been called software architecture, and there have been various attempts over the years to define the term and corresponding activities precisely, specifically in relation to the elements, forms, rationale, and constraints involved (“What Is Your Definition of Software Architecture?,” 2017).\nA well-defined understanding of software architecture is critical to its practice and perhaps the word choice alone has helped sustain a certain nature of software architectural practice akin to that undertaken for buildings. The definitional approach taken by Perry and Wolf (1992) is typical of the traditional genre, drawing parallels with the precursors of hardware and network architecture, and their forerunner, the architecture of the built environment.\nSamuel Butler (1912) observed:\nAnalogy points in this direction, and though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.\nTo what degree are we misled by the architectural analogy? And might we find a better analogy, that is one that’s less misleading?\nBuildings are made from atoms. Their purpose may be captured up front as a set of requirements that will most likely correspond in good part to the requirements upon completion. They are comparatively inflexible for the simple reason that rearranging atoms entails significant investment of energy. They may be simple or complicated, but never complex (a building cannot have unpredictable moments of emergent behaviour other than in terms of its own software systems). And a building’s interface with its environment, utilities for example, is easily prescribed in terms that may remain unchanged for many decades.\nOn the other hand, software is intangible, and while it may be simple in the most trivial instances and complicated at any noteworthy scale, it is also complex. It’s ever-changing, even during initial assembly, because the context in which it is operationalised is fast- and ever-changing. Interfacing with its own kind adds additional complication and potential for complexity, and it is I feel this potent complexity that informs more recent attempts to define software architecture.\nMaking a distinction between traditional (1990s) and modern (21st Century) definitions, the Software Engineering Institute gravitates towards the definition by Bass et al (2003):\nThe software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them.\nThis emphasis of the interrelationships of structural elements appeals. The reference to visibility may be better phrased perhaps in terms of the ease with which other software architects and systems may sense structures — their properties and dynamics — for potential interconnection and extension. At this point one must return to the start of the definition to re-encounter “program” and “system”, singular, and question such singularity. Such delineation is not then a function of the software system per se but of the sociotechnical system in which software architects (of both concious / deliberate and unconcious / emergent kind) operate. As Conway noted (1968):\nany organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.\nModern software architecture is self-bounding by a desire to understand “how the system will behave” (“Software Architecture,” 2017) and the context in which the architecting happens. The latter exhibits complexity while the former is intent on avoiding it. This juxtaposition is, in my opinion, the germ of the next evolution in conceptualising software architecture — a zooming out to consider both the software and the people involved in ways that treat the two more as a unity. In the organisational context, this is the domain of enterprise architecture (EA).\nEA is about aligning an enterprise’s IT assets (through strategy, design, and management) to effectively execute the business strategy and various operations using the proper IT capabilities. … it aims to reduce IT costs through technology reuse and eliminating duplicate functionality. (Lapalme, 2012)\nAs I have noted previously , the EA process is considered the glue between business and IT. Unfortunately, EA in IT terms has not kept abreast of EA in non-IT terms. Enterprise IT architecting is mechanistic, a servant to the business strategy and, as Lapalme notes, it fails too often to consider IT part of the holistic and dynamic whole. In other words, it falls short by defining and pursuing a plan rather than striving to support and drive continuous change.\nService oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged in response, defined by Microsoft broadly as “a loosely-coupled architecture designed to meet the business needs of the organization.” (“Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),” 2017) SOA is a philosophical approach to building systems from autonomous services, and yet it has been plagued by the weakness of its acclaimed strength.\nThe SOA Manifesto (2009) describes SOA’s primary ambition as seeking to secure intrinsic interoperability over custom integration. And yet, no matter the technological instantiation, services are too frequently reusable and not especially useful, or useful and not especially reusable. Just as pertinently, SOA is fundamentally a top-down approach by nature, at odds with the bottom-up emergent response required for organisational agility (Morgenthal, 2009).\nBut all is not lost. Adrian Cockcroft at Netflix is amongst the pioneers of “fine grained SOA” known as microservices, in which the granularity is married to more rigorous decoupling (Fowler and Lewis, 2014). Fowler and Lewis describe it as:\nan approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms.\nWe have then journeyed from so-called monolithic code in the pre-architecture times, through the static schemata of 90s software architecting and the dynamic structural components of “modern” software architecture, to the mass profusion of smaller and smaller structures combining and recombining as required.\nThe current challenge with microservices is the corresponding absence of standardised, semantic context. Each and every service has its own flavour, for want of an agreed turn of phrase, leaving it useful only in the company of other services with similar provenance.\nJansen and Bosch (2005) make a related observation:\n… almost all the knowledge and information about the design decisions the architecture is based on are implicitly embedded in the architecture.\nThey argue for making architectural design decisions an explicit part of a software architecture.\nWe appear to have arrived at a situation then in which one can have architecture with traditional efficiency and predictability but limited adaptability, or an architecture designed for agility albeit with some considerable and never-ending risk of securing the behaviours required of the whole. And so McKinsey’s greenfield IT strategy (Forrest and Sprague, 2013) and Gartner’s bimodal model the following year (“What is Bimodal IT?,” n.d.) simply propose running the two in parallel, marrying the qualities of each to the corresponding organisational requirements. For example, a retail bank’s mission critical back-end is subject to the safer architectural approach, while its foray into smartphone banking benefits from the more agile architectural approach.\nI advocate this split while feeling at the same time that it must be a temporary make-do. I’m not the only one. Morgenthal (2015) aspires to a single-mode world represented by the combination of the continuous delivery and lean IT methodologies. The first is dedicated to operational flow, and the second to the elimination of waste in the software architecture’s ability to respond to stakeholders’ needs.\nA new analogy is now emerging and guiding developments. More accurately, it encompasses multiple related analogues — biomimetics. A word coined by Otto Schmitt in the 1950s, biomimetics is the systematic approach to design inspired by biological processes and nature more broadly (Bhushan, 2009).\nThe most advanced manifestation of EA for example is known as enterprise ecological adaptation. Similarly, Martin Fowler describes evolutionary architecture in terms of its never-ending responsiveness to the environment in which the system operates (foreword to Ford et al., 2017).\nSocieties, cities, organisations, any and all collectivities, are situated unavoidably in ever-changing contexts, inter-nesting and interpenetrating. These sociotechnical organisms enact deliberate (intended) and emergent strategy, and are dedicated in part to upgrading their adaptive facilities. Darwin would recognise the picture.\nIt is not the strongest of the species, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. (Leon C. Megginson as quoted in Garson, 2014)\nCurrently, the informational content within human ‘architecture’ — our non-digital and digital communication and interactions — are bridged by the architectural processes described here informing software design processes that in turn govern data flows and combination in pursuit of information (patterned data made intelligible and useful) and knowledge (patterned information). It’s been noted in the organisational context that “strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions or actions” (Mintzberg and McHugh 1985) and “the pattern that connects”, the obsession of Gregory Bateson, is both the consequence of and input to this ceaseless dynamic.\nThe processes of architecture and the processes that evolve to resign the “architecture” label to history will likely be informed by a variety of theories and models relating to sense-making, meaning-making, designing, and decision-making in the context of complexity. These may include complex adaptive systems (CAS), Cynefin, high reliability organisations (HRO), systems thinking including the viable systems model (VSM) and systems dynamics, and open systems theory (OST) (James Lapalme et al. 2016). In the context of what Lapalme et al refer to as new realities, they also reference the human-tech ladder, critical systems heuristics, and biocomplexity. Their application in approaching the sociotechnology of identity will be explored in future research.\nAn evolutionary architecture consists of incremental change, fitness functions, and appropriate coupling. Fitness functions are borrowed from the field of evolutionary computing — “Architects define a fitness function to explain what better is and to help measure when the goal is met.” This makes the difference between a merely reactive architecture and one that also responds to direction; both emergent and deliberate.\nThe zenith of software architecture may then be its very demise. Nowak (2006) observes cooperation manifest in pre-life chemistry as well as multi-cellular organisms and human society. Mutation, selection, and cooperation can be considered as three fundamental principles of evolution (Taylor and Nowak 2009). Might the last software architect instantiate this in data?\nReferences Bass, L., Clements, P., Kazman, R., 2003. Software Architecture in Practice. Addison-Wesley Professional. Bhushan, B., 2009. Biomimetics: lessons from nature–an overview. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 367, 1445–1486. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2009.0011 Butler, S., 1912. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. A. C. Fifield, London. Conway, M.E., 1968. How Do Committees Invent? Datamation. Ford, N., Parsons, R., Kua, P., 2017. Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change. O’Reilly Media, Inc. Forrest, W., Sprague, K., 2013. Invest in technology for innovation, not productivity | McKinsey [WWW Document]. URL https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/invest-in-technology-for-innovation-not-productivity (accessed 6.14.19). Fowler, M., Lewis, J., 2014. Microservices [WWW Document]. martinfowler.com . URL https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html (accessed 6.14.19). Garson, 2014. It Is Not the Strongest of the Species that Survives But the Most Adaptable [WWW Document]. Quote Investig. URL https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/04/adapt/ (accessed 6.14.19). Jansen, A., Bosch, J., 2005. Software Architecture as a Set of Architectural Design Decisions, in: 5th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA'05). Presented at the 5th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA'05), IEEE, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, pp. 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1109/WICSA.2005.61 Lapalme, J., 2012. Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture. IT Prof. 14, 37–43. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2011.109 Mintzberg, H., McHugh, A., 1985. Strategy Formation in an Adhocracy. Adm. Sci. Q. 30, 160. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393104 Morgenthal, J., 2015. DevOps and Bi-Modal IT [WWW Document]. DevOps.com . URL https://devops.com/devops-bi-modal/ (accessed 6.14.19). Morgenthal, J., 2009. The Reason SOA Isn’t Delivering Sustainable Software. Tech Evang. URL http://jpmorgenthal.com/2009/06/19/the-reason-soa-isnt-delivering-sustainable-software/ (accessed 6.14.19). Nowak, M.A., 2006. Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation. Science 314, 1560–1563. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1133755 Perry, D.E., Wolf, A.L., 1992. Foundations for the study of software architecture. ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 17, 40–52. https://doi.org/10.1145/141874.141884 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [WWW Document], 2017. . Microsoft Dev. Netw. URL http://web.archive.org/web/20170707052149/https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb833022.aspx (accessed 6.14.19). Sheldrake, P., 2017. Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks – in search of the ideal data architecture. Philip Sheldrake. URL https://www.philipsheldrake.com/2017/09/value-flows-data-flows-meaningfully-sociotechnical-networks-search-ideal-data-architecture/ (accessed 6.14.19). SOA Manifesto [WWW Document], 2009. . SOA Manif. URL http://www.soa-manifesto.org/ (accessed 6.14.19). Software Architecture [WWW Document], 2017. . Softw. Eng. Inst. URL https://www.sei.cmu.edu/research-capabilities/all-work/display.cfm?customel_datapageid_4050=21328 (accessed 6.13.19). What is Bimodal IT? [WWW Document], n.d. . Gartner. URL https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bimodal (accessed 6.14.19). What Is Your Definition of Software Architecture?, 2017. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/research-capabilities/all-work/display.cfm?customel_datapageid_4050=21328 Image by Zhen Hu .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/07/the-past-present-and-possible-future-of-software-architecture/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Fungus\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/zhen-hu-DfqVqddJY7Y-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is important to understand the ways in which software may be conjured into the world for the simple reason that software and information technologies more generally have immense social and economic impact. The genesis of such process has been called software architecture, and there have been various attempts over the years to define the term and corresponding activities precisely, specifically in relation to the elements, forms, rationale, and constraints involved (“What Is Your Definition of Software Architecture?,” 2017).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA well-defined understanding of software architecture is critical to its practice and perhaps the word choice alone has helped sustain a certain nature of software architectural practice akin to that undertaken for buildings. The definitional approach taken by Perry and Wolf (1992) is typical of the traditional genre, drawing parallels with the precursors of hardware and network architecture, and their forerunner, the architecture of the built environment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSamuel Butler (1912) observed:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnalogy points in this direction, and though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo what degree are we misled by the architectural analogy? And might we find a better analogy, that is one that’s less misleading?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The past, present, and possible future of software architecture"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA blog .\nManning Publications has just published \u0026ldquo;Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials\u0026rdquo;.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31144\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;739\u0026rdquo;] ISBN-13: 978-1617296598 / ISBN-10: 1617296597[/caption]\nCongratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop on the doormat any day now.\nFor the uninitiated, here\u0026rsquo;s a link to the Wikipedia entry for self-sovereign identity (SSI), although it doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet reflect the caution recorded in the Internet Policy Review glossary .\nOf the book\u0026rsquo;s 35 chapters, 34 explain the technologies and motivations and celebrate SSI\u0026rsquo;s application. Here is a book written almost entirely by authors with skin in the SSI game, both reputational and financial, dedicated to making sure you understand why SSI was intended to be a good thing, why exactly it is in fact a good thing, and how it will be awesome in its real-world application.\nWith my AKASHA Research hat firmly donned and our purpose and values front of mind, I got to write the other chapter, the only dissenting chapter. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those chapters relegated from the main book, but it is available online to all purchasers. It\u0026rsquo;s the one titled \u0026hellip;\nSSI: our dystopian nightmare The editors gave me the working title — perhaps riffing off my previous analyses. As I write in the chapter itself, while it is a challenge to address the flaws of SSI in one chapter versus thirty four, it was nevertheless a privilege to be invited to do so and a testament to those extending the invitation.\nNot everyone whose work involves or relates to \u0026lsquo;digital identity\u0026rsquo; will read the book. Of those that do, not everyone will head to the online-only chapters. So allow me here to have another go, a very quick go, at pointing to the fundamental flaw in the approach to SSI\u0026rsquo;s conception and development.\nI need to keep trying to find the right words, and ideally fewer words, to explain the toxicity here.\nWorking to change complex systems demands systems thinking Systems thinking is “contextual,” which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.\nFritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision The architects, developers, and champions of self-sovereign identity have fine analytical minds. Such expertise, such craft, is wholly necessary and should be celebrated, but it\u0026rsquo;s also woefully insufficient by itself in any complex domain. To say such isolation cannot do the work justice is an understatement \u0026hellip;\nSetting out to \u0026lsquo;solve\u0026rsquo; for one aspect of a complex system has been shown time and time again to have unexpected consequences for those aspects ignored, and for many of the entities entangled in the system these consequences can be very negative.\nThe SSI goals unavoidably interfere in the most complex domains of the human condition. In other words, the system in which the SSI \u0026lsquo;solution\u0026rsquo; would operate encompasses our psychological and sociological health (and consequently ecological health). This is deeply serious stuff. Existential.\nWhile striving to be a critical friend here, our research at AKASHA hasn\u0026rsquo;t always been well received by members of the SSI community. We see this now as entirely contextual. They are dedicated to the design, development, and operationalization of SSI technology and services with certain conceptualizations of identity in mind. We are dedicated to the systems (larger whole) in which SSI would operate, all conceptualizations of identity, and the penetrating consequences for the self, culture, and nature. Conversations that span contexts unknowingly, that pit analytical thinking against systems thinking, can only be susceptible to misunderstanding.\nMultidisciplinary participatory inquiry and systems thinking is needed here whether or not everyone in the SSI community recognizes as much. We will continue to champion this cause and this course. Only if we succeed together will the innovations created in the name of SSI be validated in the world.\nFind out more I do not have the copyright to reproduce the chapter here. Fortunately, this short quote from the chapter\u0026rsquo;s introduction will be helpful in that respect.\nThis chapter is based on the following contributions to the generative-identity.org website:\nThe dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI) , Philip Sheldrake, 19 Oct 2020 Control, agency and complexity — Phil Windley and Philip Sheldrake in conversation , Jakub Lanc, 16 Dec 2020 Towards a shared understanding of ‘digital identity’ — reflecting on conversations with Doc Searls and Drummond Reed , Philip Sheldrake, 4 Mar 2021 Header image by David Clode .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/05/self-sovereign-identity-the-book-the-dystopia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A fish in its ecosystem\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/david-clode-xAwtDLOTB2A-unsplash-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2021/05/25/self-sovereign-identity-the-book-the-dystopia\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the AKASHA blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eManning Publications has just published \u0026ldquo;Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31144\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;739\u0026rdquo;]\u003cimg alt=\"Cover of the SSI book\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/cover-of-the-ssi-book.jpg\"\u003e ISBN-13: 978-1617296598 / ISBN-10: 1617296597[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCongratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop on the doormat any day now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the uninitiated, \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehere\u0026rsquo;s a link to the Wikipedia entry\u003c/a\u003e\n for self-sovereign identity (SSI), although it doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet reflect the caution recorded in the \u003ca href=\"https://policyreview.info/glossary/self-sovereign-identity\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternet Policy Review glossary\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf the book\u0026rsquo;s 35 chapters, 34 explain the technologies and motivations and celebrate SSI\u0026rsquo;s application. Here is a book written almost entirely by authors with skin in the SSI game, both reputational and financial, dedicated to making sure you understand why SSI was intended to be a good thing, why exactly it is in fact a good thing, and how it will be awesome in its real-world application.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith my AKASHA Research hat firmly donned and \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eour purpose and values\u003c/a\u003e\n front of mind, I got to write the other chapter, the only dissenting chapter. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those chapters relegated from the main book, but it is available online to all purchasers. It\u0026rsquo;s the one titled \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the Ethereum World blog .\nOur first blog post on the myths and challenges of social network moderating and the direction we\u0026rsquo;re heading in for decentralized social networking elicited some agreeable feedback but also this response:\n“I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with your views about moderation. We\u0026rsquo;re building blockchains for freedom.”\nHave you ever had that feeling where your communication simply fell flat despite your sincere best efforts?! 😞 Where your carefully constructed words didn’t appear to make the slightest dint?! Sure you have, you’re human too.\nSimilarly, we\u0026rsquo;ve all conveyed abrupt disagreement. This is the natural to-and-fro of conversation, and it demands mutual respect and enthusiasm for the potential benefits of mutual understanding.\nHow then should I respond to my responder? The response was private communication, so let’s call him Bob. I find myself asking \u0026hellip;\nWhat exactly does Bob mean by “freedom”? In the earlier post I write that AKASHA celebrates freedom of speech and freedom of attention equally. And I also noted our longing for freedom from the crèches of centralized social networks. But Bob is “building blockchains for freedom” and appears to consider this different from rather than aligned with our direction.\nCan I find an explanation for this and reconcile perceived differences? 🤝\nYou and I and Bob and my AKASHA colleagues are social animals contemplating the design of social networking. The “I” and the “we” are unavoidably entangled. Isaiah Berlin can help us understand this entanglement in the context of freedom courtesy of the transcript from his 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty ” — he used “liberty” and “freedom” to mean the same.\nLet’s start where I think Bob finds himself.\nBerlin describes negative liberty as “freedom from”. When we talk about freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech for example, we’re talking about freedom from interference by others. Typically, a person might accept local and national government so long as it doesn’t go too far. The potential for such overreach, for interference, is constrained by establishing such negative liberties as social norms and sometimes as rights.\nWe want freedom from moderating overreach, and our focus then turns to describing what might constitute overreach.\nUniversal, non-contextual moderation by employees of a distant for-profit corporate has proved itself able if not perfect in some respects (e.g. keeping deeply abhorrent pornography out of the public domain) but also susceptible to overreach. It will always be considered to be overreaching and under-reaching at the same time because it cannot share all the contexts of those using its social networking service. In short, a social network governed by a central authority is unsustainable, assuming that is the existence of decentralized alternatives that have cracked their own non-trivial sustainability challenges.\nThe question of moderating overreach is front and center in many countries in 2021, exemplified by the Trump ban.\nThis post is not about to ‘get political’ other than to point to the Trump ban in the context of contexts. In the context of Twitter, a ban is a ban is a ban. But Twitter does not stand alone. It is a social system within a social system, and in this context it’s clearly within whatever may be described as ‘the US system’. However it’s described we can say categorically that ‘the US system’ is distinct from, for example, what may be described as ‘the EU system’. More emphasis may be placed on private corporate action in moderating US society than in European society (see Ben Thompson\u0026rsquo;s Trump and Twitter ), and maybe that’s why Angela Merkel considered it “problematic” through her European lens — after all, Twitter is popular amongst European citizens too.\nMaybe. My goal here does not require me to argue any of this one way or another, but just to point to the certainties that society / human community is complex and contexts matter.\nWe should have seen this coming. The #FreeTheNipple campaign (2013+) was revealing.\nSome people consider photographs featuring male nipples acceptable but those featuring female nipples unacceptable. Others consider both acceptable. Some people want their social networking to be free from female nipples and some people want to be free to post images with female nipples.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31137\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;920\u0026rdquo;] FreeTheNipple campaign image[/caption]\nFreedom from \u0026hellip; (negative liberty).\nAnd freedom to … (positive liberty).\n“The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself … not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.”\nAKASHA has no right to insist you should be anti- or pro-nipple. (Some sentences surprise you after you\u0026rsquo;ve written them.) In recognising different-courses-for-different-horses, we can focus instead on moderating approaches that allow different communities, and sub-communities, in different contexts to moderate differently. ✨\nCould Bob work towards freedom from moderating? This is the question.\nIf this is Bob\u0026rsquo;s goal, either his goal is impossible or he\u0026rsquo;s working to an entirely different definition of moderating.\nOur first post adopts the definition of moderating as a subset of governance that structures participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. A place or space lacking cooperation and riddled with abuse might be called many things — cesspool comes to mind, or perhaps antisocial network — but never a social network.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s look at it another way. If your particular community considers sacrosanct the freedom to put anything in front of anyone else, then where is the viewer’s freedom? If the viewer is to have some freedom from such content, then the social actions necessarily involved constitute moderating. No matter how freedom-loving you may be, this balance needs your attention. In fact all the more for your love of freedom. Structure is necessitated to reconcile and enact participants\u0026rsquo; expectations for their freedoms, but it’s even more fundamental than that.\nModerating is conversation. 💬 Social networking without moderating is as impossible as social networking without conversation.\nAs conversation, moderating entails continuous information exchange with some social maintenance or goal in mind. And just as language evolves for communication efficacy and efficiency, so does moderating design, and so too then the user interface. There are as many permutations of moderating in the context of social networking as permutations of conversation (and similarly, some might make more sense than others).\nThe like. The flag. The claps. The thumbs down. The triage. The plus one. The reputational scoring. The conversational intervention. The label. The animated gif conveying your support for where something is going. One\u0026rsquo;s reach/influence. Any facility to reflect on the contextual suitability of anything and everything. The facilities to revise the facilities. Etc. These all contribute to your communication agency and your freedom of participation, and your freedom to help define the evolving structures of social participation, and your freedom to regard a balance of freedoms differently to others\u0026rsquo; regards for the requisite balance. And your collective freedom to pursue and maintain that collective balance together as best you might.\nDespite having claimed this post wasn’t about to ‘get political’, we’ve just concluded with its definition. Moderating is a subset of governance, and politics is the activities of governance.\nTo quote the title of a great book , two is company and three is complexity. There\u0026rsquo;s no pretending a social network isn\u0026rsquo;t complex, and such complexity requires moderating feedback loops.\nAKASHA works to enable your community’s politics and, in the long-run, have the social system spanning these social systems divine the acceptable from the unacceptable courtesy of participants\u0026rsquo; perception of their value and the rule of two feet . It\u0026rsquo;s meta. Nothing to do with us. Far from censorship Bob, it’s your collective\u0026rsquo;s freedom. 🙌\nImage by Dave Hoefler .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/04/two-concepts-of-liberty-and-infinite-permutations-of-moderating/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"landscape\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/dave-hoefler-64e8mSfGKRc-unsplash-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://blog.ethereum.world/two-concepts-of-liberty-and-infinite-permutations-of-moderating/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the Ethereum World blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur first blog post on \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2021/02/community-moderating-bringing-our-best/\"\u003ethe myths and challenges of social network moderating and the direction we\u0026rsquo;re heading in for decentralized social networking\u003c/a\u003e\n elicited some agreeable feedback but also this response:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with your views about moderation. We\u0026rsquo;re building blockchains for freedom.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHave you ever had that feeling where your communication simply fell flat despite your sincere best efforts?! 😞 Where your carefully constructed words didn’t appear to make the slightest dint?! Sure you have, you’re human too.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimilarly, we\u0026rsquo;ve all conveyed abrupt disagreement. This is the natural to-and-fro of conversation, and it demands mutual respect and enthusiasm for the potential benefits of mutual understanding.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow then should I respond to my responder? The response was private communication, so let’s call him Bob. I find myself asking \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-exactly-does-bob-mean-by-freedom\"\u003eWhat exactly does Bob mean by “freedom”?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the earlier post I write that AKASHA celebrates freedom of speech \u003cem\u003eand\u003c/em\u003e freedom of attention equally. And I also noted our longing for freedom from the crèches of centralized social networks. But Bob is “building blockchains for freedom” and appears to consider this different from rather than aligned with our direction.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCan I find an explanation for this and reconcile perceived differences? 🤝\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the generative identity website .\nNo two people can share an exact understanding of anything deep and meaningful simply because we each have different contexts. Conversation relies upon and can never wholly substitute for context. Nevertheless, we can work to grow a shared understanding through conversation, and the relationship between conversationalists evolves in the process.\nThe relationship is immanent in such informational exchange[1].\nOn one level, the opening paragraph here pertains to this being a blog post about conversations I’ve valued in recent months. But there’s another level given that ‘digital identity’ is our subject. Identity, in what you might call the natural and non-bureaucratic sense, is reciprocally defining and co-constitutive with relationships and information exchange[2].\nIdentities are immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange.\nConversation — both synchronous and asynchronous — is an art I haven’t mastered, as my colleagues at the AKASHA Foundation will attest! I remain but a keen student. Fortunately, as far as the topic of ‘digital identity’ goes, I have found two deep domain experts with sufficient patience and, it seems to me, a shared love of conversation in the form of Doc Searls and Drummond Reed .\nIn light of the conversations, Doc, Drummond, and I will have subconsciously updated our understanding of the others, i.e. the role the others play in the internal narratives we each maintain to help us make sense of the world. Importantly, we update our contextual understanding of ourselves in this storyline too; or more accurately, we update one of our selves. And sometimes a variant self is spawned, and now and then one fades with irrelevance.\nOur identities, our selves, are formed through internal narratives. The internal narrative is informed by the interactions. And the interactions are modulated by the identities.[3] Social, reciprocal, concurrent, and forever in flux. One might describe the whole thing as essentially human; so much so that we hardly think about it.\nThis post addresses aspects of ‘digital identity’ we’ve explored together in recent months, at the prompt of Doc and Joyce Searls last October in response to the SSI dystopia critique . It represents my contributions to and my reflections on our dialogue unless otherwise stated, and it serves as much to continue the conversation as log it, and loop others in too.\nThe post isn’t intended to reflect the presentation that I needed from Doc or Drummond, or that I thought they needed from me. This is now a different context, the context of pursuing shared understanding across the ‘digital identity’ community more broadly.\nPer the December post logging a conversation with Phil Windley , I will bring the threads together under appropriate subject headings, but in this case the copy isn’t necessarily verbatim and it isn’t presented dialogically. Here are those subject headings:\nThe system of interest Agency Hard borders and the atomistic self Identity layer, trust, and triangles Governance. But before we dive in, let me (re)invite you to my context.\nPer the definition of generative identity, I entreat you to consider architectures and designs for ‘digital identity’ in terms of their consequences for psychological, sociological, and ecological health — self, culture, and nature — rather than, say, the ease with which a hotel room might be reserved, or some general enhancements to process efficiency or veracity. Developing innovative capabilities to such ends has value, no doubt, including in humanitarian contexts, but if it harms the self, culture, and nature in the process, it will amount to an appalling step backwards rather than an enlightening step forwards.\nThe system of interest and systems thinking Cause-and-effect thinking dominates. One eats because one feels hungry. One runs because the wolf looks hungry. This has served us wonderfully well in combination with our highly-evolved social mechanisms for cooperation[4].\nDevelopment of systems thinking emerged as it became increasingly obvious through practice that many of the problems we’re interested in nowadays are better approached and understood in the context of relationships rather than in isolation[5], entailing a shift from a mechanistic to an ecological worldview[6]. We wanted heat and power and so we mined and burned coal. Today, the ecological worldview directs us instead towards renewable energy sources.\nWhile everything is ultimately connected to everything else, the universe does not of course represent a suitable system of study in most instances! Systems thinking requires some conscious distinction between those entities and relationships that come within the scope of concern and those that can be considered more tertiary by practical assessment, even though a system is not just a supersystem (i.e. containing subsystems) but also a subsystem (i.e. a part of a supersystem). The systems thinker always dedicates some cognitive cycles keeping such delineations under constant review.\nThree months after the original critique of self-sovereign identity (SSI) in 2019 , and more precisely after the resistance to it, it occurred to me that the miscommunication and confusion might be attributed to different system scopes. Perhaps that should have dawned on me earlier. These most recent conversations have confirmed for me that the ‘digital identity’ community continues on the whole to work within one system scope while I advocate and work within a larger system scope.\nMy reference to larger there should not be mistaken to mean superior just by dint of size. As I’ve noted, one’s selection of system scope is based on reasoning and judgement as to what should be taken into account versus what can be left out. And as I wrote at the time[7]:\nI think there may be a growing recognition that the problem space is wider and deeper than SSI’s arbitrary delimiters may have it. There are too many examples of human action dedicated to ‘solving’ for one aspect of an ecology only to fuck up the health of the ecology. We cannot afford to fuck up because our subject is human dignity, and life and death in some contexts.\nThis attracted the retort: What delimiters are not \u0026ldquo;arbitrary\u0026rdquo;? The systems thinking response to that must be: those that have been reasoned.\nBy my reasoning, any scope here is too narrow if it does not include human identities immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange, i.e. society. I would go further and say such a scope would be too narrow to even constitute systems thinking. (To avoid accusations of arrogance, I regard systems thinking as just another expertise that needs to be in the mix here alongside the technical talents that have gone into the technical wonders to date, and those other disciplines we’ve yet to engage.)\nOur shorthand at AKASHA for these different scopes is to refer to the smaller as technological and the larger as sociotechnological, and it’s reassuring to see the Internet Policy Review journal reference our overarching conclusion in its glossary definition of SSI[8]:\nViewed atomistically, technologically, SSI looks quite sensible. At scale, as sociotechnology, the emergent consequences are malignant.\nSeeing the verb-like In pursuit of clarity of thought and communication, we categorize varying conceptualizations of identity as either noun-like, by which we mean enduring by design, and verb-like, recognizing that the human condition and human relations are never static. The bureaucratization of identity (e.g. legal identity) is noun-like. Your professional identity for example may be both (e.g. lifelong accreditation as certified by a professional body, and ever-evolving capabilities, understanding, performance, professional relationships, standing, etc.). Your identity as a parent is verb-like (beyond the comparatively trivial legal recognition of the fact).\nOur conversations have highlighted a fundamental disconnect between our respective appreciations for the noun-like and verb-like categorisations, undetected until now.\nDoc’s response is simply: “Credentials are nouns, but to present them is a verb.” However, our subject is the categorisation of conceptualisations of identity, not nouns and verbs in general. We have different ideas for what constitutes an appropriate level or depth of analysis.\nDrummond has told me that both categories can be seen represented in Figure A of Appendix A of the Sovrin Glossary V3[9], as shown here. They cannot. Conceptualisations of human identity necessarily involve humans — their perceptions, their cognition, their behaviour, their relationships, their information exchange — and human society isn\u0026rsquo;t visible in this technological schematic. The qualities distinguishing the noun-like and verb-like conceptualizations are manifest and felt only in the system in which the SSI technology would operate, never solely in the latter. To say society is represented because the blue box labelled “entity” could represent a human being would be as mistaken as saying the economy is represented in a diagram including a dollar sign, or a city’s traffic system reflected in a diagram with a box labelled \u0026ldquo;car\u0026rdquo;.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31127\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1703\u0026rdquo;] Figure A of Appendix A of the Sovrin Glossary V3[/caption]\nI may well have contributed to this confusion by not seeing the possibility for such confusion in the first place. The comparison table of SSI and generative identity that I developed at Doc’s apt prompt in 2019[10] does not distinguish the resultant qualities of the system in which the SSI system would operate from the latter alone clearly enough. Just as well I numbered the version 0.1!\nAgency The potential to make a difference in the world — agency — is integral to all conceptualizations of identity with which I am familiar; both noun-like and verb-like. I now appreciate however that there are quite different appreciations for agency, in my earlier conversation with Phil Windley as already documented and latterly with Doc.\nWhile some try, I cannot consider agency to be something one can ascribe in isolation to an individual, especially if one is working in a design space aspiring, to a smaller or larger extent, to increase agency and/or perhaps help spread it around a bit more equitably.\nPractically speaking, one may be said to have agency only alongside others similarly. It is embedded in and emanates from our social and cultural context. Intriguingly, “modern culture creates an agentic individual managing goals thought to reside in a personality or life course.” Thought to. However, any perception of “fully realized and unfettered actors pursuing their goals” is imagined[ 11] . But let’s break it down to make it more readily understood.\nThe capability to jump on a bike and get across town quicker than otherwise is agentic, and it’s easy to consider this as entirely personal agency. Nevertheless, this capacity is only realised because others conceived of the bicycle, designed it, manufactured it and the pavement, and perhaps taught you to ride it, etc. Your agency would soon be frustrated if others stopped making inner tubes. This agency would not for all practical purposes exist at all if it was unique to you for there would be no market for bikes and so no bike you could buy.\nBeing a speaker and a writer (assuming the attention of listeners and readers!) is agency realised, but only because your audience has similar communicative agency. Such agency is imbued because you are in fact doing what many others have the facility to do too (in this instance, communicating in a shared language).\nBoth identity and agency are social because they are deeply entwined. One cannot reliably work towards an agency-related purpose without appreciation for the interplay of all conceptualizations of identity, of both noun- and verb-like, and therefore such a goal remains unachievable without expanding one’s purview from the SSI system to the system in which the SSI technology system would operate.\nDoc asks whether we should, effectively, invest time to turn each other around on this question, and I can’t deny the salience of the question. The way forward is to invite to our conversation, to our collaboration, those whose life’s work is understanding the manifestation and dynamics of agency.\nBureaucracy According to Max Weber writing in 1920[12]:\nThe fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal costs — these are raised to the optimum point \u0026hellip;\nThis acclamation of bureaucracy’s superiority may jolt the reader familiar with the more recent idea that bureaucracy is an undesirable and unviable form of organization. Nevertheless, it was a conclusion of its time and a perfectly rational one based on historical comparison. Unlike its forerunners, bureaucracy enforced equality and empowered citizens[13]. The advent of bureaucracy marked the comparative enhancement of agency in society. The individual now had official status — legal identity — and that status accrued rights over the ensuing decades. For this reason, one target of the Sustainable Development Goals is to ensure everyone has legal identity by 2030[14].\nDrummond observes that the introduction of bureaucracy in the workplace wasn’t exactly so liberating, although one can dissociate bureaucracy from the dominant connotations of centralized and rigid organizational arrangements[15].\nI disagree then with unqualified assertions along the lines that identity systems pre-dating SSI worked to subordinate agency to centralized or federated governmental systems operated by others. The bureaucratization of identity lifted agency up to the point where we only now find ourselves bumping uncomfortably against its ceiling. Moreover, the phrase “operated by others” may be recast as “by our own societies of which we each are a constituent.”\nThere’s a lot packed into this very brief mention of bureaucracy, many nuances beyond the scope of this post. In the simplest terms, I am no bald advocate of bureaucracy, but I believe that to cast its category aside is to taint the required systems thinking here, as we shall see below (see Governance).\nHard borders and the atomistic self I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that the question of the atomistic self may be so integral to some people’s (cultural) identity that no length of conversation and no number of references[16] will sway let alone dispel a person’s belief that they stand apart, sovereign, perhaps in some extreme Ayn Randian opposition to extreme collectivism, present company excluded. One can moot that complex adaptive systems are very unlikely to entertain either extreme at any possible equilibrium, but there appears to be a psychological safety, perhaps a reassuring simplicity, in backing away as far as possible from the extreme one has learned to abhor, even if this leaves you appearing equally distant to many onlookers.\nThe question featured in conversation with Phil Windley (who compared natural human beings with artificial nation states to my surprise) and now with Doc too. My response to Phil is, I think, worth repeating here.\nDrawing hard borders is your personal choice driven by one\u0026rsquo;s own goals, context, values, and cultural lens. Drawing them makes no difference in the ecology of the whole \u0026hellip; as Gregory Bateson noted, they just form part of the very ecology they were supposed to delimit.\nBut drawing hard borders does make a difference when concreted in technical code from which Alice has no escape. Alice\u0026rsquo;s context, values, and cultural situation differ from yours, and while you may sincerely hope for her to have \u0026ldquo;self-sovereignty\u0026rdquo; as you see it, your architectural imposition actually denies her it.”\nThe very last sentence should be elaborated.\nThe community that has designed SSI is comparatively and unarguably homogeneous — in disciplinary terms, in gender terms, in professional terms, and in its cultural context. It has then done, as Conway\u0026rsquo;s law[17] hints, only what it could do — render its own contextual understanding of what constitutes \u0026ldquo;digital trust\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;digital identity\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;agency\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;human relations\u0026rdquo; into code; more specifically technical protocol. Tight protocol. Not a plurality of protocols. Not a wide variety of schema. But prescriptive protocol. It is not difficult to contemplate that perhaps other people in other communities in other contexts, perhaps a high-trust society for example, ‘see’ things or ‘feel’ things differently and may wish to subscribe to alternative protocol if only there was a choice.\nBut back to borders.\nI have found no modern day paper concluding that any person has a mind entirely ‘their own’. A (biological) brain, yes. A (informational) mind, no.\nHowever you approach the topic — from anthropology to information theory to psychology to theology — the phenomenon of distributed cognition is widely accepted or at least strongly hinted at. Some SSI architects and developers may perceive hard borders, they may have inherited language that propagates atavistic perceptions (and other cultures / languages very much less so, if not entirely to the contrary), but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean such hard borders exist.\nFortunately, Drummond tells me there is no atomistic self in any SSI architecture — only decentralized identifiers (DIDs), relationships, verifiable credentials (VCs), and governance frameworks. This is most uncharacteristic of the conversations I’ve had with those working in this domain, and contradicts core messages across many websites and blog posts dedicated to SSI and related matters, especially “solutions”, but personally I find it a deep relief to hear him conclude as much. I’ve encouraged him to write on the matter.\nIdentity layer and trust Doc and I both dislike claims by SSI architects to be building the “identity layer”, a layer of the Internet that has been missing for the past half century, or so we are told.\nFor my part, as mentioned in the SSI dystopia critique but also I hope evident from this blog post alone, I cannot possibly conceive of human identity ‘living’ alongside TCP/IP, UDP, and HTTP[18]. Having already presented human identity as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct rather than merely a psychological or biological phenomenon[19], I have no problem at all with the digital augmentation or extension of the human being. On the contrary, given the challenges our species faces this century, this collective agency will likely prove essential[20].\nNorbert Wiener anticipated this informational, cyber extension of ourselves way back in 1950[21]. Seventy years later it seems almost timid to define the individual here as an assemblage of the biological, psychological, informational, and interfacial. Nevertheless, such a cyborg entails the addition of ‘the digital’ to the biological and psychological, not the substitution of the former for the latter. The turn of phrase “identity layer” pertains only to the digital fabric and so can never constitute human identity of itself in just the same way HTTP isn’t called “the conversation layer” and the FOAF ontology[22] isn’t called “the human relations layer”.\nOne would think such an observation would be wholly compatible with beliefs regarding the individual’s autonomy, her sovereignty. Alice proxying her identity to a layer of a global information network is more Borg[23] than self-sovereign! (See Trust triangles below.)\nThe defense may be that it’s only words, but words play a role in the formation of mental models, mental models play a role in our shaping of our tools, and our tools then shape us[24].\nTalking of words — let’s talk about trust.\nWhen Alice and Bob trust each other, they make themselves vulnerable to each other. There remains some chance that one’s faith in the other will turn out to be misplaced for whatever reason.\nNo-one needs to trust that gravity will keep their feet pinned to the planet, or that 2+2=4, because “trust as a concept has no meaning in a fully deterministic setting.”[25] Rather than enshrining trust in code, cryptographic techniques eliminate the need for trust in the first place. This has some advantages in some contexts, but those advantages must be qualified given that trust is integral to the formation of human relationships and the fabric of human society.\nUltimately, “trust may be thought of as a functional prerequisite for the possibility of society in that the only alternative to appropriate trust are ‘chaos and paralysing fear’.”[26] Some may proffer cryptographic digital processes as a way out of this dichotomy, except you can’t rip out a fundamental social process and still expect the same quality of human relations, of community.\nWe have a choice. At AKASHA, we frame our work in terms of setting out to combine the best of Web 3[27] wizardry and the best of human nature, relying on the latter where we can and as we should, and crafting the former as and when scale demands. Independent ethics panels will help determine the contextually appropriate blend.\nTrust triangles Triangles are to be found everywhere there is a need for structural rigidity — e.g. the Manhattan Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, bicycle frames — and similarly ‘trust triangles’ achieve informational rigidity with informational triangles. This is the kind of outcome those in the West decry of China’s nascent identity and social credit system. One might congratulate them at least for recognising and being clear about what they’re building.\nThis paragraph from the SSI dystopia critique caused Drummond to question if I was equating any form of a trust triangle with the abuses of a social credit scoring system? After all, trust triangles have existed for as long as human community.\nNon-digitalized trust triangles have existed for millennia, and that is a core part of my thesis. The problem is when you digitalize them indiscriminately.\nHistorically nuanced claims (“I would have graduated had my parents not died suddenly”) become stiflingly binary (“I cannot verify that I graduated because I did not graduate”). One\u0026rsquo;s psychological framing / narrative selves are severely inhibited (“I cannot claim I nearly graduated”, and so the self narrative becomes “I failed to graduate”). One\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;wriggle room\u0026rsquo; is vanished. The architecture SSI sets up is designed to spread and envelop many aspects of every relationship, and one is locked rigid into a set of triangular potentials. It lends a new meaning to being triangulated.\nDrummond considers SSI “the most contextually-sensitive identity technology I know of” in contrast to my assertion that “SSI cannot communicate context.” You won’t be surprised to learn that we’re both right \u0026hellip; in our different contexts.\nDrummond’s context is identity technology, whereas mine is human beings and nature. SSI may be the most contextually-sensitive technology, but what it sets out to do contextually is an utterly miserable substitute for contextually-sensitive non-technologized human relations.\nReflection on the inevitable nuances prompted Drummond to ask, in effect, whether such concerns should impair the majority’s facility to offer verifiable claims. It’s a good question, one the SSI community, SSI vendors, and all parties looking to support a roll-out should ask of their respective ethics committees.\nGovernance In the SSI dystopia critique[28] I point to the deeply undesirable outcomes of social media behaviours that went largely unpredicted just a decade ago, and I begin the process of anticipating similarly poor outcomes of SSI in common use in the years to come. I claim:\nThere is no known way to constrain SSI from enabling if not catalyzing these applications. Such constraints might require a friction or a frustration of interoperability entirely counter to the architectural and engineering goals.\nI go on to highlight the way in which SSI effects the societal regulators of social norms, legal code, and technical code[29]:\nSSI fundamentally changes the balance of these regulators in the context of identity. It diminishes the role of legal code and has software code and social norms supervene.\nDrummond has good cause to push back. And I think I have good reason to push back his push back. Most importantly, this debate goes to the heart of the matter — to the woeful inadequacy of SSI principles, in all their variety both past and present, and to the urgent need to corral multidisciplinary systems thinking to make the very best of the progress that has been made to date.\nDrummond points to the working group at TNO in the Netherlands focused on governance and constraints, specifically its focus on the prevention of coercive bad actors[30]. And he quite rightly champions the ToIP [Trust over IP] stack[31]. While we can argue about the validity of the T in ToIP, “it combines both cryptographic trust at the machine layer and human trust at the business, legal, and social layers.” He notes:\n\u0026hellip; providing the proper frictions is a key focus of most of the SSI ecosystem governance frameworks in which I am involved. It\u0026rsquo;s just that it can now be intentional friction instead of unintentional friction.\nI do like the use of (un)intentional there.\nThe TNO working group is indeed an example of stakeholders seeking to reintroduce necessary friction. TNO is not the first to frame coercion in terms of the \u0026ldquo;800-pound gorilla\u0026rdquo;, but that\u0026rsquo;s not the sole source of coercion, and coercion is not the only social mechanism in play. While most welcome, there can be little doubt by any reading that this runs counter to the founding architectural and engineering goals of SSI.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying I disagree with some of the ideas that parties such as TNO have developed. I\u0026rsquo;m saying that they too are effectively recognising SSI\u0026rsquo;s innate ill-effects and are trying to head them off at the pass.\nSimilarly, I see the ToIP undertaking as recognition of the invalidity of any justification of SSI in terms of right-libertarianism or negative liberty. By affecting what some would call “removing choice”, it runs counter to the clarion call of \u0026ldquo;self-sovereignty\u0026rdquo;.\nAnd here we briefly revisit bureaucracy.\nOne can list the qualities of the bureau (office) in terms of being formalized, specialized, standardized, rule-based, and impersonal. Similarly, bureaucracy implies a normative and authoritative structure considered to be both rational and legitimate[32]. I imagine I’m not alone in considering these qualities perfectly suited to the proper administration of the ToIP governance stack. I could contemplate participating in a B2C relationship subject to such good governance, on the basis that doing so didn’t contribute to its wider adoption outside the domain of such good governance. However \u0026hellip;\nThe ToIP undertaking is necessary but insufficient. Failure to participate in the governance side of the stack, however the requisite participation may be prescribed, does not preclude participation in the technical side of the stack, especially by the very actors from whom we can perhaps expect the most harmful emergent outcomes in their natural inclination towards self-interest over system-interest in the absence of good corporate governance; you, me, and our friends and family in peer-to-peer information exchange.\nAs typified by TNO\u0026rsquo;s conclusion, the only constraint is to reverse out of the ubiquitous meme that SSI is just like a wallet with credentials in it that you can pull out and present at any time as you wish.\nLonger-term, one must also question the sustainability of ToIP. SSI protocols typify a set of technologies that radically erode Coase’s costs of using the pricing mechanism, better known as transaction costs[33]. As such costs constitute the Coasian explanation for the very existence of “the firm”, the SSI technology stack first enables the fragmentation of any value chain beyond the governance domain of any one or small set of organizations, and ultimately threatens the very existence of the organizations it calls upon to govern it.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s time we accept SSI for what it was. Unrealistic. Where\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;self-sovereignty\u0026rdquo; in being subject to these bureaucratic algorithms? The term \u0026ldquo;self-sovereign\u0026rdquo; is not just inappropriate, it\u0026rsquo;s beginning to undermine the efforts of its evangelists. It\u0026rsquo;s a label associated with an ethos and set of design principles that hinders rather than helps anyone now, that simply fails to live up to the requisite complexity. It does an injustice to the potential applications of the protocols developed in its name.\nI believe we\u0026rsquo;re just beginning to get real about the natural complexity of human identities immanent in relationships immanent in information exchange. Currently, this involves the existing ‘digital identity’ community making some well-meaning attempts to identify specific problems and gaps and fix and fill them respectively. Yet if we are to deliver in contexts rarely even mentioned to date[34] — psychological, sociological, and ecological health — I believe a deeper multidisciplinary review is necessary.\nNotes Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Gregory Bateson. 1972. University of Chicago Press. A simpler way. Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers. 1998. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. The Narrative Self. Marya Schechtman. In The Oxford Handbook of the Self, edited by Shaun Gallagher. 2011. Oxford University Press. SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Nowak, M., Highfield, R., 2011. Simon and Schuster. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Developments, Applications. Bertalanffy. 1967. George Braziller Inc. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Capra \u0026amp; Luisi. 2014. Cambridge University Press. https://cyber.harvard.edu/lists/arc/projectvrm/2020-01/msg00020.html https://policyreview.info/glossary#node-1524 Retrieved 26 February 2021 Appendix A: Sovrin Entities, Identities, and Connections, Sovrin Glossary v3, December 2019 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gfIz5TT0cNp2kxGMLFXr19x1uoZsruUe_0glHst2fZ8/edit# A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop, Philip Sheldrake, September 2019 https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/30/a-call-for-interdisciplinarity-generative-identity-and-the-internet-identity-workshop The “Actors” of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency. Meyer and Jepperson, 2000. Sociological Theory 18, 100–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00090 In Economy and society. 1978. Roth and Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maybe it is time to rediscover bureaucracy. Olsen. Journal of public administration research and theory. January 2006. http://faculty.cbpp.uaa.alaska.edu/afgjp/padm610/Maybe%20It\u0026rsquo;s%20Time%20to%20Rediscover%20Bureaucracy.pdf See: The Sustainable Development Goals, Identity, and Privacy: Does their implementation risk human rights? Privacy International. 2018. https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2237/sustainable-development-goals-identity-and-privacy-does-their-implementation-risk Work, Human Agency and Organizational Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation. Jannis Kallinikos. Organization Studies, 2003. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0170840603024004005 For example: The Cognitive Ecology of the Internet, Smart, Heersmink, Clowes, 2017. in: Cowley, Vallée-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 251–282. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/397486/1/cognitive_ecology_internet.pdf See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway\u0026rsquo;s_law See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite Distributed selves: personal identity and extended memory systems. Heersmink. 2016. Synthese. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301691846_Distributed_Selves_Personal_Identity_and_Extended_Memory_Systems See https://akasha.org/blog/2020/07/24/cooperating-at-scale-part-one The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society. Norbert Wiener. 1950. Houghton Mifflin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/26/shape/ Trust in Society. Karen Cook, ed. Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. Trust as a Social Reality. Lewis and Weigert. Social Forces 63, no. 4 (1 June 1985): 967–85. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/63.4.967 , quoting: Trust and Power. Luhmann. John Wiley \u0026amp; Sons, 2018. An information network emerging from and made possible by new cryptographic techniques. Under the heading “We swipe therefore we are” Under the heading “All in the mix” See the subsection \u0026ldquo;countermeasures to coercion\u0026rdquo; https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-rfcs/blob/master/concepts/0289-toip-stack/README.md#countermeasures-against-coercion See https://trustoverip.org/ Ibid. 13 (Maybe it is time) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_cost It is reassuring to see the formation of the ToIP Human Experience Working Group during the second half of 2020. ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/03/towards-a-shared-understanding-of-digital-identity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"water ripples\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/water-ripples.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/towards-a-shared-understanding-of-digital-identity/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo two people can share an exact understanding of anything deep and meaningful simply because we each have different contexts. Conversation relies upon and can never wholly substitute for context. Nevertheless, we can work to grow a shared understanding through conversation, and the relationship between conversationalists evolves in the process.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe relationship is immanent in such informational exchange[1].\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn one level, the opening paragraph here pertains to this being a blog post about conversations I’ve valued in recent months. But there’s another level given that ‘digital identity’ is our subject. Identity, in what you might call the natural and non-bureaucratic sense, is reciprocally defining and co-constitutive with relationships and information exchange[2].\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIdentities are immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Towards a shared understanding of ‘digital identity’ — reflecting on conversations with Doc Searls and Drummond Reed"},{"content":"\nOriginally published to the Ethereum World blog .\nIn light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world\u0026rsquo;s attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms.\nOur work at AKASHA is founded on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. We are dedicated to that unfolding, and so then to enabling, nurturing, exploring, learning, discussing, self-organizing, creating, and regenerating. And this post explores our thinking and doing when it comes to moderating.\nModerating processes are fascinating and essential. They must encourage and accommodate the complexity of community, and their design can contribute to phenomenal success or dismal failure. And regardless, we\u0026rsquo;re never going to go straight from zero to hero here. We need to work this up together.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re going to start by defining some common terms and dispelling some common myths. Then we explore some key design considerations and sketch out the feedback mechanisms involved, before presenting the moderating goals as we see them right now. Any and all comments and feedback are most welcome.\nWe will emphasise one thing about our Ethereum World journey — it makes no sense whatsoever for the AKASHA team to dictate the rules of the road, as we hope will become increasingly obvious in the weeks and months ahead.\nTerms and myths Let\u0026rsquo;s do this.\nTerms \u0026ldquo;The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.\u0026rdquo; An apposite truism attributed to Socrates.\nGoverning — determining authority, decision-making, and accountability in the process of organizing [ref ].\nModerating — the subset of governing that structures participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse [ref ].\nCensoring — prohibiting or suppressing information considered to be politically unacceptable, obscene, or a threat to security [Oxford English dictionary].\nMyth 1: moderation is censorship One person\u0026rsquo;s moderating is another person\u0026rsquo;s censoring, as this discussion among Reddit editors testifies. And while it\u0026rsquo;s been found that the centralized moderating undertaken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube constitutes “a detailed system rooted in the American legal system with regularly revised rules, trained human decision-making, and reliance on a system of external influence”, it is clear “they have little direct accountability to their users” [ref ].\nThat last bit doesn\u0026rsquo;t sit well with us, and if you\u0026rsquo;re reading this then it very likely doesn\u0026rsquo;t float your boat either. We haven\u0026rsquo;t had to rely on private corporations taking this role throughout history, and we have no intention of relying on them going forward.\nSubjectively, moderation may feel like censorship. This could be when the moderator really has gone ‘too far’, or when the subject doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel sufficiently empowered to defend herself, but also when the subject is indeed just an asshole.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31116\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;566\u0026rdquo;] Free Speech https://xkcd.com/1357/ [/caption]\nAs you will imagine, AKASHA is not pro-censorship. Rather, we recognise that the corollary of freedom of speech is freedom of attention. Just because I\u0026rsquo;m writing something does not mean you have to read it. Just because I keep writing stuff doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you have to keep seeing that I keep writing stuff. This is a really important observation.\nMyth 2: moderation is unnecessary AKASHA is driven to help create the conditions for the emergence of collective minds i.e. intelligences greater than the sum of their parts. Anyone drawn to AKASHA, and indeed to Ethereum, is interested in helping to achieve something bigger than themselves, and we haven\u0026rsquo;t found an online ‘free-for-all’ that leads to such an outcome.\nLarge scale social networks without appropriate moderating actions are designed to host extremists, or attract extremists because the host has given up trying to design for moderating. A community without moderating processes is missing essential structure, leaving it little more than a degenerative mess that many would avoid.\nMyth 3: moderation is done by moderators Many social networks and discussion fora include a role often referred to as moderator, but every member of every community has some moderating capabilities. This may be explicit — e.g. flagging content for review by a moderator — or implicit — e.g. heading off a flame war with calming words.\nIf a community member is active, she is moderating. In other words, she is helping to maintain and evolve the social norms governing participation. As a general rule of thumb, the more we can empower participants to offer appropriate positive and negative feedback, the more appropriately we can divine an aggregate consequence, the more shoulders take up the essential moderating effort. We\u0026rsquo;ll know when we\u0026rsquo;ve got there when the role we call moderator seems irrelevant.\nMyth 4: moderation is simple enough Moderating actions may be simple enough, but overall moderating design is as much art as science. It\u0026rsquo;s top-down, bottom-up, and side-to-side, and complex …\nComplexity refers to the phenomena whereby a system can exhibit characteristics that can\u0026rsquo;t be traced to one or two individual participants. Complex systems contain a collection of many interacting objects. They involve the effect of feedback on behaviors, system openness, and the complicated mixing of order and chaos [ref ]. Many interacting people constitute a complex system, so there\u0026rsquo;s no getting around this in the context of Ethereum World.\nThe law of requisite variety asserts that a system\u0026rsquo;s control mechanism (i.e. the governing, specifically the moderating in the context here) must be capable of exhibiting more states than the system itself [ref ]. Failure to engineer for this sets the system up to fail. Here are some example failure modes in this respect:\nA team of central moderators that just can\u0026rsquo;t keep up with the volume of interactions requiring their attention The value of engaging in moderating processes is considered insufficient Moderating processes are perceived as unfair Those doing the moderating cannot relate to the context in question Moderating processes are too binary (e.g. expulsion is the only punishment available). Moderating by design Let\u0026rsquo;s take a look at some of the things we need to take into consideration, various feedback loops, and our moderating goals.\nConsiderations There are a number of top-level design considerations [ref ]. These include:\nManual / automatic Human interactions involve subtlety, context, irony, sarcasm, and multimedia; in fact many qualities and formats that don\u0026rsquo;t come easy to algorithmic interpretation. Fully automated moderation isn\u0026rsquo;t feasible today (and perhaps we might hope that long remains the case), so that leaves us with entirely manual moderating processes and computer-assisted moderating processes.\nTransparent / opaque “Your account has been disabled.”\nThis is all you get when Facebook\u0026rsquo;s automated moderation kicks in. No explanation. No transparency. At AKASHA, we default to transparency, obvs.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31117\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;586\u0026rdquo;] Facebook account disabled[/caption]\nDeterrence \u0026amp; punishment Only when people know about a law can it be effective. Only when people learn of a social norm can it endure. Both the law and social norms deter but do not prevent subversion. Punishment is available when the deterrent is insufficient — in fact it validates the deterrent — and both are needed in moderating processes.\nCentralized / decentralized Decentralization is a means rather than an end of itself [ref ]. In this instance, decentralized moderating processes contribute to a feeling of community ‘ownership’, personal agency, and ideally more organic scaling.\nExtrinsic / intrinsic motivation Some moderating processes play out in everyday interactions whereas others require dedication of time to the task. That time allocation is either extrinsically motivated (e.g. for payment, per Facebook\u0026rsquo;s moderators), or intrinsically motivated (e.g. for the cause, per the Wikipedia community). It is often said that the two don\u0026rsquo;t make comfortable bedfellows, but at the same time there are many people out there drawn to working for ‘a good cause’ and earning a living from it.\nWe are drawn to supporting and amplifying intrinsic motivations without making onerous demands on the time of a handful of community members. Moderating processes should feel as normal as not dropping litter and occasionally picking up someone else\u0026rsquo;s discarded Coke can. When they start to feel more like a volunteer litter pick then questions of ‘doing your fair share’ are raised in the context of a potential tragedy of the commons.\nNever-ending feedback Nothing about moderating is ever static. We can consider five levels of feedback:\n1st loop Demonstrating and observing behaviors on a day-to-day basis is a primary source and sustainer of a community\u0026rsquo;s culture — how we do and don\u0026rsquo;t do things around here. We might call it moderating by example.\n2nd loop This is more explicitly about influencing the circulation of content and the form most people think about when contemplating moderation. A typical form of second-loop feedback is exemplified by the content that has accrued sufficient flags to warrant attention by a moderator — someone with authority to wield a wider range of moderating processes and/or greater powers in wielding them. While it sometimes appears to play second fiddle to corrective feedback, 2nd loop also includes positive feedback celebrating contributions and actions the community would love to see more of.\n3rd loop Community participation is structured by moderating processes. Third-loop feedback may then operate to review and trim or adapt or extend those structures, reviewing members\u0026rsquo; agency, by regular appointment or by exception.\n4th loop Moderating is a form of governing — the processes of determining authority, decision-making, and accountability. Fourth-loop feedback may then operate such that the outcomes of 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-loop feedback prompt a review of community governance, or contribute to periodic reviews.\nLegal When infrastructure is owned and/or operated by a legal entity, that entity has legal responsibilities under relevant jurisdictions that may require the removal of some content. When content-addressable storage is used (e.g. IPFS , Swarm ), deletion is tricky but delisting remains quite feasible when discovery entails the maintenance of a search index.\nModerating design goals We\u0026rsquo;ve identified eight moderating design goals. It will always be useful in our future discussions together to identify whether any difference of opinion relates to the validity of a goal or to the manner of achieving it.\nGoal 1: Freedom We celebrate freedom of speech and freedom of attention, equally.\nGoal 2: Inclusivity Moderating actions must be available to all. Period.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31118\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;693\u0026rdquo;] Everyone is welcome to edit Wikipedia[/caption]\nGoal 3: Robustness Moderating actions by different members may accrue different weights in different contexts solely to negate manipulation / gaming and help sustain network health. In simple terms, \u0026lsquo;old hands\u0026rsquo; may be more fluent in moderating actions than newbies, and we also want to amplify humans and diminish nefarious bots in this regard.\nGoal 4: Simplicity Moderating processes should be simple, non-universal (excepting actions required for legal compliance), and distributed.\nGoal 5: Complexity The members and moderating processes involved should produce requisite complexity.\nGoal 6: Levelling up We want to encourage productive levelling up and work against toxic levelling down, for network health in the pursuit of collective intelligence.\nGoal 7: Responsibility Moderating processes should help convey that with rights (e.g. freedom from the crèches of centralized social networks) come responsibilities.\nGoal 8: Decentralized Moderating processes should be straightforward to architect in web 2 initially, and not obviously impossible in the web 3 stack in the longer-term. If we get it right, a visualisation of appropriate network analysis should produce something like the image in the centre here:\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31119\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;689\u0026rdquo;] Moderating consequences — gotta get us some dynamic polycentricity[/caption]\nThis list is by no means exhaustive or final. The conversation about moderation continues, but it needs you! If you think you\u0026rsquo;d like to be a bigger part of this in the early stages, please get in touch with us . If you feel it is missing something, we also encourage you to join the conversation here and here .\nImage by Courtney Williams .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/02/community-moderating-bringing-our-best/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/courtney-williams-2OQlK1FPN6A-unsplash-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://blog.ethereum.world/community-moderation-myths-goals/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally published to the Ethereum World blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world\u0026rsquo;s attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur work at AKASHA is \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efounded\u003c/a\u003e\n on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. We are dedicated to that unfolding, and so then to enabling, nurturing, exploring, learning, discussing, self-organizing, creating, and regenerating. And this post explores our thinking and doing when it comes to moderating.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eModerating processes are fascinating and essential. They must encourage and accommodate the complexity of community, and their design can contribute to phenomenal success or dismal failure. And regardless, we\u0026rsquo;re never going to go straight from zero to hero here. We need to work this up together.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;re going to start by defining some common terms and dispelling some common myths. Then we explore some key design considerations and sketch out the feedback mechanisms involved, before presenting the moderating goals as we see them right now. Any and all comments and feedback are most welcome.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Community moderating — bringing our best"},{"content":"\nOriginally published by Omidyar Network\u0026rsquo;s Good ID .\nAs Einstein intimated [1], everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Current architectures for digital identity — intended to meet some definition of the needs of the complex living system that is human society — are dangerously too simple for the task.\nEven self-sovereign identity (SSI), not infrequently held up by its champions as having the requisite complexity by design or claims to that effect, encodes distressing emergent outcomes.\nI will qualify my use of words such as dangerous and distressing. Most obviously, we are talking about systems that may facilitate exclusion, persecution, and murder, as history attests.\nMuch less obviously I find, we are contemplating the ramifications for psychological, sociological, and ecological health; the very poor outcomes of the digitalization of identity for the human condition, the fabric of our communities, and our facilities to cooperate in responding to wicked problems at national and global scale. I don’t wish to sound flippant but these things are more important than, say, my hiring a car with great ease or proving I’m old enough to order a beer, both referenced examples of the technology’s application\nThe Good ID article format isn’t intended for detailed critiques - I invite you to dive into one provided in the conclusion. Rather for the brevity required here, I’ll focus on the misapplication of one common engineering maxim — separation of concerns — in terms of its contribution to SSI’s dystopian promise.\nDescribed as “a kind of divide and conquer” strategy [2], and “one of the essential principles in software engineering” [3], “this principle asserts that software should be separated based on the kinds of work it performs” [4].\nThe SSI architecture follows the separation of concerns maxim when it shouldn’t, and then fails to when it should. Let’s take each in turn:\nOutside the legal domain and IT systems administration for access management, identity is a social phenomenon co-constitutive and reciprocally-defining with relationships and corresponding information flows, as outlined in a previous Good ID viewpoint [5].\nThis natural triarchy cannot be separated, atomized, discretized, and yet, with an ingrained separation of concerns mindset, an historic familiarity with the comparatively narrow domain of Identity Access Management (IAM), and a corpus inherited from their pre-digital society-coding cousins, SSI architects appear drawn to legal identity and authorization as exemplars of the wider design challenge.\nThere may be benefits in rising up to the challenge in this common albeit artificial context, but having followed a separation of concerns in one tight context that is most unsuited to others, the architecture must then design to keep the corresponding code tightly constrained to the context for which it is indeed designed.\nBut just when the initial dedication to separation of concerns demands continued dedication, the architects turn to pursue interoperability and universality. SSI is designed deliberately to bleed into the quotidian operation of conceptualizations of identity that reflect the complexities of our nature and natural living systems, rather than stick to the comparatively Newtonian workings of the law.\nThis is malignant. Quite simply, SSI is not ready for us, so we must not be ready for SSI.\nFor a deeper dive on this topic, please see The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI) [6].\nSuch critique is a necessary next step on this long path to forging inter-disciplinary research, understanding, and development towards ‘digital identity’ for psychological, sociological, and ecological health; to co-creating contextually Good ID.\nYou are invited to join the corresponding working group, especially if you or your colleagues have deep expertise in psychology, sociology, ecology, history, political science, etc. - indeed any and all disciplines that will help balance and bring the best out of deeply talented information technologists.\nReferences\n[1] See Quote Investigator [2] Laplante, P. A. (2007). What Every Engineer Should Know about Software Engineering . United Kingdom. CRC Press.\n[3] De Win, B., Piessens, F., Joosen, W., \u0026amp; Verhanneman, T. (2002). On the importance of the separation-of-concerns principle in secure software engineering . In Workshop on the Application of Engineering Principles to System Security Design (pp. 1-10).\n[4] Microsoft .NET Common Architectural Principles . Retrieved 23 Nov 2020.\n[5] Sheldrake, P. (2019). Good Identity Lives In Between . Good ID.\n[6] Sheldrake, P. (2020). The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI) .\nPhoto by Julian Mora .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/01/how-the-separation-and-unseparation-of-concerns-contribute-to-ssis-dystopian-promise/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"By Julian Mora\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/julian-mora-v490AlsqbTs-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.good-id.org/en/articles/how-the-separation-and-unseparation-of-concerns-contribute-to-ssis-dystopian-promise/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally published by Omidyar Network\u0026rsquo;s Good ID\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Einstein intimated [1], everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Current architectures for digital identity — intended to meet some definition of the needs of the complex living system that is human society — are dangerously too simple for the task.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven self-sovereign identity (SSI), not infrequently held up by its champions as having the requisite complexity by design or claims to that effect, encodes distressing emergent outcomes.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How the separation and unseparation of concerns contribute to SSI’s dystopian promise"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the generative identity website .\nPhil Windley claims that a technology stack consisting of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and related technologies has all the qualities of generativity. He does so in his latest blog post with reference to Jonathan Zittrain ’s 2006 paper The Generative Internet . It’s a well-known and well-respected reference I offered among others in 2019 on using the adjective generative in the context of identity.\nZittrain qualifies technological generativity as a function of its “capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.”\nPhil recommends the paper in support of his argument.\nI recommend the paper to counter Phil’s broader argument and to underline the purpose and value of generative identity .\nLast month Phil and I discussed the critique of self-sovereign identity that describes why I consider SSI — at least as it stands today — to be degenerative to the point of dystopian. If you are unfamiliar with the critique you may want to check out The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI) . Phil is a proponent of SSI and in a sincere attempt to reconcile our perspectives, which in many ways are not too dissimilar, I put it to Phil that there is a blind spot in his analyses when it comes to complexity, which ties directly to my two dominant themes:\nWe are contemplating sociotechnology (in the simplest terms, people + technology) and never merely technology alone Such contemplation and design requires multidisciplinary expertise. We have just published the draft Generative Identity Group Charter in pursuit of such multidisciplinary insight. Progress in terms of engaging thought leaders like Phil pivots on nurturing a shared understanding of complexity in the multidisciplinary context of sociotechnology, and I have no doubt that Phil may well add to that list in terms of those aspects he considers to be our blind spots.\nPhil’s latest post is titled The Generative Self-Sovereign Internet . It is the first of a series of two. There is only one prior and fleeting use of “generative” on Phil’s blog pre-dating our work here according to Google, and so this blog post definitely caught my attention. He defines “self-sovereign internet” in a November 2020 post as a future network enabled by DIDComm, the emerging messaging protocol for secure and private communication between entities identified by / identifying with DIDs (decentralized identifiers). DID-based relationships are the foundation of self-sovereign identity.\nIn the latest post Phil reviews this technology for alignment with Zittrain’s qualifications for technological generativity and concludes that it is indeed generative. (He sets up his upcoming post, part two, to do the same for verifiable credential exchange.)\nI agree. It is generative technology. But that cannot be our purpose.\nIt seems likely that this post is prompted by our recent conversation. Perhaps it’s Phil’s way of bringing the earlier conversation to a conclusion as I invited him to do at the time. He’s asserting that SSI is generative. By corollary he’s effectively asking who needs generative identity when we’ve already got it in the form of SSI? Who could possibly call SSI degenerative?\nI can, among a growing number of others. And I do.\nI tried to explain during our exchange in December, and I will try again. (And I recognise the shortfall as the communicator’s.) During the December conversation I contributed this observation:\nYou write [Phil] that I should be \u0026ldquo;merely looking at the architecture\u0026rdquo;. I should make it very clear that I would never merely do that. …\nWe are contemplating quite different scales of system. The system architecture to which I refer encompasses human behaviour, human community and society, and the natural living world. I have not seen any system analysis from the SSI community at such scales, nor any anticipation then of the inevitable emergence.\nThe system architecture to which you refer is technical. Period. There is no way, contrary to your assertion, that the distressing consequences with which I’m concerned ought to follow from this system architecture. There may be some, but my focus is SSI in the real world.\nRegardless, Phil’s purview in this post continues to be solely technological. In contrast, generative identity — indeed anything that is or purports to be ‘digital identity’ by my reading — can only ever be considered sociotechnological.\nAnd here’s the thing, the primary subject of Zittrain’s paper is actually generative sociotechnology — how to sustain and nurture generativity when people integrate the technologies into their lives, their families, their communities. What might they perceive? What might they think? How might they behave?\nHaving presented those qualities of generative technology that Phil references in support of his argument, Zittrain actually invests the majority of the paper explaining why a singular dedication to technological generativity will defeat itself on contact with people, which will sound very familiar to any reader of the SSI-dystopia critique.\nZittrain’s paper explores the complexity of the whole system (i.e. the one that actually matters) narratively and notes how it may well not exhibit those much hoped-for qualities for long no matter how many might strive to defend its technological purity. In fact the more they defend it the worse the potential outcome. With fifteen years’ of hindsight now to our advantage, we can confirm that Zittrain’s anticipation of poor outcomes in the context of generativity, or more pertinently the mechanisms by which such outcomes emerge, was on the money.\nSimilarly, I argue that those dedicated singularly to SSI technology will produce outcomes opposite to those they bounce out of bed every morning to pursue. In their mono-disciplinary isolation, in refusing to explore, understand, and adapt to the social emergent possibilities, their product will be degenerative. This is more alarming than Zittrain\u0026rsquo;s prophecy simply because our focus here envelops human identity, human dignity, the human condition.\nIn one part of the paper Zittrain focuses on the social repercussions of code and the awakening of the Internet Engineering Task Force to the need to enforce ethical standards. This ethical imperative at a whole system level remains urgent. Generative identity approaches \u0026lsquo;digital identity\u0026rsquo; for psychological, sociological, and ecological health, necessarily encompassing complexity, a dedication to sociotechnology not just technology, and multidisciplinarity. It really is the only ethical way to proceed. It is the only way Phil and all technologists working on ‘digital identity’ will contribute to the requisite generativity in the contexts and at the scales that matter.\nPhoto by Osman Rana .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/01/the-deficiency-of-the-generative-self-sovereign-internet/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"dark tunnel\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/osman-rana-9rRBct37OAI-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/deficiency-of-the-generative-self-sovereign-internet/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePhil Windley claims that a technology stack consisting of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and related technologies has all the qualities of generativity. He does so in his latest blog post with reference to \u003ca href=\"https://jz.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJonathan Zittrain\u003c/a\u003e\n’s 2006 paper \u003ca href=\"https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/zittrain_generativeinternet.pdf?sequence=1\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Generative Internet\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n. It’s a well-known and well-respected reference \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/02/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eI offered among others in 2019\u003c/a\u003e\n on using the adjective \u003cem\u003egenerative\u003c/em\u003e in the context of identity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eZittrain qualifies technological generativity as a function of its “capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePhil recommends the paper in support of his argument.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI recommend the paper to counter Phil’s broader argument and to underline the purpose and value of \u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/about-generative-identity/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003egenerative identity\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The deficiency of the \"Generative Self-Sovereign Internet\""},{"content":"\nI discussed the topics of sovereignty, agency and complexity on Medium.com with Phil Windley in December 2020 in follow-up to my September 2019 post: Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (first published to the AKASHA Foundation blog here ). Medium.com isn\u0026rsquo;t a great interface for following such threads, so the conversation was drawn together first on the generative identity website , and now reproduced below.\nThread 1 — on control and agency In response to Sheldrake\u0026rsquo;s assertion:\nagency (in co-evolving structure) entails a negotiation in and with the world that the word “control” denies.\nWindley There is no agency without control of something. Agency implies I control things. Else how can I be autonomous?\nSheldrake I believe you may be wielding the concept of agency slightly differently to sociologists — by my reading at least — perhaps evidenced most clearly by your question “Else how can I be autonomous?” \u0026laquo; to varying extents you are not.\n“Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.” (Giddens, 1986)\nOne can say that the greater one’s capabilities of control, the greater one’s agency. But while control is perhaps the desired object, agency does not presume control.\nHaving control over a social outcome entails quite different dynamics to, say, controlling the light switch in one’s bedroom. The latter is entirely dumb and will never disagree with you. As and when social interaction encompasses disagreement, one person’s “control” may come at the cost of someone else’s. (Perhaps you want the light off but your partner still wants to read.) Quite naturally then, it is impossible for everyone to maintain control.\nIn complex systems, I would talk in terms of influence rather than control (with the likes of power theory and actor-network theory linking the two). One may be negotiating in a social system in one context where one’s will prevails, and then in another where, despite no difference on one’s own part, one’s will does not. That’s life. That’s relationships (the pathways for organizing). That’s interpersonal data (the medium of organizing). That’s identity (the sense-making capacity of organizing).\nWindley Sovereignty isn’t about complete control. It’s about borders. When we say a country is sovereign, we don’t mean it can do anything it wants vis ‘a vis other countries. Only that it controls what happens within its border. Outside its border, it must interact with others as peers.\nSo too with SSI. The big idea of SSI is that it gives the individual a place to stand as a peer instead of having to be within someone else administrative identity system where they set all the rules. SSI allows people to interact with other people and organizations as peers.\nSee https://www.windley.com/archives/2020/08/authentic_digital_relationships.shtml for more on why I think this leads to better relationship and a few — dare I say it?? — generative use cases that arise from those better relationships.\nSheldrake A nation state is an artificial construct defined by artificial borders. Nation state sovereignty most definitely invokes those borders.\nBut humans are natural not artificial. While I argue that SSI currently relates to legal or more generally noun-like identity — rather than the verb-like, more natural conceptualizations of identity — it is being designed to bleed into every micro-interaction in our quotidian lived experiences. And this is deeply worrying.\nThere are absolutely no hard borders in natural living systems. Perceptions to the contrary may be expected but remain entirely subjective, and I address this very point at greater length in the original post (heading: \u0026ldquo;An ecology\u0026rdquo;).\nDrawing hard borders is your personal choice driven by one\u0026rsquo;s own goals, context, values, and cultural lens. Drawing them makes no difference in the ecology of the whole \u0026hellip; as Gregory Bateson noted, they just form part of the very ecology they were supposed to delimit.\nBut drawing hard borders does make a difference when concreted in technical code from which Alice has no escape. Alice\u0026rsquo;s context, values, and cultural situation differ to yours, and while you may sincerely hope for her to have \u0026ldquo;self-sovereignty\u0026rdquo; as you see it, your architectural imposition actually denies her it.\nWindley Sorry, gotta disagree. As Gabriel García Márquez said: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” There are very much borders in human relationships and while we may not identify them the same way a nation-state does, there are borders.\nYou’re assuming these borders are hard. I think SSI lets us make them extremely flexible and move them all the time. You’re creating things to argue with based on assumptions the technology is driving the architecture.\nSheldrake Having read just the one of his books to date I have some appreciation for Márquez\u0026rsquo;s magic realism. A pithy quote cannot be relied upon however when presented in opposition to deep domain expertise in psychology, sociology, and ecology (which I am not claiming for the avoidance of any doubt! \u0026hellip; just asserting that such expertise be brought in here.)\nA border is the edge or boundary of something. When you intimate that the borders you perceive in relation to the human condition are not hard, what do you mean? (I would underline that references to their flexibility and mobility doesn\u0026rsquo;t change a border from being a border.)\nWhile borders feature in your sense-making of the world, they are in fact I would argue a product of the very distributed cognition they deny. In conversation (via interpreters) with Amazonian tribe leaders last year, I can vouch that they do not perceive a border between themselves and the trees, let alone each other.\nWhat purpose does your reference to borders serve outside legal identity other than to support one\u0026rsquo;s perceptions and make it look easier to code?\nAny technical architecture for a complex living system premised on false assumptions that manages still to secure traction will leave deep deep marks.\nMárquez writes at the top of his memoir (\u0026ldquo;Vivir para contarla\u0026rdquo; / \u0026ldquo;Living to tell the tale\u0026rdquo;):\n\u0026ldquo;La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda y cómo la recuerda para contarla.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.\u0026rdquo;\nHow certain are you that this will endure in an SSI age?\nThread 2 — on complexity In response to Sheldrake quoting Matthew Schutte in the context of the 2016 SSI principle: Control. Users must control their identity. \u0026hellip;\nThis assumes that 1) “identities” are a static referent, 2) identities are maintained at a system wide scale.\nWindley Neither of these are necessary assumptions for the principle. I agree that identities are more than a static referent and it\u0026rsquo;s better to speak of relationships, but control is still required. And there\u0026rsquo;s simply nothing about control that implies centralization and maintenance at a \u0026ldquo;system wide scale\u0026rdquo;\nSheldrake Thanks Phil. I think I can try to put my finger on the ambiguity underpinning the difference in your interpretation of this principle and Matthew’s. With the emphasis on try! …\nChristopher Allen’s principle is “Control. Users must control their identities.” I refer to the principle here as “Control. Users must control their identity”, singular. This is accurate (less ambiguous) because, as Allen’s accompanying explanation confirms, his use of the plural corresponds to the multiple users rather than to each user having multiple identities. Each user has one identity, and “it” is used to refer to that one identity.\nIf Matthew reads this similarly, then the one singular identity (referent) must, by definition, endure, for how else might they be referred to. It is not dynamic but static. It is an “it” among others, which together constitute a social system. Others refer to my “it” and I refer to theirs. They are then categorically a system-wide static referent.\nIf you interpret this principle differently to the point where you assert that it does not make either assumption, then perhaps you are reading “identity” as a mass noun. This is not an easy interpretation if only because Allen presents a binary choice (“They must be able to choose celebrity or privacy as they prefer”) that would not be required if one could — if this schema ever reflected reality — choose differently for one’s different identities.\nWindley I like to point out that there’s no artifact called an “identity” in the identity metasystem created by the protocols supported by the Indy and Aries projects. People see and manage relationships (connections), credentials, and messages. I view “identity” as what emerges from all those and is only seen, in total, by each person.\nI’ve said before that trying to parse Christopher’s words from 2016 to understand what is happening today is just setting up strawmen arguments that are easy to knock down. Christopher made an important contribution, but his words are not scripture and he’s not a prophet. You’d do well to move on from arguments based on finely parsed readings of his words like it’s the Apocrypha.\nSheldrake To your point about Allen\u0026rsquo;s 2016 principles, you will note that the most recent SSI critique makes no mention. But my 2019 critique does because such \u0026rsquo;laws\u0026rsquo; get ingrained in minds and encoded in software and endure longer than you might otherwise think appropriate, and remain then worthy of criticism.\nI wonder if you agree \u0026hellip; I really do think there\u0026rsquo;s not much that distinguishes our perspectives / models. We really do see things very similarly indeed. Reassuringly.\nTo paraphrase the concluding sentence to your first paragraph here, if only to underline that alignment but also to signal the very subtle difference \u0026hellip; Alice\u0026rsquo;s identities are the co-emergent consequence of her relationships, perceived imperfectly and only in parts by each person (including herself).\nIn fact, Georg Simmel put it far more eloquently than either of us more than a century ago.\n\u0026ldquo;We are all fragments, not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgamations not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality and uniqueness — no longer distinguishable in principle — which envelops our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines. However, the view of the other broadens these fragments into what we never actually are purely and wholly. The fragments that are actually there can scarcely not be seen only juxtaposed, but as we fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, completely unconsciously of course, we construct the fullness of individuality from these fragments.\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; the procedures play out in the individual soul as well. In every moment these processes are of so complex a kind, harboring such an abundance of manifold and contradictory vicissitudes, that identifying them with one of our psychological concepts is always incomplete and actually falsifying: even the life moments of the individual soul are never connected by just one thread.\u0026rdquo;\nWindley I like the quote and agree we are more aligned than not.\nMy problem with your response is parsing it finely to justify the assertion that SSI has static, noun-like identities instead of merely looking at the architecture and judging it. It’s like sitting around for years trying to determine from first principles how many teeth a horse has instead of just going out to the pasture and counting.\nIn fact, I think SSI is extremely dynamic and flexible. Indeed, after reading your posts on generative identity, I’m wondering what you’re going to change in the architecture to come up with something more generative than the SSI architecture I’m familiar with.\nSo, I await the design. Until then, it’s just words without substance to talk of dystopia and generativity because there’s nothing to support the argument.\nIn the end, we’re talking about how to support life-like relationships and interactions in the digital realm. That requires principles, architecture, and ultimately code.\nSheldrake Love the horse metaphor! :-) \u0026hellip; and I am, first and foremost, a professional engineer. I embrace thinking and doing in equal measure; each is better off for the other. And when thinking alerts you to significantly negative consequences of one\u0026rsquo;s actions, one pauses for reflection and entreats others similarly.\nYou are not the first to refuse the critique of SSI with the challenge to me to come up with a more fitting design (or worse \u0026hellip; some refer to a \u0026ldquo;solution\u0026rdquo;). This is illogical. The current lack of a design that does not suffer the same dangerous consequences does not relieve the current design of its flaws nor its champions of the ethical responsibility to pause and reflect.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able, yet, to articulate the malignant emergent consequences of SSI in a way that more people working in this space grasp readily. Blame the writer not the reader. Fortunately, the analyses is gaining traction here in Europe, slowly but surely, again not for the erudition of the critique but for the working of different social norms and corresponding perspectives I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\nYou write that I should be \u0026ldquo;merely looking at the architecture\u0026rdquo;. I should make it very clear that I would never merely do that. I will come back to my two main themes in response to your comment here: emergence and sociotechnology \u0026hellip;\nOne can look at the architecture of SSI all one likes, just as one can study the architecture of the automobile. Such study is necessary but woefully insufficient, taking no account for example of traffic jams, pollution, or any other systemic consequences.\nAs I write: \u0026ldquo;Viewed atomistically, technologically, SSI looks quite sensible. At scale, as sociotechnology, the emergent consequences are malignant.\u0026rdquo;\nYou write that your approach \u0026ldquo;requires principles, architecture, and ultimately code\u0026rdquo;. I would retort that the current principles are unclear and must be revisited in inter-disciplinary fora and tested for their facility to operate at a layer beneath the society with which you are most familiar to enable very different operationalizations.\nAnd when you write \u0026ldquo;code\u0026rdquo; you are thinking I suspect of technical code. I have no doubt in my mind that technical code alone will be woefully insufficient in heading off distressing outcomes per my references in the critiques to friction.\nWindley You write “Viewed atomistically, technologically, SSI looks quite sensible. At scale, as sociotechnology, the emergent consequences are malignant.” But I’ve never been able to understand those consequences or why you think they follow from SSI from your writing.\nWe disagree most pointedly, I think, on the importance of architecture and its ability to help with this. You say, for example:\n“One can look at the architecture of SSI all one likes, just as one can study the architecture of the automobile. Such study is necessary but woefully insufficient, taking no account for example of traffic jams, pollution, or any other systemic consequences.”\nYou’re mistaking component architecture with system architecture and then criticizing the ability of architecture to elucidate the problems because component architecture doesn’t answer all the questions. I contend that if you look at the architecture of the automobile transportation system holistically, then you can can better analyze malignant consequences and their causes.\nSSI is a system and there is a system architecture. The principles are very much a part of the architecture. The malignant consequences you worry about ought to follow from the system architecture and become something to study and learn from. So, please point them out. Otherwise, it’s all just handwaving.\nI suggest that part of the problem is that you’re trying to critique SSI which is a big tent that does not have a consistent set of principles or even agreement on a system architecture. As such, it’s an easy target since you can undoubtedly find some system somewhere that purports to be SSI and is “doing it wrong.” :)\nA better approach might be to select one or two specific SSI ecosystems like Sovrin, for example, and examine their principles (which are clearly laid out and evolved from Allens) and system architecture (which is very developed) and point out the specific malignancies that follow. I’m sure there are some and the community welcomes sincere criticism. Sovrin’s architecture has changed a great deal over the years as problems have been discovered because the participants are sincere in their desire to develop an identity metasystem that empowers people to live fully engaged digital lives.\nSheldrake Thanks as always Phil for taking the time to respond. Your response largely pivots on:\nYou’re mistaking component architecture with system architecture and then criticizing the ability of architecture to elucidate the problems because component architecture doesn’t answer all the questions.\nWe are contemplating quite different scales of system. The system architecture to which I refer encompasses human behaviour, human community and society, and the natural living world. I have not seen any system analysis from the SSI community at such scales, nor any anticipation then of the inevitable emergence.\nThe system architecture to which you refer is technical. Period. There is no way, contrary to your assertion, that the distressing consequences with which I’m concerned ought to follow from this system architecture. There may be some, but my focus is SSI in the real world.\n(You also write that the principles are very much a part of the architecture, but then note that there aren’t any consistent principles??)\nI, and increasingly others, will keep on highlighting the distressing outcomes here, and I thank you again for treating me here as a critical friend. Thanks. Much appreciated.\nWindley There are consistent principles for specific systems. You have to critique a specific system and its principles, not the general notion. One might, for example, argue for or against democracy to the extent people generally understand what democracy means, or if you appeal to some widely accepted definition. Otherwise, you will be better understood if you argue against democracy as it operates in [pick a country]. So too for SSI.\nYou say you’re highlighting distressing outcomes, but you’re not doing it in a way that people in, say, the Sovrin community recognize as an issue with their system cause you so often misconstrue what that community believes or is doing.\nUntil you can say “Distressing outcome X will occur in system Y because Y does Z” your critique will continue to miss the mark and not have the impact it could.\nIt’s easy to scare people by saying “this complex thing you don’t want to spend time understanding will ruin your life and cause cancer”. Much harder to say “we need a way to live fully engaged digital lives safely. Here’s how we can do that.” So, yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that you can get people to listen and be scared.\nThe tragedy is that the result will be a continuation of the status quo, a dystopia of surveillance capitalism that is destroying not just digital life, but real life as well. I think you have a moral duty to either offer specific critiques that can be acted on, or to stop scaremongering.\nSheldrake Until you can say “Distressing outcome X will occur in system Y because Y does Z” your critique will continue to miss the mark and not have the impact it could.\nThis has been a productive exchange Phil in terms of improving my understanding of the communication and collaboration challenge.\nI regard you as one of the most sophisticated leaders in the ‘digital identity’ space. You have experience and knowledge I lack, and I have experience and knowledge you lack. While that is a truism for any two people of course, I make that observation if only to humbly suggest that you appear to have a blind spot that I think typifies ‘the community’ here. Complexity.\nI’m very aware of the dangers of characterizing a group of people because undoubtedly there is always variation, there are always exceptions, but when I’m called — on more than several occasions now — to identify direct causal effects (your X, Y, Z above) it adds to the suspicion that current principles, architectures, and designs have been developed in isolation from an appreciation for complex systems, and conveys a reluctance to engage with complexity even when prompted in critique.\nThis might signal an ignorance of complex adaptive systems, of natural living systems, of sociology, of ecology. This would explain why The dystopia of self-sovereign identity isn’t hitting home as reliably as hoped with ‘the community’, yet, and indeed why the critique is warranted in the first place. It also corroborates a primary recommendation — to press PAUSE until inter-disciplinary expertise has been brought to this endeavor.\n\u0026hellip;\nOur two-threaded conversation here on Medium these past nine days is of course entirely in the public domain. We’d like then to copy and paste it unedited and in its entirety to generative-identity.org. Please do let me know this week if you have any objection, or indeed would like to add a concluding remark of course. Thank you again.\nImage by Robert Zunikoff .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2021/01/control-agency-and-complexity-phil-windley-and-philip-sheldrake-in-conversation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/robert-zunikoff-ebno_NwaOns-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI discussed the topics of sovereignty, agency and complexity on Medium.com with Phil Windley in December 2020 in follow-up to my September 2019 post: \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/09/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eGenerative identity — beyond self-sovereignty\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n (first published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/02/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog here\u003c/a\u003e\n). Medium.com isn\u0026rsquo;t a great interface for following such threads, so the conversation was drawn together \u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/control-agency-complexity-windley-sheldrake-conversation/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efirst on the generative identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n, and now reproduced below.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Control, agency and complexity — Phil Windley and Philip Sheldrake in conversation"},{"content":"\nThe critique of self-sovereign identity (SSI) has elicited this kind of response a few times now, a reaction pointing at if not acclaiming the huge effort that has gone into getting \u0026lsquo;digital identity\u0026rsquo; this far. I\u0026rsquo;ve had it via the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list, during the session on generative identity at the recent Internet Identity Workshop, and in private exchanges.\nThis cannot constitute a rational response to a critique but it is an understandable one, as many of my interlocutors recognize; there is a lot of emotional energy invested in such deep and long-term work. Open collaborators such as Doc Searls, Joyce Searls, and Drummond Reed, and it seems to me Phil Windley, appreciate the journey for all its twists and turns, but others — perhaps on visualizing some imminent arrival at some desired destination — respond differently.\nI can only guess but such a mindset appears to have contributed to a recent eight-post retort from one thought leader. Eight posts in a row! To be honest, this particular response is perhaps more personal for some reason going back, as far as I can tell, to January when she told the mailing list:\nI\u0026rsquo;m kinda done with the trolling on 15 years worth of really hard [work] to get to where we are with a guy showing up to tell us all that it isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;generative\u0026rdquo; enough.\nIt is a shame when a deep domain expert feels they have to rubbish a challenge from outside \u0026ldquo;the community\u0026rdquo; with assertions that the challenger is ignorant of the technology in question, but that\u0026rsquo;s the credential with which she would badge me.\nClearly she and I will never collaborate if only because I so dislike ad hominem discourse. And it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get dragged down by it. I responded less than admirably in a previous exchange by noting this individual\u0026rsquo;s deep domain expertise in legal (noun-like) identity but having a poor grasp otherwise. My poor choice of words. I should have at least qualified that this is my perception of her reluctance to engage in meaningful discussion of the critique, but perhaps this is just her style — the eight posts consist of a catalogue of her expertise lest anyone be confused, repeated assertions of how she knew everything about the critique and its sources before I wrote it, and how she was going to write something about emergence soon enough.\nWhile Kaliya gives me no indication that she has sensed let alone understood the distressing emergent ramifications of self-sovereign identity I try to illuminate, I can only hope for a ninth post in which she starts to grapple with its current innate malignancy.\nPhoto by Jim Wilson .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2020/11/but-weve-spent-fifteen-years-working-on-this/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"sharp bend road sign\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/jim-wilson-5QvsD0AaXPk-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/the-dystopia-of-self-sovereign-identity-ssi/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ecritique of self-sovereign identity\u003c/a\u003e\n (SSI) has elicited this kind of response a few times now, a reaction pointing at if not acclaiming the huge effort that has gone into getting \u0026lsquo;digital identity\u0026rsquo; this far. I\u0026rsquo;ve had it via the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list, during the session on generative identity at the recent Internet Identity Workshop, and in private exchanges.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis cannot constitute a rational response to a critique but it is an understandable one, as many of my interlocutors recognize; there is a lot of emotional energy invested in such deep and long-term work. Open collaborators such as Doc Searls, Joyce Searls, and Drummond Reed, and it seems to me Phil Windley, appreciate the journey for all its twists and turns, but others — perhaps on visualizing some imminent arrival at some desired destination — respond differently.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"But we've spent fifteen years working on this"},{"content":"\nSSI has distressing emergent outcomes — the antithesis of the hopes and plans of the SSI community and those attracted to SSI\u0026rsquo;s real-world application. We have to reflect and rethink.\nPut starkly, many millions of people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, and no other facet of information technology smashes into the human condition in quite the same way as ‘digital identity’. Therefore, if ever there’s a technological innovation for which ‘move fast and break things’ is not the best maxim, this is it. We need to move together with diligent respect for human dignity and living systems.\nDeveloped under the auspices of the AKASHA Foundation , and first published to the Generative Identity website .\nWith thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Dil Green, Will Abramson, Ryan Worsley, Jakub Lanc, Brent Zundel, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. And to those who have influenced the ideas here in conversation and in their writing: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Elizabeth Renieris, Kieron O\u0026rsquo;Hara, Martin Etzrodt, Michael Shea.\nThis document supports the launch of the generative identity working group[1], and emerges the week of the 31st Internet Identity Workshop[2] and in good time for the Odyssey Momentum hackathon.[3]\nIntroduction The SSI community is writing a book for publication in 2021 (referred to from here on simply as ‘the book’):\nThis case study-driven book cuts through the jargon and hype to expose the amazing potential SSI offers for security, privacy, identity, and even uprooting the way the global economy works.\nThe chapters and appendices are all listed on the publisher’s website at the time of writing[4].\nBased on previous analysis, the editors invited me to contribute a chapter with the title “SSI: our dystopian nightmare”. While it is a challenge to address its flaws in one chapter, it was nevertheless a privilege to be invited to do so and a testament to those extending the invitation. This document evolved from a draft of that chapter, and the chapter will now evolve from this document.\nThe book blurb says \u0026ldquo;you’ll reach the book’s lightbulb moment: what this radical technology really means for the shape of our lives, our businesses, and our futures.\u0026rdquo; Unfortunately, the story to date has been largely utopian, an impossible future.\nSociotechnology No-one works on SSI to deliver outcomes diametrically opposed to the ones they set out to procure. But that is what’s happening.\nI urge you to read on because — regardless of your job, your skills, your experience or your professional goals — you have an ethical responsibility to yourself, your colleagues, your friends and your family if you have any influence in this context at all.\nI invite you to press pause on any SSI project you may be involved in while you consider the potential dystopian consequences of your work, and if you don’t have authority over the pause button, do make sure that those that do read this document.\nIf you or they don’t fully understand the deep concerns outlined in this document — my apologies. I entreat you to work with a tech-savvy social scientist in one day of joint reflection. Just one day.\nWhy a social scientist?\nAlthough SSI has been scoped, architected and built as technology, it is not merely technology. By definition, it’s sociotechnology (involving the application of insights from the social sciences to design policies and programs[5]). Yet when I’ve asked if any disciplines other than technology and law have actually been invited to the party thus far, the question has always drawn a blank. No reference to psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, historians, political scientists, etc.\nThis is alarming simply because people don’t work like software works. The SSI community’s mission breaks on contact with people if there is even a chance that people will ‘break’ on contact with SSI.\nOne has to go no further than the title of the book’s first chapter to bring a mono-disciplinary myopia into focus:\nChapter 1: Why the Internet is missing an identity layer — and why SSI can finally provide one.\nSSI cannot provide an \u0026lsquo;identity layer\u0026rsquo; of the Internet any more than the Internet might be said to be missing a ‘truth layer’. Such deep and meaningful concepts manifest amongst human beings. They can’t be slotted into the technology stack alongside the likes of TCP/IP, UDP, and HTTP[6].\nWhen the SSI community refers to an ‘identity layer’, its subject is actually a set of algorithms and services designed to ensure the frictionless transmission of incorruptible messages between multiple parties. This involves some clever mathematics and neat code that will undoubtedly prove of some value in the world with appropriate tight constraints, and it will certainly impact the operation of various conceptualisations of identity, but this is not human identity per se, or the digitalization of human identity. Far from it, as we shall see.\nFirst, we take a brief journey into emergent consequences. Then I’ll introduce two broad categorisations of conceptualisations of human identity developed specifically to help make sense of the possibilities and ramifications of identity technologies. We conclude with a brief look at the implications of the first two sections in terms of our collective intelligence and ability to address wicked problems together.\nI know from experience that this isn’t an easy subject to talk about — ‘digital identity’ is such a broad, deep and multi-faceted field. If you are an expert in sociology or philosophy, psychology or cultural studies, complexity, history, economics or law or some other relevant discipline other than information technology, I urge you to expand on this analysis to help throw more light on the matter.\nNot just like a wallet With brevity in mind, let’s select just one key sentence from the book’s first chapter:\nthis means the best overall analogy for the decentralized identity model is in fact exactly the way we prove our identity to each other every day: by getting out our wallet and showing the credentials we have obtained from other trusted parties.\nUnfortunately, this assertion is dangerously misleading.\nWe’re a quarter of a century into the development of social media (in the context of the World Wide Web), and so with the benefit of a hindsight we don’t yet have for SSI, how does this read to you? \u0026hellip;\nthis means the best overall analogy for social media is in fact exactly the way we converse and interact every day: by sharing things to talk about and expressing our thoughts as we do with current media — phoning, writing, emailing.\nThere are some critical qualities missing here. Not because it isn’t precisely equivalent to Chapter 1’s claim for SSI but rather because we all know better after the fact. This assertion for social media lacks any acknowledgement of complex adaptive systems, of media theory, or of our understanding of human behaviour. It fails to anticipate the emergence of outcomes wholly different from prior experience.\nI’m not saying that social media does not have some wonderful qualities but that it has also contributed to the decline of traditional media and to the development of filter bubbles, viral fake news, state surveillance, surveillance capitalism, political polarisation and extremism, revenge porn, cyberbullying, Snapchat dysmorphia[7], pro-suicide fora, smartphone addiction, etc. The least we can do now then is to invest time with social scientists and other disciplines to ask what unintended consequences will accompany large-scale adoption of SSI. There is no evidence that this has happened to date.\nI can write “will accompany” rather than “may” because complex adaptive systems behave differently when core system properties are radically altered (and sometimes even when slightly altered). For example, friction is a core property of systems of identity just as it is for the media through which we communicate. Digitalization removes the frictions associated with the time and energy required to manage atoms, traverse space, and search and access archives. And just to note that, like any system property, friction cannot be said to be a good or bad thing out of context, and I will explore this in the current context later.\nWe swipe therefore we are In seeking to better understand the unfamiliar by reflecting on the more familiar, we can think about behaviours we exhibit or have seen others exhibit in the context of social media and the potential or indeed likely equivalent behaviours and consequences in the context of SSI.\nWe change ourselves, consciously and subconsciously, when we know we\u0026rsquo;re the subject of gaze. It’s a perfectly natural response. The gaze doesn’t have to be active to ‘make’ people behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. For example, have you seen people ‘Instagram™ming’ themselves into a scene and wondered whether they actually appreciated the occasion or even took in the scenery? Are they present? They were perhaps emotionless up until the smartphone made their arm raise to head height (or in fact just above for ‘just the right angle’[8]), and then came postures and smiles to meet the gaze. Pity the selfie-generation!\nAnother noteworthy behaviour is the readiness of social media users to transgress their own privacy norms in the moment — the so-called privacy paradox[9]. Or perhaps we don’t personally appreciate or care about any potential consequences of a privacy breach in a given context. Quite naturally, we behave with immediate self-interest rather than the system’s longer-term best interests in mind.\nIn the same vein as these examples … What verifiable claims do you need in your wallet? What’s the ‘must-have’ this week? You don’t want to stand out by failing to follow suit. Hey, have you seen this new feature that lets you self-verify your total number of verifiable claims? And this social network just made it easy to publish claims openly[10]. Everyone’s doing it.\nWhat if the only thing standing between you and making a living is a verifiable claim that you’ve had covid-19, presuming some corresponding immunity. Miserably, a fraction of society has to ask themselves if they should go get the virus for just this reason, and a fraction of those then do.\nPerhaps you’re thinking that behaviours resulting from the adoption of SSI are not the SSI community’s responsibility? But they are — just refer to the ethical framework of your professional engineering body. Or perhaps you’re hoping people just won’t behave in ways that can be seen, upon some reflection, to produce negative outcomes at system scale. But the behaviours make individual sense in the contextual moment. We operate with self-interest in mind, rarely system-interest. It’s simply how we are — even those who might be said to have given it some thought, as epitomized by a story tweeted by Daniel Buchner[11].\nDaniel leads technical product work for Microsoft’s decentralized identity initiative and recently engaged a medical doctor in conversation on the topic. He was appalled to hear the doctor conclude that social security numbers should be applied everywhere, and that they should be publicly known to represent us.\nYou may have some long-lasting relationships on Twitter or Wordpress or Medium or WhatsApp or Facebook or Reddit or wherever, just as you do in the ‘real world’. Each takes its own course with some things revealed, others things kept private, other things merely left unreferenced. And some of us have even been known to exaggerate a few things on occasion. We try out different personae on different platforms, in different locations, in different contexts. This is all quite natural, part and parcel of being human.\nOur identities, our selves, are formed through internal narratives. The internal narrative is informed by the interactions. And the interactions are modulated by the identities. Social, reciprocal, concurrent, and forever in flux.\nAn acquaintance now quits those ‘old-fashioned’ relationship-building niceties and gets straight to the SSI point. Where do you work? Which college did you go to? Which college did your parents go to[12]? Republican or Democrat? What’s your gender? Your ethnic origins? Do you have this gene or the other one?\nIf you fail to offer up the requisite verifiable claims then you fail to get to ‘trust building’ first base in the SSI century. (Note: this is in fact trust avoidance not trust building[13].) You are then ignored or indeed rejected. But it’s worse. The new social norm now expects you, expects everyone, and more accurately expects your agents to perform similar examinations as a matter of course. And why not? We’re told it’s beneficial, that it’s trust building, that it\u0026rsquo;s the missing layer. It’s frictionless. It works on an individual basis and government services have adopted it, so surely then it must be good for society as a whole?\nThere is no known way to constrain SSI from enabling if not catalyzing these applications. Such constraints might require a friction or a frustration of interoperability entirely counter to the architectural and engineering goals.\nAll in the mix Professor Lawrence Lessig is a scholar of technology in society who is famed, amongst other things, for exploring the ways in which our lives are subject to four forces: laws, social norms, the market, and technical architecture (software)[14]. He observes that software code regulates conduct in a similar but not identical manner to legal code — while law needs people to know about it to be effective in regulating behaviour, software code is effective regardless.\nSSI fundamentally changes the balance of these regulators in the context of identity. It diminishes the role of legal code and has software code and social norms supervene. (When it comes to identity, let’s all hope legal code keeps the market well clear — a market in digital identity leads to digital enslavement.)\nIn centralising identity on the individual, as SSI does, it removes some identification, authentication, and claims processes from being subject to law and organisational governance (e.g. the GDPR[15] does not apply to individuals), and into the chaos of social groups and the formation and reformation of social norms and other societal structures. It’s worth noting that social norms form without any real and widespread understanding of the technology and with little if any appreciation for potential emergent consequences. Unfortunately, as we know very well from history, emergent social norms can be very far from egalitarian or liberating (e.g. Nazism, apartheid), and although the decentralized authentication processes we have today have their downsides of course, those disadvantages are at least well understood and remain the constant subject of expert legal purview.\nNow I must point out that I’ve taken some licence in switching around the more typical attribution of decentralization to SSI and centralization to today’s status quo. On one level this switch is accurate — our relationships with dozens of organizations today are indeed authenticated by each of them in turn, separately[16], whereas SSI collapses that all down to our supposed atomistic selves. However, we must be cognizant that each and every layer of any ‘stack’ may be measured separately for its degree of (de)centralization and found to be quite different. There is no aggregate quantification, only varied systemic outcomes.\nEven more pertinently then, we must appreciate that invoking “decentralization” as if it were an end rather than a means is pointless. Rather, as Nathan Schneider argues convincingly[17], we need to be really specific about our purpose and therefore also our facilities for course-correction. While further discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this document, it’s worth lifting a short quote from Nathan’s conclusion:\n\u0026hellip; we cannot accept technology as a substitute for taking social, cultural, and political considerations seriously. Decentralized technology does not guarantee decentralized outcomes.\nI understand that the SSI community has proceeded to date with deliberate separation of the technical from the political[18]. However, in the context of identity particularly, these are in fact inseparable and to pretend otherwise is unethical.\nNow that I have begun to outline the nature of potential consequences, indeed very likely consequences by my estimate, it’s time to explore a possible categorisation of all things ‘identity’ that will help throw some more light on the flaws of SSI, and to help us all develop a better way forward.\nGame on The word ‘identity’ encompasses many different things in many different contexts, and it can even take opposing forms. For example, the SSI context is very much one of individualistic distinction, but there is also of course collective or cultural identity based on similarity (the word identity is derived from the Latin ‘idem’ meaning ‘same’). If you find the complexity here intriguing, I recommend starting with “Identity: A Very Short Introduction”[19], but otherwise rest assured that this section is accessible.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31061\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;800\u0026rdquo;] Monopoly tokens[/caption]\nLet’s play a game[20]. In fact, we already are. In business we may ask ‘what game are you in?’, and everyday language may refer to life itself as a game.\nWe — the physical, biological human — do not enter games directly. Rather, we select or define an avatar. This might take the form of a Tyrannosaurus rex in more recent editions of Monopoly™. Similarly, computer games, most notably massively multiplayer online games, carry this idea quite naturally into the digital age. The likes of Monopoly and Final Fantasy are artificial inventions of course, but then so is the law, and our avatar in that game is known as a legal identity.\nWe can say that sociologists and psychologists regard our everyday identities in a similar fashion. Intuitively following some self-reflection, we all know that we have different identities, call them personae if you like, or avatars, that we adopt in different contexts. Indeed the word ‘person’ has its roots in the Latin ‘persona’, meaning an actor\u0026rsquo;s mask, a character in a play.\nAll the world’s a stage.\nI referred to this earlier in the context of ‘being’ different across different social media in different contexts, and constantly revising those identities based on the corresponding contextual relationships and interactions. Consider your professional avatar, your parental avatar, your spousal avatar, your student avatar, etc. Overlapping and interacting in some respects no doubt, but always evolving and always contextual[21]. (SSI cannot communicate context.) Your ‘you’ in the performance review meeting at work differs to your ‘you’ on your wedding day. Your avatars at age 35 will differ from those age 25, or indeed from those age 34. Or 34½. Or yesterday. Psychologists and sociologists understand all this well.\nThe AKASHA Foundation[22] funds research to bring clarity to the topic of ‘digital identity’ to help ensure that corresponding innovations benefit the individual, our communities, our species, and by corollary those species with which we share this planet. With the aspiration of avoiding so-called rabbit holes in the domain of identity, we have found it useful to categorise different conceptualisations of identity as either noun-like or verb-like.\nI seem to be a verb [caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31062\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;540\u0026rdquo;] Buckminster Fuller[/caption]\nVerbs describe actions, states, change — in fact then the very nature of living things and living systems.\nAs Buckminster Fuller anticipated in ‘I Seem to be a Verb’[23] \u0026hellip; who I am encompasses a constant flux of informational diffusion and intermixing, interfacial constructions and experiences, continuously revised narratives, arrangings and organizings.[24]\nYour “I”, and your “you” from others’ points of view, are always changing, often gradually, occasionally radically. It’s how we keep re-orienting our understanding of others and re-orienting ourselves in social contexts.\nOn the other hand, birth certificates, social security numbers, driving licenses, and passports are noun-like — they\u0026rsquo;re not intended to be dynamic, by design. They are artificial, as Phil Windley notes so well[25]:\nDescartes didn\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;I have a birth certificate, therefore, I am.\u0026rdquo;\nThe game of law — a relatively recent bureaucratization — requires noun-like identities. The game of life involves verb-like identities.\nThe art here then is ensuring that the essential human qualities encompassed by verb-like identities are accommodated by systems of ‘digital identity’, or not obliterated by them at the very least.\nIn light of the earlier discussion here, it would be foolhardy to rely on individual human behaviours to secure the continuing system viability of verb-like identities in a SSI world. Can software code help here then? In the same post as the Descartes observation, Phil Windley writes:\nWe are at a point in the development of identity that it is possible to develop and deploy technologies that allow individuals to create a self-sovereign basis for their identity independent from civil registration.\nSuch systems allow us to tease apart the purposes of the birth certificate by recognizing a self-sovereign identity independent of the proof of citizenship. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t, by itself, solve the problem of providing legal identity since the self-sovereign identity is self-asserted. But it does provide a foundation upon which a legal identity could be built: specifically it is an identifier that a person can prove they control. Constructing a legal identity on this self-sovereign identity is possible, but would require changes to existing statutes, rules, policy, and processes.\nTo translate this into the lexicon here, SSI cannot substitute for the need for legal (noun-like) identity, nor is anyone asking that of it, but it can evolve to become its own form of noun-like identity with the potential to help support the formation of an alternative legal or quasi-legal identity. This is useful in terms of the target included under the Sustainable Development Goals to ensure everyone has a legal identity by 2030[26] (those living without legal identity are powerless in the game of law), yet there is no reference to or acknowledgement of what is presented here as verb-like identity, nor anywhere else that I’ve found.\nThe book presents seven scenarios in Chapter 3 to explain varying applications of SSI. While I don’t have permission to reproduce the explanatory diagrams here, I can list the scenarios:\nBob meets Alice at a conference Bob meets Alice through her online blog Bob logs into Alice’s blog to leave a comment Bob meets Alice through an online dating site Alice applies for a new bank account Alice buys a car Alice sells the car to Bob. The accompanying diagrams portray so-called ‘trust triangles’[27], with each triangle encompassing a credential issuer, a credential holder, and a credential verifier.\nScenarios 4 and 5 involve a Government ID agency as issuer, i.e. issuers of legal identity. Scenarios 6 and 7 do not, but they do involve banks that require the Government ID agency in the opening of new bank accounts per scenario 5.\nLegal (noun-like) identity features obviously then in the majority of the scenarios presented. This is no accident because this is how the SSI community thinks, and how it thinks is reflected in the technical architecture and documentation. For more evidence, a diagram in Chapter 2 titled “An overview diagram of the role of agents and wallets in the SSI ecosystem” only references people in their capacity as legal actors.\nSSI does not recognise the verb-like let alone step up to the challenge of sustaining or empowering verb-like identity in the digital age. Any solace a reader may seek in scenarios 1, 2 and 3 is unfounded, as I’ll now explain.\nSeems I must be a noun SSI proxies for legal (noun-like) identity, but the system property of friction is radically altered in the process. Historically, invoking legal identity is tiresome. It involves systemic friction and consequently it’s called upon only when really needed and ignored in all other contexts. How frequently and for what purposes have you needed to produce proof of legal identity so far this century?\nBut SSI demonstrates an unprecedented frictionless quality enabling the routine, programmatic proffering of or triangulating back to legal identity and other noun-like identities[28] and associated credentials on demand.\nWe can consider this in terms of how playing the legal game impacts other games following the introduction of the SSI game.\nAn individual’s legal (noun-like) identity is a 1st-order avatar in the legal game. A 1st-order avatar in the ‘real’ world, in the game of life, is verb-like. Neither is reliant on the other but relates directly back to the player, i.e. the physical human being. A marriage (a legal contract) and a corporate (a legal construct) are 2nd-order avatars in the legal game as 1st-order avatars are prerequisite. A subsidiary company would be 3rd-order, etc. Similar orders, or more accurately holons, play out in all games.\nThere are comparatively new games in town based on cryptography. SSI is one such game. Ethereum[29] and Holochain[30] are other examples. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are 1st-order avatars in the SSI game.\nWhen a connection is made between one’s SSI avatars and one’s legal avatar, and assuming the legal game continues to trump cryptographic games in human society, the SSI avatar becomes subordinated to the legal avatar wherever and whenever the corresponding verified claim is or has been present. As you’ve seen, this doesn’t just apply in a ‘trust triangle’ with a Government ID agency, but in adjacent ones too such as a triangle involving a bank that’s party with you to another triangle with a Government ID agency. And so to adjacent adjacent ones, and adjacent adjacent adjacent ones, etc.\nTriangles are to be found everywhere there is a need for structural rigidity — e.g. the Manhattan Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, bicycle frames — and similarly ‘trust triangles’ achieve informational rigidity with informational triangles. This is the kind of outcome those in the West decry of China’s nascent identity and social credit system[31]. One might congratulate them at least for recognising and being clear about what they’re building.\nPlease note that I’m not saying SSI leaks claims information. This isn’t about information security or the prevention of identifier correlation. This is about Alice’s freedom, perhaps indeed her “sovereign right” if that’s how you conceive the world, to live and live through her verb-like identities most of the time as she does today. It’s noteworthy that SSI doesn’t have a monopoly here — digital identity initiatives in other cryptographic games such as Ethereum have similar causes-and-effects.\nThe SSI community is dedicated to digitalizing noun-like identity, and because there’s no equivalent effort to achieve the same for verb-like identity, let alone one that might have the sociotechnological capacity to resist the otherwise inevitable creep of digitalised noun-like identity, SSI inexorably suffocates the verb-like.\nIt seems I must be a noun \u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip; except that is of course oxymoronic. There is no such thing as a noun-like “I” compatible with the game of life. That would, for example, make you exactly the same as the five-year old starting school, and the young adult on his/her first day at work, in every context, in every game. Indeed, a noun-like “self-sovereignty” is impossible — to play the SSI game is to be trapped in it. The SSI system is sovereign and you are left anything but.\nDegenerative Perhaps by inheriting a noun-like conceptualisation of identity from legal code, perhaps in consequence to the assembly of SSI from cryptographic primitives, and perhaps in response to a perceived inclination of SSI community members to reify the individuated, atomistic person, the SSI worldview may be described as Newtonian in contrast to the complexities of living systems.\nThis worldview doesn\u0026rsquo;t just mistake legal identity for \u0026rsquo;the real thing\u0026rsquo;. The legal construct of personal data[32] is similarly mistaken, leaving the actual real thing open to unthinking entanglement with the legal construct of property. But the world doesn’t work like this.\nThe major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.[33]\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31063\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;540\u0026rdquo;] Margaret Wheatley[/caption]\nAfter Margaret Wheatley[34] (see the figure below), identity is the sense-making capacity of organizing. It is of the selves that organize and the self that gets organized. Narrative in nature, identities assemble in relationships involving and producing personally and socially material information.\nRelationships are the pathways for organizing, required for the creation and transformation of information, the expansion of the organizational identity, and accumulation of wisdom. Relationships are formed with information exchange between identifying / identifiable entities in identifying / identifiable organizings.\nInformation is the medium of the organizing. Life uses information to organize itself, i.e. when a system assigns meaning to data. Information is contextual to identities in relationships.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31064\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;665\u0026rdquo;] Figure: the triarchy of identity, relationships, and information — reciprocally defining and co-constitutive to the point that it even feels wrong to present them as three distinct circles; after Margaret Wheatley[/caption]\nThere is no such thing as personal data in the game of life but rather interpersonal data — created in and associated with identities in relationships. Almost every type of data you can think of that meets the legal definition of personal data turns out to be interpersonal in reality (the other ‘person’ may be an organization of people). Keeping a personal diary may exemplify a relatively tiny set of exceptions, although even then one can think of it as one of your verb-like identities seeking to understand and help another. Selves-reflection.\nIdentity and relationships and information (interpersonal data) are reciprocally defining and co-constitutive. In the jargon of graph theory[35], interpersonal data is edge-centric not node-centric, and indeed so then identity and relationships. (I noted in the caption to the figure above that three circles may not be the best representation.)\nIt is critical to understand this if only because we have come to a point in history when humanity has to rise up to wicked problems at global scale for the very first time. Fortunately, we’ve inherited some almost magical information technologies that should help us learn, understand, and cooperate, but there are still many ways in which we can misjudge their application.\nAs you will appreciate, interpersonal data needs to be privacy preserving and socially meaningful. It might be your road trip but those with responsibility for transport infrastructure will want to monitor road use. It might be your immunisation, but those responsible for public health will want to ascertain herd immunity. It might be your life, your family, but we will need to join-up somehow to help you and your family live your lives in privacy, in peace, in harmony, and in prosperity, in the face of such challenges as the climate cataclysm and pandemics. The system-interest is in your self-interest just as your self-interest is in the system-interest.\nContrast this with the book’s description of the advantages of SSI in the context of personal data (Chapter 8):\nAs those accounts convert over to using pairwise peer DIDs and signed personal data, the value of that personal data to anyone else but the relying party who has explicit signed permission disappears.\nWhen you nail down identity you’re in the mindset to nail down interpersonal data. Its social value disappears as we’re informed here, or at the very least frustrated. Such frustration leads many to scrabble for the legal concept of property[36] to try and get it moving again, but the full, natural opportunity and value comes in not nailing it down and propertizing it in the first place.\nThis characteristic of SSI is presented as a feature when it is in fact a bug of existential importance. It’s degenerative — i.e. characterized by progressive deterioration and loss of function.\nThe same applies to any technical architecture that designs to treat personal data and identity as separate concerns. If the architecture pays heed only to noun-like identity, and/or if it conceives of personal data as some separate thing that can be shepherded into a personal data store / bank / vault, then it’s working against our best interests however worthy the corresponding team’s motivations.\nSuch designs fail the law of requisite variety in our living systems to the significant detriment of our psychological, sociological, and ecological well being. As articulated by the Six Circle Model[37], designs to effect any system change — let alone ambitions for global systemic transformation — too frequently focus on structure, process, and patterns, and neglect the underlying inseparable fundamentals of identity, relationships, and information (interpersonal data). Such neglect leads to failure.\nThe question of ‘digital identity’ is massively more critical than many working on it appreciate.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31065\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1180\u0026rdquo;] Contrasting generative identity and self-sovereign identity (click to view as PDF )[/caption]\nA generative conclusion, hopefully Needless to say, this document does not substitute for the much-needed interdisciplinary research into SSI in the context of the theories and reality of technological and social change, but it is I hope evident that the claims throughout the book for SSI’s social advantages — e.g. privacy, trustworthiness, decentralization, agency enhancement, and even “sovereignty” — cannot be made for SSI technology. They are entirely unverified claims.\nSocial claims only make sense in the context of SSI technology in people’s hands, in society at large, as sociotechnology, and we must all be explicit today in letting everyone know that this combination, this assemblage, has received negligible analysis let alone synthesis to date. Such deliberations are essential in advance of allowing any SSI game to begin.\nUntil perhaps further research proves otherwise, I err on the side of caution. SSI cannot deliver the system properties we need for ‘digital identity’. If it cannot be tightly constrained in some as yet unknown way to very occasional instances of noun-like identity, then it will deliver outcomes diametrically opposed to the ones the SSI community set out to procure. Viewed atomistically, technologically, SSI looks quite sensible. At scale, as sociotechnology, the emergent consequences are malignant.\nA community is forming under the banner of generative identity[1:1]. By generative I mean ‘participating as nature’. It denotes a capacity to produce unprompted change, growing not shrinking the possible; a capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility[38]. At the time of writing, generative identity is a label for a set of challenges to SSI and some heuristic principles presented as discussion points in the hope of both avoiding very poor emergent outcomes and creating the conditions to support psychological, sociological, and ecological health.\nGenerative identity is about the human’s potential and humanity’s potential. I hope you will identify with that.\nAt https://generative-identity.org/ https://internetidentityworkshop.com/ https://www.odyssey.org/ https://www.manning.com/books/self-sovereign-identity/ Bunge, Mario. 1999. Social Science Under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. University of Toronto Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite Is \u0026ldquo;Snapchat Dysmorphia\u0026rdquo; a real issue?. Ramphul and Mejias, Cureus, 10(3), 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5933578/ See https://www.allure.com/story/how-to-take-good-selfies if you’re an Instagram newb. A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. Susan Barnes, 2006, First Monday, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5e30/227914559ce088a750885761adbb7d2edbbf.pdf The GDPR does not proscribe individuals from publishing personal data or organizations from helping them do so. Moreover, the social network itself may be decentralized (not entailing an incorporated entity) and not then subject to such regulation. https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/1236071204768731137 A first “trust triangle” has Bob as the holder of the claim and his parents as issuers, and their credibility as an issuer is confirmed by a second triangle in which they are the holder of a claim and their respective college the issuer. They appreciate this claim may be socially useful to Bob so have the verification process ‘on auto’. See https://www.ted.com/talks/onora_o_neill_what_we_don_t_understand_about_trust Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig, 1999, see http://codev2.cc/about/ General Data Protection Regulation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation Excepting where individuals may select a “log in with …” option, bringing a third party such as Facebook or Google into the process. Decentralization: An Incomplete Ambition, Nathan Schneider, 2019, https://osf.io/m7wyj/ Private correspondence with an SSI thought leader. Identity: A Very Short Introduction, Florian Coulmas, 2019, https://global.oup.com/academic/product/identity-a-very-short-introduction-9780198828549 Inspired by — Me and My Avatar: acquiring actorial identity, Anthony O’Tierney et al, 2016, https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/bitstream/10197/9328/1/F54_Avatars_EGOS_2016.pdf See https://batesoninstitute.org/warm-data/ https://akasha.org/ I Seem to be a Verb, Buckminster Fuller et al, 1970, https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/I_Seem_to_Be_a_Verb.html?id=wBUJrgEACAAJ\u0026amp;source=kp_cover\u0026amp;redir_esc=y Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty, Philip Sheldrake, 2019, https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/02/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty/ Self-Sovereign Identity and Legal Identity, Phil Windley, 2016, https://www.windley.com/archives/2016/04/self-sovereign_identity_and_legal_identity.shtml Target 16.9, Sustainable Development Goals, 2015, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg16 See https://www.windley.com/archives/2018/09/multi-source_and_self-sovereign_identity.shtml Many organizations and bureaucracies have a noun-like approach e.g. your employer assigns an employee number that endures. https://ethereum.org/ https://holochain.org/ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Article 4, General Data Protection Regulation, 2016 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679\u0026amp;from=EN#d1e1489-1-1 An Ecology Of Mind — A Daughter\u0026rsquo;s portrait of Gregory Bateson Directed by Nora Bateson, 2015, https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson/116642860 A simpler way, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers, 1998, https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/634222616 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory See https://medium.com/radicalxchange/the-interpersonal-data-at-the-heart-of-all-human-digital-systems-including-markets-6316701184a9 https://youtu.be/MG5by8NNkng The Generative Internet, Jonathan Zittrain, 2005, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_Generative%20Internet.pdf?sequence=1 Image of trees used to create the generative identity identity, if you know what we mean, by GDJ .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2020/11/the-dystopia-of-self-sovereign-identity-ssi/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"triangles\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/triangular-rigidity.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSSI has distressing emergent outcomes — the antithesis of the hopes and plans of the SSI community and those attracted to SSI\u0026rsquo;s real-world application. We have to reflect and rethink.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePut starkly, many millions of people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, and no other facet of information technology smashes into the human condition in quite the same way as ‘digital identity’. Therefore, if ever there’s a technological innovation for which ‘move fast and break things’ is not the best maxim, this is it. We need to move together with diligent respect for human dignity and living systems.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDeveloped under the auspices of \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation\u003c/a\u003e\n, and \u003ca href=\"https://generative-identity.org/the-dystopia-of-self-sovereign-identity-ssi/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efirst published to the Generative Identity website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWith thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Dil Green, Will Abramson, Ryan Worsley, Jakub Lanc, Brent Zundel, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. And to those who have influenced the ideas here in conversation and in their writing: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Elizabeth Renieris, Kieron O\u0026rsquo;Hara, Martin Etzrodt, Michael Shea.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI)"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .\nIn the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity\u0026rsquo;s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient \u0026lsquo;sociotechnological primitives\u0026rsquo;.\nFirst I\u0026rsquo;d like to qualify pre-architectural. It\u0026rsquo;s not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we\u0026rsquo;re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn\u0026rsquo;t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.\nA means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.\nNuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own \u0026hellip; maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.\nHere is an incomplete list of ideas and concepts that could well be in the mix. At least they\u0026rsquo;re at the forefront of AKASHA\u0026rsquo;s collective mind, a mind we\u0026rsquo;re very much hoping to hook up to yours and your collectives\u0026rsquo; in the not too distant.\nBoth trust and trustlessness The AKASHA team is excited to be working to combine the best of Web3 wizardry and the best of human nature, nurturing and relying on the latter where we can and as we should, and crafting the former as and when scale demands.\nConsensus protocols are predicated on either the absence of trust or a contextual advantage of not having to establish it. Nevertheless, trust — the act of making oneself vulnerable to another — is integral to human relationships and community cohesion, and that has not and will not change.\nThe sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it plainly [Trust and Power, 1979]:\nA complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning.\nNot exactly the outcome we\u0026rsquo;re working towards here!\n💡 For more on trust and trustworthiness we recommend Onora O\u0026rsquo;Neill\u0026rsquo;s A Question of Trust (also available as a book ).\nThe viable systems model (VSM) Developed by cybernetician Stafford Beer, the VSM represents an organizing structure capable of (re)producing itself, of being viable in / adaptable to the changing environment. It is useful to both analysis and synthesis.\nBeer describes the isomorphic quality of the VSM, effectively its recursive nature — multiple viable systems constitute a viable system and so on ad infinitum. So a group of people might constitute a VSM with any one person fulfilling a System 1 role for example, but of course that person herself constitutes a VSM.\nThe model is inspired by the brain and nervous system and consists of five types of system. Systems 1, 2, and 3 are analogous to the autonomic nervous system. System 4 encompasses cognition and conversation. And System 5 relates to the higher brain functions involved in reflection and decision-making.\n💡 For more on the VSM we recommend Raul Espejo\u0026rsquo;s The Viable Systems Model: A Briefing About Organisational Structure .\nSociocracy (aka dynamic governance) Conflict and passivity lie either side of sociocracy\u0026rsquo;s goal. It\u0026rsquo;s a form of governance that welcomes and accommodates dissensus rather than consensus in pursuit of productive and valuable outcomes.\nTeams (known as circles) have autonomy with the consent of the wider organization. A hierarchy of people is replaced by a hierarchy of roles, and the organizational structure is forever poised to adapt as needed, per VSM. Similarly, the structure has a recursive nature — circles of circles, circles within circles. You might call it holonic or fractal, and it serves to afford scale without needing to scale the disadvantageous aspects of bureaucracy.\n💡 For more on sociocracy we recommend this introduction by Ted Rau .\nPlatform cooperativism Here is how Nathan Schneider introduces the topic :\nThe disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the banner of ‘platform cooperativism’, an emerging network of cooperative developers, entrepreneurs, labor organizers and scholars is developing an economic ecosystem that seeks to align the ownership and governance of enterprises with the people whose lives are most affected by them. This represents a radical critique of the existing online economy, but it’s also a field of experimentation for alternative forms of ownership design.\n💡 For more on platform cooperativism we recommend Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet .\n💡 For an exploration of sociocracy meeting platform cooperativism, check out Ted Rau again, Platform co-op governance: deep democracy on scale .\nContext and warm data Context matters, as Gregory Bateson noted :\nThere is a gulf between context and message (or between metamessage and message) which is of the same nature as the gulf between a thing and the word or sign that stands for it, or between the members of a class and the name of the class. The context (or metamessage) classifies the message, but can never meet it on equal terms.\nEssentially, \u0026ldquo;without context, there is no communication.\u0026rdquo;\nOur information technology is well suited to messages, and considerably less suited to conveying context, let alone the metacontext of the sender or recipient of the message. No-one would ever claim this facility of a so-called smart contract and yet it is integral to human relations. Bateson\u0026rsquo;s daughter Nora explains why this is critical in our context here:\nInformation that does not take into account the full scope of interrelationality in a system is likely to inspire misguided decision-making, which compounds already “wicked” problems. Warm Data is not meant to replace or in any way diminish other data, but rather it is meant to keep data of certain sorts “warm\u0026quot; — with a nest of relations intact.\n💡 For more on warm data we recommend the International Bateson Institute .\nPatterning and autopoiesis You\u0026rsquo;re good at patterns, as Jeremy Lent explains:\nThrough the capabilities of our pre-frontal cortex, our species has evolved a patterning instinct \u0026hellip; It deserves to be called an instinct because it emerges in human behavior at the earliest stages of development, well before any cultural learning has taken place. \u0026hellip; This human instinct for patterning is embedded in our cognition, maintaining its activity throughout our lives.\nOur work should never ignore let alone erode this capability, but might in fact seek to amplify it. Imagine for example if more individuals could see the pattern that manifests as their so-called carbon footprint.\nFritjof Capra explains the pattern of organization of any system as the configuration of relationships among the system\u0026rsquo;s components that determines the system\u0026rsquo;s essential characteristics. You immediately appreciate the pattern that constitutes a bicycle for example, without contemplating the physical structure of a specific bike. All bikes have the same pattern and every bike has a unique structure.\nAutopoiesis — literally \u0026ldquo;self-making\u0026rdquo; — links the pattern of organization and structure with the process of embodiment in describing living systems. The facilities for pattern-making, pattern recognition and sensing, and for autopoiesis, are all front and centre in any ambition to cooperate-at-scale.\n💡 For more on patterning we recommend Jeremy Lent\u0026rsquo;s The Patterning Instinct .\n💡 For more on autopoiesis, and much more, we recommend Fritjof Capra\u0026rsquo;s The Systems View of Life .\nCommunity informatics Community informatics design seeks practical solutions to complicated and complex socio-technical challenges. It is necessarily transdisciplinary, encompassing social and human aspects, life sciences, behavioural science, organizational structures, systems design, management, ethics, aesthetics, etc.\nThe following diagram portrays eight phases of patterns to be considered.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31046\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;594\u0026rdquo;] Toward a discovery and strategic alignment matrices for socio-technical systems\u0026rsquo; design , Pierre-Léonard Harvey, 2017[/caption]\n💡 For more on community informatics we recommend Michael Gurstein\u0026rsquo;s What is community informatics, and why does it matter? Developing patterns of organization Where should we focus our attention if we wish to see structures emerging that better support cooperation-at-scale? How might we offer up improved patterns? How might we qualify them as improved at all?\nIn leading work on these questions at the Digital Life Collective , Joachim Stroh maps out a territory:\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_31049\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;800\u0026rdquo;] Digital Life Collective patterns[/caption]\nOstrom\u0026rsquo;s principles Elinor Ostrom defined a set of principles that apply to the governance of so-called common-pool resources — those resources that are non-excludable (it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to exclude anyone from consuming the resource) and that feature subtractability of use (akin to rivalrous, where my use reduces your potential use).\nThe facilities to enhance cooperation should be available to all, so non-excludability is right up our street. While many of the objects of cooperation will feature subtractability — see the Sustainable Development Goals — the facility for cooperation itself should be non-rivalrous if not anti-rivalrous. In other words, my use of the facility increases the potential for and value of your use, and vice versa.\n💡 For more on the Ostrom principles we recommend Jeff Emmett\u0026rsquo;s introduction in the context of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)\nModular politics We\u0026rsquo;ve been working towards our purpose for some time, considering the expression and combination of elementary components of community governance as Lego™ bricks perhaps, or more accurately interactive bricks. We\u0026rsquo;ve recognised those patterns of community and societal organization we might wish to propagate (e.g. sociocracy) and, in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, we\u0026rsquo;re also tantalized by the potential for these components to be assembled in unprecedented combination to build new models that make existing ones obsolete.\nAnd then we stumbled upon the modular politics vision articulated this year and drawing on Elinor Ostrom\u0026rsquo;s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The vision describes \u0026ldquo;a strategy \u0026hellip; specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance \u0026hellip; enabling platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to the another, and interoperable across platforms.\u0026rdquo;\n(Note: per the section above on context and warm data, portability between contexts does not imply equivalence of meaning or effect from one context to another.)\n💡 For more on Modular Politics see Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities , Primavera De Filippi et al, 2020\nIdentity Identity is something that sets the individual and the group apart from other individuals and groups (\u0026ldquo;show me your ID\u0026rdquo;). It is also something individuals have in common, a similarity, a shared context (\u0026ldquo;I identify as \u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;).\nThe dynamics of identity work to differentiate and homologize at all scales of organizing, recursively. Identity is then a critical aspect of all organizing, of all cooperation, and yet the work to date on \u0026ldquo;digital identity\u0026rdquo; has been incredibly narrow, mono-conceptual, and focused very much on repeatable and reliable authentication by a computer system. This is not only inadequate when taken to cover all conceptualizations of identity, it is dangerous. It does not serve our psychology, sociology, or ecology well.\n💡 For more on identity we recommend our own Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty .\nInterpersonal data The concept of \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo; is elucidated in law, most notably perhaps the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, very many people conflate the legal definition for the real thing — it\u0026rsquo;s a very common mistake to make. On the contrary, in the vast majority of instances the real thing turns out to be interpersonal data i.e. describing or relating to a relationship between two or more persons (including legal persons, aka companies).\nThis is as deeply concerning for cooperation as identity, and that\u0026rsquo;s because identity, relationships, and interpersonal data are co-constitutive and reciprocally defining.\nNext time you hear someone refer to personal data, or \u0026ldquo;my data,\u0026rdquo; ask them to name some specifically and then you can respond by listing the other parties necessarily involved (even if their context is entirely distinct). The phrase \u0026ldquo;my data\u0026rdquo; conveys a declaration of ownership as well as connoting \u0026ldquo;data about me.\u0026rdquo; There is no property to be owned here, let alone any singular claim over it. On the other hand \u0026ldquo;data about me\u0026rdquo; remains a valid concern for cooperating-at-scale.\n💡 For more on interpersonal data we recommend our own The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2020/08/the-number-1-challenge-for-humanity-cooperating-at-scale-part-2/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"green plant\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/living-network-1493394-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2020/08/07/cooperating-at-scale-part-two\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2020/07/the-number-1-challenge-for-humanity-cooperating-at-scale/\"\u003ethe first\u003c/a\u003e\n of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity\u0026rsquo;s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient \u0026lsquo;sociotechnological primitives\u0026rsquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst I\u0026rsquo;d like to qualify \u003cem\u003epre-architectural\u003c/em\u003e. It\u0026rsquo;s not oxymoronic despite \u003cem\u003earche\u003c/em\u003e meaning \u003cem\u003eorigin\u003c/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003ebeginning\u003c/em\u003e. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we\u0026rsquo;re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If \u003cem\u003epre-architectural\u003c/em\u003e doesn\u0026rsquo;t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA means to \u003ca href=\"http://akasha.org/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eour purpose\u003c/a\u003e\n is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own \u0026hellip; maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .\nDespite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin\u0026rsquo;s theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation.\nI should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another \u0026hellip;\n[On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859]\nModern day scientists know that any investment of resources by individuals — of the same species or different — in acts of cooperation could in fact make those individuals vulnerable to non-cooperators, and yet cooperating proves to be a continuing strength rather than a weakness. We see cooperation everywhere we look.\n[We have] a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.\n[Microcosmos , Margulis \u0026amp; Sagan, 1997]\nCooperation confers an irrefutable advantage and we\u0026rsquo;re still grappling with understanding the qualities of the mechanisms that make this the case.\nHuman beings are brilliant same-species cooperators — hence our parasitic success — and yet a quick scan of typical news headlines would suggest quite the opposite. Without dwelling too deeply on international relations or indeed media theory, the reported character of interactions between the likes of the United States and China and Russia and India and Europe might be said to be more fractious than cooperative. And national news headlines compound the gloom.\nWhy?\nWhy can\u0026rsquo;t we just work together for mutual advantage on our little blue marble ? As co-pilots of Spaceship Earth ?\nSelf-evidently, we\u0026rsquo;re not yet well-practiced at cooperating at national scale let alone global, if only perhaps because there has been no evolutionary advantage in developing such capacity. Our technologies exacerbate problems at macro scale while connecting and virtualizing and dividing us. Take our interaction right here right now. I\u0026rsquo;ve written this and you\u0026rsquo;re reading it. There are no atoms in transit. There\u0026rsquo;s no physical proximity. No direct relationship — indeed we may never meet IRL. And yet we can still choose to cooperate on Web3 stuff. And we will. But while it may have the illusion of familiarity, this is to all extents and purposes unreal!\nIn the evolutionary context, cooperation is for family units, villages, and tribes. Maybe in cohorts approximating 150 in number [Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates , Dunbar, 1992], in geographic proximity and the context of the local environment with all senses firing, and with the age-old conditions for indirect reciprocity (Claire scratches Bhavna\u0026rsquo;s back because she saw Bhavna scratching Alice\u0026rsquo;s).\nAbstract away these familiar fundamentals and we\u0026rsquo;re too often left sharing cat gifs and dick pics, surveilling each other and spreading fake news. Our collective mastery of the technology is analogous to a prehistoric people using 60-inch TVs for beds and cave doors.\nAnd yet here we are, the very first species that we know of needing to cooperate at global scale to rise up to some very serious challenges manifesting at global scale. This is an existential matter \u0026hellip; which is a posh way to say we\u0026rsquo;re all in a deep pile of shit if we don\u0026rsquo;t sort this out together. As a fundamental means to some fundamental ends, cooperating-at-scale is humanity\u0026rsquo;s primary challenge. There are 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), and the word cooperation is mentioned 23 times in the corresponding United Nations resolution .\nOur technologies are very much more adaptable than we are (evolution operates through very many generations, not within the one or two we have to respond here). Perhaps this is why some notable parts of the tech community find it too hard to resist the temptations of techno-solutionism — the dream that tech can solve all of our problems [To Save Everything, Click Here , Morozov, 2013].\nBut resist we must for the very fact that you and your family, your communities and our societies, cannot adapt to such prescriptions in ways that preserve let alone amplify our humanity. To attempt as much transforms each of us from subject to object to abject [(Why) Technology is Costing Us Agency , Haque, 2019].\nRather, we have to proceed on the basis that humanity is a feature not a bug. We must work towards a future in which we participate as nature rather than continue to consider ourselves separate from it, or worse, above it. We must learn quickly to cooperate at scale — within our own species and alongside other species.\nThe AKASHA team does not see itself as a bunch of technologists because a bunch of technologists would fail. We must be sociotechnologists. We dedicate ourselves to the inseparable interweave of human beings and digital technologies, of human cultures and digital ecosystems. The technologies must increase the agency of the individual — through and over her technologies. And the technologically augmented individual must also find herself achieving still greater agency embedded within cooperative groups, and cooperative groups of cooperative groups. Such collective agency is integral to the potential realization of collective intelligences with the deepest respect for human dignity.\nThe AKASHA World Framework strives to help set this up in its own small way. Most fortunately, by definition, whatever version 1.0 might look like down the road, it must not aspire to do it all. (Which is just as well!)\nRather, it experiments with taking the cryptonetworking primitives fundamental to Ethereum, and similar technologies, and elevating them into some forms of \u0026lsquo;sociotechnological primitives\u0026rsquo; — social + technological assemblages — that can be combined and recombined, forked and merged and forked again, to suit local social and bioregional contexts in global harmony.\nWhile our once-every-few-years-elected representatives continue to antagonize each other, the rest of us can work together towards working together. By realizing cooperative self-governance, we can establish the necessary patterns to reinforce cooperative self-governance at all scales, celebrating and channeling difference as requisite to the collective intelligences needed to nurture regenerative ways of living.\nIn my next post, I\u0026rsquo;ll outline some concepts and the pre-architectural principles that are likely to be in the mix. We think they\u0026rsquo;re OK if only because we\u0026rsquo;re riffing off lots of many wonderful people\u0026rsquo;s wonderful insights. We know they might only prove useful in cooperation with you and yours.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2020/07/the-number-1-challenge-for-humanity-cooperating-at-scale/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/connections1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2020/07/24/cooperating-at-scale-part-one\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin\u0026rsquo;s theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e[On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859]\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eModern day scientists know that any investment of resources by individuals — of the same species or different — in acts of cooperation could in fact make those individuals vulnerable to non-cooperators, and yet cooperating proves to be a continuing strength rather than a weakness. We see cooperation everywhere we look.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[We have] a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e[\u003ca href=\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/microcosmos-four-billion-years-of-evolution-from-our-microbial-ancestors/oclc/1123954997\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMicrocosmos\u003c/a\u003e\n, Margulis \u0026amp; Sagan, 1997]\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCooperation confers an irrefutable advantage and we\u0026rsquo;re still grappling with understanding the qualities of the mechanisms that make this the case.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHuman beings are brilliant same-species cooperators — hence our parasitic success — and yet a quick scan of typical news headlines would suggest quite the opposite. Without dwelling too deeply on international relations or indeed media theory, the reported character of interactions between the likes of the United States and China and Russia and India and Europe might be said to be more fractious than cooperative. And national news headlines compound the gloom.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy can\u0026rsquo;t we just work together for mutual advantage on our little \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eblue marble\u003c/a\u003e\n? As co-pilots of \u003ca href=\"https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/spaceshipearth\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSpaceship Earth\u003c/a\u003e\n?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale (part 1 of 2)"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .\nThe post Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list \u0026hellip; some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by way of making a contribution from a distance to the 29th Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) taking place this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Living eight time zones away, I have not yet had the opportunity to attend an IIW, and this occasion is no exception unfortunately.\nThis is a call to action. Whether it succeeds or not in that respect will depend in good part on how well I’ve been able to communicate the severity of the problem with the current trajectory — in terms of our psychological, societal, and ecological health — and how well I’ve been able to make the ethical case for the urgency of interdisciplinarity. Beyond that, it is in the hands of those leading the ‘identity community’.\nFor the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, I have no reason to criticize the personal values and aspirations of any individuals with whom I’ve been privileged to engage in this community. No-one here wants to achieve the opposite effect to the one they set out to secure. These are quite simply impossible matters to approach through a mono-disciplinary lens — hence my objective to help open this out at the earliest possible opportunity.\nReviewing the proposed topics for this week’s IIW event, it’s clear that it’s as dedicated to identification (a claims verification process) as it is identity. But perhaps that’s not quite right either. When considering the RWOT functional definition of identity — identity is how we recognize, remember, and ultimately respond to specific people and things — and contrasting it with the IIW’s logo and agenda, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the workshop is dedicated to anonymity and privacy.\nWhile the ‘Internet Anonymity and Claims Verification Processes Workshop’ doesn’t quite have the same ring, this isn’t a trivial observation. Two significant ramifications come to mind.\nThe first is simply that some people think they’re working directly on identity when they are in fact working directly on anonymity and claims verification processes, this response for example:\nidentity in the world is mostly what I do when another needs to know something about me.\nIn doing anything (and sometimes by not doing anything!), you take in, process, and send out information in the context of relationships. And this is not constrained to \u0026ldquo;when another needs to know\u0026rdquo;. We cannot help take in, process, and send out information all the time in the context of relationships, all of which contributes to our multiple concurrent identities (in the verb-like sense, in the narrative sense, in others\u0026rsquo; eyes). Hence the generative identity principle of co-constitution.\nThe second ramification is that those working directly on anonymity and claims verification processes are in fact working indirectly on identity because the conceptualizations overlap inseparably, and they are then operating in the identity zone so to speak without, it seems, appropriate context and framing.\nIt’s not too much of a stretch to moot that most people in the ‘identity community’ have a working appreciation for noun-like identity and almost none for the essential, quotidian verb-like. I consider this a shortcoming of the shared endeavour rather than anything personal. Here’s a response I offered to someone deliberately avoiding “identity” in describing their work:\nIn working with medical information, in working with medically-oriented relationships, you are 100% working with verb-like identity \u0026hellip; Not referencing it specifically doesn\u0026rsquo;t change the fact. Medical information and relations with physicians aren\u0026rsquo;t merely associated with \u0026lsquo;an identity\u0026rsquo;, they manifest in ever-changing identities. In other words, they shape \u0026lsquo;who we are\u0026rsquo; in contexts and \u0026lsquo;how we become\u0026rsquo; in contexts.\nThese two ramifications are perhaps the most significant insight of my past four weeks. I attribute it to my observation in the generative identity post that the ‘identity community’ appears to be almost entirely mono-disciplinary — technological, with a smattering of legal expertise. At minimum we’re missing psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, and complexity scientists. No-one has countered otherwise, meaning we likely have a state of affairs I describe in the generative identity post as unethical by itself — and it’s not too hard to appreciate then why ‘digital identity’ might not be heading for a good place. (It’s also noteworthy that the community is unrepresentative, being predominantly white and male.)\nCould the individual ‘user’ do with some anonymity and the individual agency to present verified claims? Yes indeed, sounds good. But as a complex human being woven into the complexities of society and the complexities of the broader environment, Alice’s best interests can only be served when interdisciplinary teams determine to anticipate the emergent consequences of their work, and indeed design for it. The best way to serve Alice and Bob is to work towards the benefit of the species and therefore our environment. The best way to serve the species is to support Alice et al in their diversity and agency within the complex adaptive system we call society. In other words we have to design for all scales and varied contexts.\nAnd yet astonishingly just one interlocutor to date has made fleeting reference to my emphasising emergence, and there has been very little acknowledgement of this being a sociotechnological rather than merely technological system. On the contrary:\n[The SSI discussion seeks] to separate the political ambitions of SSI from its technical realization. … I recommend a similar tactic for your \u0026ldquo;generative identity\u0026rdquo;. IMO, it conflates the political with the technical and as such, undermines both. Those who care about either will get caught up in nits about the other.\nThis artificial separation of the social / political and technological is at the heart of the problem here. They are of course utterly inseparable. To design the latter in the vacuum of the other is unethical, and frankly dangerous (by which I mean people will suffer in consequence). As Einstein noted, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. What is described here as “caught up in the nits”, I recognise as simpler than possible. Generative identity is the antithesis of this recommendation to repeat this error. (See the section in the generative identity post on \u0026ldquo;separation of concerns\u0026rdquo;.)\nIf any ‘identity community’ has, say, technologists representing more than a third of the collaborative group, then by definition other essential disciplines are under-represented and any recommended architectures will more than likely be fundamentally flawed. And given that we’re designing something so incredibly close to the human condition and the fundamental fabric of our societies, where very many people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, this would be unacceptable. It’s why I tend to write ‘identity community’ in single quote marks — it cannot constitute community with its current homogeneity.\n‘Digital identity’ today lacks the requisite variety of disciplines, conceptualizations, and protocols to rise up to the complexities of the human condition, of societies, of ecology. Given the frictionless medium, the virality of human relations, and the support of governments , the emergent and potentially rapid consequences of this trajectory are frightening. A system adhering to or influenced by the founding SSI principles will I believe, ironically enough, be utterly disempowering for the individual, through emergence, through structuration.\nSo what of those founding principles I critique in the generative identity post, and the associated characteristics and consequences?\nI’ve been told that the principles are three years old, and:\n\u0026hellip; have served as a rallying cry, not a blueprint. SSI has evolved greatly over the last three years and will continue to evolve. No one takes them out in meetings and measures what we’re doing against the principles.\nI have not been pointed to a revised set of principles. This urges a polemical question — does this mean SSI currently has no principles?! Ethically, a set of principles must be determined in interdisciplinary forum and they most definitely should be taken out in meetings to guide and assess progress. Generative identity offers a distinct set of candidate principles.\n[UPDATE 4 Oct 2019: a Twitter exchange about Sovrin\u0026rsquo;s principles .]\nAs for contrasting the characteristics and consequences of SSI and generative identity, I drafted the following comparison table for convenience (also in PDF ):\nI was challenged by a leader of Sovrin :\nIt’s easy to argue against something if you get to define it and make it anything you like so that you can use it in contrast with the thing you’d like to promote. … you’ve created a caricature of SSI that no one working on it would recognize. In fact, if someone were to describe Sovrin using the phrases in your generative identity column, I’d say they were right on.\nThis attracted support from a fellow Sovrin leader:\nWhat you call \u0026ldquo;generative identity\u0026rdquo;, Philip, is what I call \u0026ldquo;SSI done right\u0026rdquo;.\nThe generative identity post argues that identity cannot be self-sovereign by the RWOT functional definition. It describes the flaws in four founding / “rallying cry” principles. But no-one has yet engaged with the critique at this level of detail. My response to these objections:\nIf this is “SSI done right”, that would be wonderful. Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t. But I don’t see the co-constitution principle in the architecture, or attendance to near inevitable emergent outcomes, or a refusal to accommodate propertisation, or much interdisciplinary deliberation, etc., but I will keep looking and learning!\n\u0026hellip; As I’ve noted \u0026hellip; generative identity is little more at the moment than an identifier for a set of draft principles that I consider distinct from what I’m seeing manifest under the banner of SSI. Well, there are a few embryonic sketches … but it is very much not a “thing [I’d] like to promote” but rather related to outcomes my AKASHA colleagues and I care about deeply .\nYes, we all want to empower individuals, enhance agency, defend privacy, etc. but because the object here is the very essence of the sociotechnological — the very sense-making capacity of organizing and living and cohabiting this planet, whether actors here recognise that or not — the corresponding protocols and architectures will have far greater influence on our potential to reach a generative stage in the Anthropocene than the WWW to date. And given path dependencies and equilibria, we may only have the one chance to get it right in good time.\nI do hope this conversation continues, openly ideally, but privately as needed. It would, I humbly propose from a distance, make for a valuable session at IIW this week.\nWe’re hoping to convene a suitably interdisciplinary community, or community of communities, and we will need your help. If you or your organization or community can help make this happen — if you understand the need for some deep and meaningful interdisciplinary action — please get in touch now. Thanks in advance.\nAppropriately, I will finish this post with a contribution from a practitioner of one of those disciplines we need at the table — a knowledge ecologist. Christina Bowen traces the transformation of information to knowledge in human systems the way an ecologist might follow the transfer of sunlight to different forms of energy moving through a wetland. Indeed, her career started in wetland ecology.\nIf identity is what we do together, looking to the living systems surrounding us makes sense. Generative identity is created not by drawing the right boundary at the right time, but by paying attention to the flows across those boundaries. Like cell membranes, identities and identity systems must change and move according to changing conditions.\nWhile the identity conversation in the bleeding edges of tech goes on, a parallel conversation in legal and ecological fields is arising. Rivers are being given the legal rights of people . People are imagining forests that pay to be harvested in a manner that suits them.\nIdentities allow action, and provide protection.\nIf we cannot discover the perfect implementation of digital identity, the least we can do is to look beyond the boundaries of tech discussions and white papers, and learn more about the needs of people, the flows of nature, and the nature of boundaries.\nImage credit: Ryan Alexander , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/09/a-call-for-interdisciplinarity-generative-identity-and-the-internet-identity-workshop/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/generative-identity-iiw-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/30/a-call-for-interdisciplinarity-generative-identity-and-the-internet-identity-workshop\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe post \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/09/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eGenerative identity — beyond self-sovereignty\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on \u003ca href=\"https://cyber.harvard.edu/lists/info/projectvrm\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list\u003c/a\u003e\n \u0026hellip; some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by way of making a contribution from a distance to the 29th \u003ca href=\"https://internetidentityworkshop.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternet Identity Workshop\u003c/a\u003e\n (IIW) taking place this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Living eight time zones away, I have not yet had the opportunity to attend an IIW, and this occasion is no exception unfortunately.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a call to action. Whether it succeeds or not in that respect will depend in good part on how well I’ve been able to communicate the severity of the problem with the current trajectory — in terms of our psychological, societal, and ecological health — and how well I’ve been able to make the ethical case for the urgency of interdisciplinarity. Beyond that, it is in the hands of those leading the ‘identity community’.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop"},{"content":"Professor Bill Buchanan OBE invited me to present generative identity at the 2nd International Conference on Blockchain, Identity and Cryptography at Edinburgh Napier University earlier this month. Thanks Professor, and thanks too to Will Abramson for making me feel so welcome.\nOn the basis that the video of me walking around in front of my slides isn\u0026rsquo;t all that visually exciting(!), here\u0026rsquo;s a cut my colleague Joshua Long was good enough to produce, showing just the slides with the audio.\nhttps://youtu.be/tjUmjpY3DDw ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/09/presenting-generative-identity-at-edinburgh-napier-university/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.napier.ac.uk/people/bill-buchanan\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eProfessor Bill Buchanan OBE\u003c/a\u003e\n invited me to present \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/09/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty/\"\u003egenerative identity\u003c/a\u003e\n at the 2nd International Conference on Blockchain, Identity and Cryptography at Edinburgh Napier University earlier this month. Thanks Professor, and thanks too to \u003ca href=\"https://wip-abramson.dev\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWill Abramson\u003c/a\u003e\n for making me feel so welcome.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the basis that the video of me walking around in front of my slides isn\u0026rsquo;t all that visually exciting(!), here\u0026rsquo;s a cut my colleague Joshua Long was good enough to produce, showing just the slides with the audio.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Presenting generative identity at Edinburgh Napier University"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .\nWith thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie.\nHero image generated from the original image by Ryan Alexander .\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to outline three ways to think about digital identity to help move the conversation forward in line with the AKASHA Foundation\u0026rsquo;s purpose . I\u0026rsquo;m not claiming any neat taxonomy per se, just exploring very different degrees of nuance with radically distinct implications.\nRelating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, naively Relating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, expertly Relating to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society\u0026rsquo;s accommodations of and approaches to identity, generatively. Naively It seems from observation alone that quite a few technologists work in this mode, excited to be bringing pre-digital bureaucratized identity into the digital age.\nTelegram Passport is an exemplar of the naive unfortunately, a service allowing you to upload your \u0026ldquo;real-life ID\u0026rdquo; just the once so you may offer up such documentation more easily in the future as and when required by third-party services. Simple? Yes. Convenient? Undoubtedly. With dire emergent consequences? Quite possibly.\n\u0026ldquo;Your papers, please\u0026rdquo; is a cultural metaphor for living in a police state, and Telegram technologists are diligently removing the systemic frictions of the pre-digital era to assist your compliance, misguidedly assuming that friction is something that should always be eliminated I suppose.\nYou may be tempted to dismiss such a concern … But I decide when to present my ID!\nWell not quite. Consider the Barnes Paradox whereby individuals transgress their own privacy preferences just to get to the stuff a click away. We\u0026rsquo;ve all done it. Moreover, each of us is just one of very many agents in the constant emergent reformation of societal structures; in other words, many if not most of your fellow citizens would have to exercise similar discipline. Still confident?\nThe only way to feel positive when it comes to naive digital identity is by assuming lawmakers will step in to constrain the types of entities that may request ID in such a manner, and to constrain the corresponding purposes too. Such a license to operate would be cryptographically provable by the requesting party.\nBut please do not rely on this to ease your mind as you write more naive code. Under the influence of the false dichotomy of privacy .v. security, or guided by similarly naive understanding of identity, governments appear too frequently to be pulling in the wrong direction here. India\u0026rsquo;s Aadhaar is a case in point. This alarmingly naive, government-funded invention was intended to be entirely voluntary, but to opt-out now is to effectively opt-out of living in the country; an example of the structuration I referenced above.\nThe thought put into Aadhaar\u0026rsquo;s goals, design and consequences has been and remains woefully inadequate.\nNaive innovation represents an inordinate and perilous transformation of the ilk explored in mid-twentieth century dystopian novels. In other words, people will die if its application is not controlled. But controlling it will also lead to exclusion, persecution, and deaths depending on the dogma of those in power at the time. (See India\u0026rsquo;s hunt for \u0026ldquo;illegal immigrants\u0026rdquo; is aimed at Muslims .) As I note in my webinar for the Self-Sovereign Identity Meetup , engineering the facility for inclusion cannot but also enable exclusion.\nBrevity is my only reason for limiting the examples here to Telegram and Aadhaar. They are not too unusual in their naivety, unfortunately. Just use your preferred search engine to look up \u0026ldquo;KYC-as-a-service\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;e-KYC\u0026rdquo; for example and challenge yourself to find a service that limits its application to legally necessitated situations, or one that doesn\u0026rsquo;t use legal terms and conditions to curtail hackers\u0026rsquo; freedom to find flaws in its system.\nIf this has sparked your deeper interest, _Dissent on Aadhaar_1 is perhaps the definitive read on Aadhaar\u0026rsquo;s architectural flaws, its erosion of civil liberties, undermining of democratic process, negative impact on welfare programmes, and pivotal role in the formation of a surveillance state. Separately, Kaliya Young explores how Aadhaar differs from the US Social Security System2 and concludes: \u0026ldquo;there tends to be insufficient consideration of the ways in which the proposed solutions that use Aadhaar might create risks for those individuals and institutions it intends to serve.\u0026rdquo;\nExpertly Identity experts are semantic pedantic — their professional focus is distinction after all. I adopt Jonathan Donner\u0026rsquo;s recommendation3 to distinguish the terms \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;identification\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;ID\u0026rdquo;. Identity \u0026ldquo;implies a kind of multidimensional social location of an individual relative to other people and institutions around him or her.\u0026rdquo; Identification is a claims verification process, and ID is an artifact, traditionally tangible, that \u0026ldquo;supports a claim or signals that identification might be possible.\u0026rdquo;\nIn other words, identity ≠ identification ≠ ID. Any and every conversation in which participants recognize this distinction is massively more productive. And there\u0026rsquo;s another phrase …\nSelf-sovereign identity (SSI) SSI is the current state of the art. The concept and term emerged in 2016 having morphed from \u0026ldquo;sovereign source authority\u0026rdquo; in 2012. Here is an extract from Devon Loffreto\u0026rsquo;s argument for such sovereignty4:\nSociety is an Agreement. It is made by and between Individuals. Within any Society, Individuals have an established Right to an \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo;, and to all of the benefits and responsibilities of some form of \u0026ldquo;Nationally Sovereign Structure\u0026rdquo; of governance and administration. Sovereign Source Authority (SSA) refers to the actual default design parameter of Human identity, prior to the \u0026ldquo;registration\u0026rdquo; process used to inaugurate participation in Society.\nThe motivation here is valid at least, evidenced in the analysis of the conditions by which totalitarianism took hold in Europe in the 1930s and early 40s5:\nThe stateless and the minorities … had no governments to represent and to protect them. … The very phrase ‘human rights\u0026rsquo; became for all concerned — victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike — the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.\nWhen only states are sovereign, the individual rendered stateless has no rights. This is unacceptable and led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and more recently to the inclusion under the Sustainable Development Goals of the target to ensure everyone has a legal identity by 20306.\nWe are also moved by the motivations for such a target and recognise that there are choices to be made of how best to achieve it, and indeed to define precisely what it is. Is it to serve only in tightly specified legal or humanitarian contexts for example? If so, who gets to decide? And who gets to decide who gets to decide?7 We must remain cognizant that efficient identity related bureaucracy was also fatal in the 1940s8. It was easier to find people to murder in jurisdictions in which legal identity worked well. On which point, the minimum qualification of an expert in this field must be historical awareness and dedication to not repeating its tragedies.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to offer an introduction to SSI nor the corresponding deliberations by various communities, not least Rebooting the Web of Trust , Internet Identity Workshop , Identity Foundation , ID2020 , and Good ID . Rather, the following resources are excellent introductions if you need to jump off here.\nThe Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (includes \u0026ldquo;Ten Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity\u0026rdquo;), Christopher Allen, April 2016 What is self-sovereign Identity? , Sovrin, 2018 Self-sovereign identity: Unraveling the terminology , IBM, 2018 The Three Models of Digital Identity Relationships , Timothy Ruff, Evernym, 2018 Given that I will be taking aim at the founding principles, I will just tip my hat to _The Laws of Identity_9 from 2005. As Kim Cameron explained at the time10, the word \u0026ldquo;laws\u0026rdquo; was adopted in the scientific sense of hypotheses about the world — resulting from observation — which can be tested and are thus disprovable. The influence of these laws on the SSI principles is plain, not least user control.\nThe transition to SSI from the prior state of play (described succinctly by Christopher Allen in the first link in the list above) represents a substantial and most welcome breakthrough, but my focus here is its fatal flaws — some of its ‘laws\u0026rsquo; don\u0026rsquo;t stand the test — and where we might go beyond SSI.\nNot how the world works The Rebooting Web of Trust community adopts what it describes as a functional approach to identity :\nIdentity is how we recognize, remember, and ultimately respond to specific people and things.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a multidimensional social location of an individual relative to others, and clearly contextual. We might recognise faces, voices, gaits, fingerprints, irises, handwriting, usernames, email addresses, PINs, cookies, cryptographic keys or the mathematical proofs of their application, etc. We might remember by close personal association, by faint to robust recollection, by paper record, by database and algorithm. And our responses will be influenced by our interpretation of the associated archived information and the current informational context.\nThe definition emphasises the observer rather than the observed, the recogniser rather than the recognised. Identity is in the eye of the beholder11. It\u0026rsquo;s social.\nOn the other hand, the term SSI denotes that identity emanates from the individual in question under that individual\u0026rsquo;s control — after all, to be sovereign means to possess the supreme or ultimate power, and control is both a formative law and founding principle here. SSI is then individualistic, atomistic, and definitely not reliant on anything social.\nBut how could this reflect reality? How could this be possible when I have minority influence over others\u0026rsquo; recognising me as best they might, remembering me as they so desire, and responding to me as they see fit? I may attempt to minimise information disclosure, and I may have some recourse under law to effectively reverse previous disclosures, but while that is all well and good in the name of privacy, identities still form in the eyes of the beholders beyond my control. Timothy Ruff puts it tentatively12:\n… connections, relationships, and third-party issued credentials are not entirely self-sovereign, nor should they be. They represent (at least) two-sided relationships, and the other party to the relationship has some degree of control, too.\nI\u0026rsquo;m more blunt, and perhaps the easiest explanation is one of reductio ad absurdum.\nImagine if you will that I am self-sovereign. Imagine that I exercise my self-sovereignty fully in the only direction afforded me — i.e. I refuse any facility that others might wield to recognise, remember and respond to me. (For the more technical reader here, I might take full advantage of pairwise pseudonymity with efficient zero-knowledge proofs and ‘tumblers\u0026rsquo; that obfuscate my true service endpoints13.)\nI am now maxing my self-sovereignty.\nIs this then the ultimate identity power play? Should you then consider me to be in full control of my identity? In short no, of course not, for who then is left to make the distinction? What is it I\u0026rsquo;m now supposedly controlling? I am left with no identity at all.\nIdentity cannot be self-sovereign by the functional definition.\nThis could be a straightforward case of poor word choice — I\u0026rsquo;m not the first to make that observation14 — but this goes deeper than the label. This contradiction, this impossibility, is set up from the underlying principles.\nA quote from the anthropologist, social scientist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson springs to mind15:\nThe major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.\nPhil Windley has observed such a tension, up to a point16:\nMany people hear sovereign and think \u0026ldquo;sovereign means the individual has complete control.\u0026rdquo; Not really. As Scott David pointed out, \u0026ldquo;declaring yourself king of a deserted island isn\u0026rsquo;t very useful.\nSovereignty is about relationships and boundaries. … Sovereignty defines a boundary, within which the sovereign has complete control and outside of which the sovereign relates to others within established rules and norms.\nI argue from the perspectives of complexity science and sociology (not unrelated of course) that not only are many of the SSI principles false — they don\u0026rsquo;t reflect how the world works — but even this attempt at reconciliation entails clean boundary lines that simply don\u0026rsquo;t exist. But Windley concludes:\nThe beauty of sovereignty isn\u0026rsquo;t complete and total control, but rather balance of power that leads to negotiations about the nature of the relationships between various entities in the system.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t sovereignty, or the \u0026ldquo;beauty of sovereignty\u0026rdquo;. By my reading, Windley suspects that identity isn\u0026rsquo;t about sovereignty at all.\nAnd last year, when learning to become a certified Warm Data Lab host, I found a kindred spirit in Matthew Schutte who had already critiqued the SSI principles17. I won\u0026rsquo;t take on every principle here — just four should do the job, starting in each case with a quote from Matthew\u0026rsquo;s critique and contributing my own notes.\nSSI principle: Existence. Users must have an independent existence.\nThis is the first false assumption: The belief in an identity as an object. The perception of an \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo; is a heuristic that simplifies information processing and decision making, but it is not an underlying reality that we should be anchoring Identity processes to — at least not in total.\nI dislike the reference to \u0026ldquo;users\u0026rdquo; in this principle. Rather, let\u0026rsquo;s talk about human beings i.e. recognise our full potential and dignity in ways not necessarily triggered let alone encouraged by the word \u0026ldquo;users\u0026rdquo;.\nFurthermore, and as I\u0026rsquo;ve written before , the I and the we are not really separable. Neither the individual nor the collectivity can be or become without the other, an assertion recognised by structuration theory in sociology. The theory, dominant in its field, moves away from treating the individual (agent) and society (structure) as separate, paired elements, to considering the two as interdependent, no longer separate or opposed18:\nthe structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize.\nComprehending such complexity requires some shifts in thinking, including:\nAway from the reductionism of ‘parts and wholes\u0026rsquo; towards the simultaneity of a thing being both a part and a whole (holonic philosophy) Away from a focus on the agents (nodes, things, groups) towards a focus on the relationships (the edges, dynamics, liminality, interdependencies), per Actor-Network theory , and ultimately in my view to rhizomes19 and agencement20 — the continuous and unending flux of assembling and reassembling. Unlike SSI, these appear to correspond to how identity works in the world. I acknowledge of course that the law has a concept of identity for narrowly-bounded legal applications, but that\u0026rsquo;s the point — narrowly-bounded — and heuristic to boot, to quote Matthew Schutte. In the countries I\u0026rsquo;m most familiar with, in Western Europe and North America, there is no need to reference a legal identity to grab a cab, buy a bagel, meet-up with a mate, borrow a book, play in the park, or do a friend a favour. We act around group norms, simultaneously affecting their perceived loci and boundaries, telling and enacting different stories to ourselves and others, and playing different parts with different people in different contexts, all of which are identity related without our necessarily thinking or believing them as such, and all of which would be alien to the designer of a legal ID system. (I explore identity narratives later.)\nOr to put it another way, designing for ‘proof of personhood\u0026rsquo; to engineer sybil resistance is critical in some contexts of course, but only a minority of identity contexts. It would be harmful in other contexts. (See Verifying identity as a social intersection .)\nSSI principle: Control. Users must control their identity.\nThis assumes that 1) \u0026ldquo;identities\u0026rdquo; are a static referent, 2) identities are maintained at a system wide scale. These claims align with past attempts at identity administration architectures, but don\u0026rsquo;t map to the actual functioning of identity in the real world.\nI would argue that: 1) claims are all that exist, 2) these claims can be thought of as signals that are \u0026ldquo;published\u0026rdquo; (sent) by some actors and \u0026ldquo;received\u0026rdquo; (sensed) by others. After receipt, the recipient bears the burden of prioritizing and interpreting the signals that they have sensed. There are complex adaptive system dynamics in play here that lead to a differentiation in the sensitivities of various actors.\nThanks Matthew.\nControl is wholly inappropriate in the context of identity because it is a logical impossibility. But that\u0026rsquo;s not to advocate or resign ourselves to the binary opposite. Far from it. Anthony Giddens, the progenitor of structuration theory, has something to add here21:\nAgency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place. \u0026hellip; To be able to \u0026lsquo;act otherwise\u0026rsquo; means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve noted before , agency (in co-evolving structure) entails a negotiation in and with the world that the word \u0026ldquo;control\u0026rdquo; denies. Identities form and reform (and expire) in the course of individuals exercising or not exercising agency, all the while sending and receiving signals to use Matthew\u0026rsquo;s words. We can strive to enhance agency, perhaps spread it around a bit more evenly, but to frame identity in terms of control is to promise something that cannot be delivered.\nIn a related email discussion, Elizabeth Renieris notes22:\nThe GDPR is a classic example of a law that is being misinterpreted by the SSI community as having to do with individual control. Notice how the core GDPR principles (lawfulness, fairness \u0026amp; transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity \u0026amp; confidentiality, and accountability) do NOT include control. In fact, the only notion of \u0026ldquo;control\u0026rdquo; in the GDPR stems from the concept of \u0026ldquo;controllership\u0026rdquo; which is a quasi-fiduciary obligation of data controllers to adhere to these core principles, to protect the personal data of data subjects, and to accept certain procedural requirements, etc. Yes, individual data subject rights provide a degree of control over data already shared but those rights are calibrated to exist within a meta-structure designed to remedy some of the asymmetries between individual data subjects \u0026amp; organizational controllers (where the emphasis is on controllers who are in a position to act responsibly and give effect to rights).\nSSI principle: Access. Users must have access to their own data.\nAgain, though noble in intent, this does not map to reality. If I see you slap a child, that impression gets \u0026ldquo;written\u0026rdquo; on my brain. You don\u0026rsquo;t have access to it. … These private channels of impression, interpretation and communication are critically important, and yet do not lend themselves to the type of \u0026ldquo;user centric\u0026rdquo; identity scheme being proposed here.\nTo have unimpeded access is to have control, which cannot work when one appreciates that so-called personal data and identity are reciprocally defining and co-constitutive (more on which later). The use of \u0026ldquo;their own\u0026rdquo; here invokes the idea that data be treated as property (if only perhaps for lack of imagination). I have written at some length on the impracticality and immorality of total access to / control over / ownership of personal data23 and I won\u0026rsquo;t repeat that here. I will however invite you to use the expressions \u0026ldquo;data about me\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;data about us\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;my data\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;our data\u0026rdquo; to avoid any implication of ownership.\nMatthew doesn\u0026rsquo;t address the digitalisation of associated processes, but I do below.\nSSI principle: Persistence. Identities must be long-lived.\n… builds upon the same flawed framework of \u0026ldquo;an Identity is an object\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Identity objects will be managed at system scale rather than by individual observers.\u0026rdquo; These are fatal flaws that do not map to how signals, agents, interpretation and steering operate in complex adaptive systems.\nWe can choose not to willingly pull our previous interactions into the present relationship. However, we are incapable of preventing others from attempting to correlate our past with our present — or to prevent them entirely from taking steps to improve the likelihood that our present interaction will be discoverable by those who interact with us in the future\nThere are ways in which we can pressure others to reduce the level of such sharing that occurs, but these are primarily through the mechanism of social pressures, not technical limitations of the infrastructure we make use of.\nIdentity doesn\u0026rsquo;t come with persistence as a defining characteristic. I have yet to find a similar ‘law\u0026rsquo; in the corpus of sociology, cultural studies, or psychology; the opposite in fact. Law is the only discipline that necessarily bureaucratizes birth and death with some urgency to connect the two, and has been narrowly-constrained in application as noted.\nOf course, digital technologies have effectively given some observers superhuman powers of recognising, remembering, and responding. While developers of SSI related technologies might design to attenuate such powers, such intention doesn\u0026rsquo;t justify the terminology of \u0026ldquo;self-sovereignty\u0026rdquo; or its founding principles. Fundamentally, superhuman technologies are established, around which societal norms have formed and will continue to form, as Marshall McLuhan famously observed. In the context here, this leaves only the law as the basis to trim those super powers in the name of enduring social norms, and in practice it is more the (corporate) observer that extends or accommodates technology in seeking legal compliance than it is any technology of purely self-sovereign origin having the desired effect.\nGeneratively I have discussed how personal and group identity is manifest online, both naively and expertly. Now I\u0026rsquo;m going to explore how we might employ digital technologies to transform society\u0026rsquo;s accommodations of and approaches to identity, generatively.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30999\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;400\u0026rdquo;] by Ryan Alexander CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (see original at https://vimeo.com/9636677 )[/caption]\nI have never attempted to engineer self-sovereign identity. I am then no SSI expert. I invest my time working out how we might wield digital technologies to nurture the full potential of human beings, realising intelligences that would otherwise remain hidden, and creating regenerative cultures and systems24. In the context here, my focus can be called generative identity.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not an easy domain to communicate, so I welcome any interest you might have in conversation and collaboration.\nMy use of generative relates to a desired state beyond sustainability25:\nSustainable — aiming not to leave anything in worse state (i.e. it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;less bad\u0026quot;26) Restorative — doing things to assist the evolution of natural sub-systems Regenerative — participating as nature; co-evolution of the whole system. It also relates to Jonathan Zittrain\u0026rsquo;s use in technological terms27:\nGenerativity denotes a technology\u0026rsquo;s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences… Generativity is a function of a technology\u0026rsquo;s capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.\nGenerativity may be designed into a digital architecture \u0026ldquo;through loose couplings across layers whereby innovations can spring up independently at any layer, leading to cascading effects on other layers.\u0026ldquo;28\nThe book _Designing Regenerative Cultures_29 opens with this Albert Einstein quote:\nIf I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.\nGenerative identity is most definitely in the \u0026ldquo;determining the proper question to ask\u0026rdquo; phase. Let\u0026rsquo;s start with the question — what do we mean by \u0026ldquo;self\u0026rdquo;?\nThe narrative self Marya Schechtman argues that we each maintain numerous narratives in multiple contexts that evolve reflexively with our interactions30:\nthe complexity of selves is to be found in the multiple perspectives on our lives that we negotiate in living them, a complexity best understood in narrative terms.\nThe title of an article by Daniel Dennett31 puts it succinctly: Why Everyone is a Novelist.\nRichard Sorabji notes that Schechtman stresses the continuing and interacting nature of an individual\u0026rsquo;s activities — \u0026ldquo;talking, listening, walking, acting, having beliefs, desires, goals, intentions, thinking, being inconsistent, and vacillating.\u0026ldquo;32 The narratives are mostly accretive, but may also on occasion undergo sharp change.\nIdentities are formed through narrative. Narratives are informed by interactions with others. Interactions are modulated by identities. In other words, there are no absolutes here. Nothing is concrete. Everything is agencement. An individual is an agencement with her narratives. A group is an agencement of individuals and distinct and shared and conflicting narratives.\nMichel Callon connects these arrangings and organizings to the very potential to act and interact33.\n[Agency] can neither be contained in a human being nor localized in the institutions, norms, values, and discursive or symbolic systems assumed to produce effects on individuals. Action, including its reflexive dimension that produces meaning, takes place in hybrid collectives comprising human beings as well as material and technical devices, texts, etc.\nAn ecology The next two paragraphs and the following quote are perhaps the trickiest elements to follow here, but I do my best to offer an explanation immediately after.\nAll conceptualizations of identity and their corresponding perceived manifestations entail minds working with information. Gregory Bateson pointed out that the learning in both instances develops as a hierarchic series \u0026ldquo;constructed by successive use of the word \u0026lsquo;about,\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;meta.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; Moreover, on considering \u0026ldquo;phenomena marginal to communications theory, similar hierarchies may be constructed by the piling up of \u0026lsquo;change\u0026rsquo; upon \u0026lsquo;change\u0026rsquo;.\u0026ldquo;34\nOn seeking to contrast these — orders of learning, and contexts, and contexts of contexts — Bateson concludes that they could only be considered separate should the first be located inside the individual and the second located outside.\nBut in the communicational world, this dichotomy is irrelevant and meaningless. The contexts have communicational reality only insofar as they are effective as messages, i.e., insofar as they are represented or reflected (correctly or with distortion) in multiple parts of the communication system which we are studying; and this system is not the physical individual but a wide network of pathways of messages.\nThis finding explains Bateson\u0026rsquo;s adoption of the term \u0026ldquo;ecology of minds\u0026rdquo;. In plain terms, your brain and your mind are not the same thing. The brain is what\u0026rsquo;s in here [taps skull] whereas the mind is a distributed, social phenomenon. The brain is biological. The mind is informational and inseparable from informational contexts.\nIn seeking difference and therefore similarity, inclusion and therefore exclusion, varying conceptualizations of identity may draw boundaries and boundaries of boundaries, with ready potential for apparent contradiction. (It would be more surprising if there were none, and such apparent contradictions keep those working on digital identity entertained in debate for very many hours!) Nevertheless, \u0026ldquo;the characteristics of the system are in no way dependent upon any boundary lines which we may superpose upon the communicational map.\u0026rdquo;\nAt some moments in time, in some contexts, in some epistemologies, perceptions of boundary lines may emerge for those seeking epistemological insight or those labouring under some desire for some expressed mode of societal governance or organization, but this doesn\u0026rsquo;t change the system because the system Bateson describes encompasses such learnings, such actions, and such contexts. They are part of the ecology.\nThe idea, discussed earlier, that SSI might delimit a clear boundary within which the sovereign has control is a case in point here. This isn\u0026rsquo;t how the world works but rather how this interpretation of SSI would have it work.\nTowards mechanism design Evolution hasn\u0026rsquo;t left us with innate facility for systems thinking — it just hasn\u0026rsquo;t been core to our adaptation. And yet we are now the first species, that we know of anyway, to confront the need to cooperate as a species on a system of global scale.\nBateson argued that there are some conditions under which our current civilization and our environment might co-exist in a state of ecological health. In classic cybernetic formulation, and following Ross Ashby, he identified that there are varying freedoms and constraints (flexibility) of variables in a complex adaptive system by which we may realise societally valued outcomes in terms of ecological sustainability. He contemplated the need for either a \u0026ldquo;high\u0026rdquo; civilization or well-educated planners.\nA \u0026ldquo;high\u0026rdquo; civilization is defined in part by its facility to maintain the necessary wisdom in the human population to understand the requisite variables and corresponding flexibilities. While I would never dismiss such aspiration, far from it, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear to be realistic within the short time we have to reset the trajectory here35. (Being ignorant of everything other than my own infinitesimal niche, how arrogant would it be to require everyone else to learn my expertise given I have insufficient bandwidth to learn theirs? Or is that proposition itself arrogant?)\nWhile not offering similar doubts explicitly, Bateson leaned towards the well-educated planners route — a.k.a. mechanism design — approaching system design such that its operation by and corresponding incentives offered to those involved are such that the system trends towards a desired state. Mechanism design has traditionally assumed rational participation (homo economicus ) but increasingly encompasses understanding of our irrationality assembled under the rubric of behavioural economics , becoming known as behavioural mechanism design.\nEntertaining behavioural mechanism design here raises the question:\nAre some conceptualizations of identity (boundary drawing and redrawing) more conducive than others to the recovery and maintenance of ecological health, to generativity?\nIn overly simplistic but perhaps more memorable terms, could people more readily self-identify as astronauts on Spaceship Earth36?\nAll change We have then arrived at the first principle for generative identity based on the imperative to support continuous ecological adaptation.\nGenerative identity principle: Change. Generative identity facilitates and maintains freedom of application, freedom of agencement, and freedom to revise generative identity.\nAs Buckminster Fuller anticipated in _I Seem to be a Verb_37 and as I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to explicate here, who I am encompasses a constant flux of informational diffusion and intermixing, interfacial constructions and experiences, continuously revised narratives, arrangings and organizings.\nIn my webinar for the SSI Meetup I distinguish between noun-like and verb-like conceptualisations of identity. The noun-like are unchanging by design — think of those developed for the legal bureaucratization of identity (e.g. birth certificate, passport, national ID card, social security number, Aadhaar identity number), those based on permanent physical features (e.g. fingerprint, face recognition), and those inventions vying to achieve similar permanence or based on such permanence (e.g. Facebook ID, Telegram passport).\nThe primary characteristic of verb-like conceptualisations is their accommodating and enabling change. They haven\u0026rsquo;t been a focus of the digital identity community to date. Indeed, the verb-like conceptualizations, while in fact dominant in everyday life, appear to be so far removed from technologists\u0026rsquo; beliefs and understanding of how identity works in the world and from how digital technologies have developed to date that I find many have a hard time grasping that such conceptualizations even exist. Sociotechnologists on the other hand get it pretty quickly if not immediately given their interdisciplinary focus (see Web Science ).\nNoun-like identity conceptualizations lack adaptability by design. By deep existential contrast, generative identity is essential to psychological, societal, and ecological health.\nGenerative identity principle: Co-constitution. Identity and relationships and information are reciprocally defining and co-constitutive.\nAfter Margaret Wheatley38, identity is the sense-making capacity of organizing. It is of the selves that organize and the self that gets organized. Narrative in nature, identities assemble in relationships involving and producing personally and socially material information.\nRelationships are the pathways for organizing, required for the creation and transformation of information, the expansion of the organizational identity, and accumulation of wisdom. Relationships are formed with information exchange between identifying / identifiable entities in identifying / identifiable organizings.\nInformation is the medium of the organizing. Life uses information to organize itself, i.e. when a system assigns meaning to data. Information is contextual to identities in relationships.\n(See The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets .)\nBut this doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear from my experience to be how many computer scientists and software engineers think. The design principle of separation of concerns has served the discipline and profession well to date ‘lower in the stack\u0026rsquo;, but its application ‘higher in the stack\u0026rsquo; where human identity is involved and complex adaptive systems reign must be subject to constant challenge. A presentation at this summer\u0026rsquo;s DWeb Camp for example proposes that data and identity be considered orthogonal to / independent of each other39. To be fair, although an indictment of itself, the conceptualisation of identity adopted in the presentation remains completely undefined. This is also not unusual. The idea that identity might be anything other than noun-like, to use my terminology here, and anything much more advanced than the substitution of a cryptographic key for tangible ID appears not yet to have entered the mainstream conversation.\nBy corollary of the principle of co-constitution, we arrive at \u0026hellip;\nGenerative identity principle: Omni-directionality. There can be no distinction of input or output — any data flow may have reflexive consequence.\nBy way of a trivial example, there is a connection between the series of novels known as Harry Potter and the writer J. K. Rowling. Each \u0026lsquo;contributes\u0026rsquo; information to the other.\nThere is also a connection between the book The Cuckoo\u0026rsquo;s Calling and the writer Robert Galbraith. In this instance, the connection to the book was all that was known about the writer. It defined Galbraith.\nOf course, authoring a book is a big undertaking, and I want to stress that the same goes for the smallest most fleeting actions and inactions.\nGenerative identity principle: Friction. Friction is an important system property in any system, including generative identity.\nWe learned subsequently of course that Rowling wrote under the Galbraith pen name. The identity Robert Galbraith still exists at the time of writing, but when operating with a noun-like conceptualisation of identity we might say that it is absorbed into Rowling\u0026rsquo;s and Galbraith is demoted to a mere known pseudonym.\nSuch collapses occur naturally but the rate at which collapses may occur when subject to deliberate programmatic techniques (correlation) is a concern. In the SSI webinar, I note that friction is an important system property. Failure to re-engineer appropriate frictions in our sociotechnical system may lead to very poor social outcomes. Existing work done in the name of SSI may prove useful here (baby, bathwater), and I also believe this will likely require a blend of legal and technical codes and appropriate revisions of social norms.\nGiven the co-constitution here, it\u0026rsquo;s not surprising that a concern for correlated identities applies equally to correlated relationships and information. Take this fairly recent assertion40:\nDecentralized identity systems must allow us to present claims we make about ourselves (now called self-attested), but must allow us to present claims that express things others say about us too.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s not to like about this additional feature?\nWell, let\u0026rsquo;s assume that we consider the idea of the Chinese \u0026ldquo;social credit\u0026rdquo; system — a state surveillance system seeking to standardise the assessment of citizens\u0026rsquo; economic and social reputation — an affront to individual freedoms many in the West hold dear. Now imagine that anyone in the West can present claims that express things others say about them. I suggest that you, just like almost everyone else, will see self-interest in, for example, porting your eBay seller rating to your Airbnb host profile. Instant reputation! And in fact it soon becomes a qualifying expectation (structuration). Everyone\u0026rsquo;s rational self-interest works against our collective best interest, and an equivalent \u0026ldquo;social credit\u0026rdquo; system forms by emergence almost as quickly as the Chinese deliberate action and perhaps all the more efficiently.\nSSI experts may clamour here to point out the ways in which the associated technology does not set up this up. I will if I may just reiterate the point that we\u0026rsquo;re all working in a sociotechnological environment, not merely technological, and therefore with structuration not just atomistic individuals.\nIf we can procure omni-directionality with appropriate friction, we will be well on the way to living up to the final principle in this draft list \u0026hellip;\nGenerative identity principle: Non-universality. One can have generativity or universality but not both.\nOr to put it another way, the only universal attribute of generative identity is that it does not trend toward universality. It must have a proclivity for mutation by design, which also requires it to be resistant to homogenising network effects. Generative identity is a set of principles that may be instantiated in different ways by different cultures, different collectivities, different societies, at different times.\nI appreciate that this one is going to be difficult for some people to accept, especially those technologists working without the socio- prefix. If it helps any, you\u0026rsquo;ll appreciate that mutual understanding crystallises as needed in a context and fades as and when attentions are directed elsewhere. This is perfectly natural. Now swap out \u0026ldquo;mutual understanding\u0026rdquo; for \u0026ldquo;interoperability\u0026rdquo;.\nGenerative identity at the AKASHA Foundation AKASHA\u0026rsquo;s purpose demands systems thinking, especially systems ecology and the interdisciplinarity of web science, if not transdisciplinarity (emphasising holism and synthesizing new bodies of knowledge with which to address complex systems problems41).\nIn the spirit of our purpose, and from simple necessity, our purpose can only be pursued in cooperation with many others, and that clearly includes the identity ‘problem space\u0026rsquo;. We\u0026rsquo;re excited to be playing a part, ready for conversations and collaborations.\nConcurrent to the thinking process reflected here, we\u0026rsquo;re coding. Today, this entails research into and experimentation with decentralized identifiers (DIDs) led by Andrei Sambra .\nAs you might imagine, even if you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with the term, the concept of \u0026ldquo;identity provider\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly compatible with the generative identity principles. But perhaps we may provide for holonic provision. Do keep an eye on the AKASHA blog for updates.\nLegal identity I\u0026rsquo;ve noted that the conceptualisation of generative identity remains embryonic. We\u0026rsquo;re only at the stage of determining the questions. Surely one of the biggest question marks must be the ease with which noun-like and verb-like conceptualisations might co-exist. Perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s a future in which only the latter are necessary, but a co-existence will be required for some good time to get us that far.\nIt could be that the noun-like require entirely different protocols to the verb-like, and rigorous effort is made to design appropriate and enduring sociotechnological constraints to prevent the otherwise inevitable noun-like creep.\nOr perhaps a particular quality of verb-like instantiations enables it to stabilise in similarly defined rare exception. I was presented with a word I didn\u0026rsquo;t previously know in a recent conversation with Jonathan Donner — gerund — a verb form which functions as a noun. Who knew?!\nEither way, at some point we have to answer the questions \u0026hellip; Who decides? And who decides who decides? These questions are usually invoked to note a weakness in the system. In this context however I also find some comfort in the presumption that it will be humans at least. Let me explain by way of finally bringing this post to a conclusion.\nOne way or the other I\u0026rsquo;m guided by fragmented glimpses of historical events, and I take inspiration from the complexity of nature and our growing appreciation for the nature of complexity. I am then enthusiastic for the sociotechnological potential here, celebrating humanity, realising intelligences that would otherwise remain hidden, and creating regenerative cultures and systems.\nEqually, I\u0026rsquo;m alarmed at the potential for psychological, societal, and ecological harm should these draft principles of generative identity not be developed and instantiated in abundant combinations of generative legal and technical code and societal norms. I cannot conceive of a neutral alternative … at least I cannot perceive any clues from nature for such. The alternative is degenerative — tending to decline and deterioration.\nPsychologically, our freedom of narrative will be eroded leaving only enumerated subjects of network control42, or indeed \u0026ldquo;abjects\u0026rdquo; more than subjects or objects43. In some contexts, physical safety will be the individual\u0026rsquo;s primary anxiety.\nSocietally, political doctrine is more likely to be rendered into technical form. \u0026ldquo;Politics does not circulate just through the flow of ideologies or rationalities of government, but through diagrams, instruments and practices.\u0026ldquo;44 Foucauldian disciplining will be writ large, with a \u0026ldquo;normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish\u0026quot;45, at which point the design problem becomes \u0026ldquo;to design and redesign the User itself in the image of whatever program might enroll it.\u0026ldquo;46\nEcologically, we won\u0026rsquo;t be participating as nature, we won\u0026rsquo;t be co-evolving with the whole system. Rather, we will have become locked rigid together or rigid apart. The structure, having subsumed agency, will crash into natural systems with ever greater force until they can no longer sustain us.\nIn welcoming all conversation and debate about SSI and generative identity, may I invite any ongoing champions of SSI to articulate how it might not contribute to such tragic outcomes let alone help avoid them. That is likely more than has been asked of SSI to date, but then this has got to be a good part of the question.\nNotes Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother , Reetika Khera, 2018 Key Differences Between the U.S. Social Security System and India’s Aadhaar System , Kaliya Young, 2019 The difference between digital identity, identification, and ID , Jonathan Donner, Caribou Digital, 2018 Sovereign Source Authority , Devon Loffreto, 2012 The Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt, 1951 Target 16.9, Sustainable Development Goals , 2015 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , Shoshana Zuboff, 2018 Surviving the Holocaust: Socio-demographic Differences Among Amsterdam Jews , Peter Tammes, 2017 Microsoft’s Vision for an Identity Metasystem , 2005 The Laws of Identity , Kim Cameron, Microsoft, 2005 Identity is in the eye of the beholder, Steve Wilson, 2013, at archive.org 7 Myths of Self-Sovereign Identity , Timothy Ruff, Evernym, 2018 Project VRM Harvard Mailing List , Adrian Gropper, 2019 Let’s find a more accurate term than ‘Self-Sovereign Identity’ , Kim Cameron, 2018 An Ecology Of Mind — A Daughter’s portrait of Gregory Bateson Directed by Nora Bateson , 2015 On Sovereignty , Phil Windley, 2016 Schutte’s Critique of the Self-Sovereign Identity Principles , Matthew Schutte, 2016 The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration , Anthony Giddens, 1986 A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari, 1980 Agencement/Assemblage , John Phillips, 2006 Ibid 18 Project VRM Harvard Mailing List , Elizabeth Renieris, 2019 The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets , Philip Sheldrake, 2019 See the AKASHA Foundation’s purpose — https://akasha.org/about/ Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration , Bill Reed, 2007 Cradle-to-cradle design , Braungart, McDonough, Bollinger, 2006 The Generative Internet , Jonathan Zittrain, 2005 The New Organizing Logic of Digital Innovation , Yoo et al, 2010 Designing Regenerative Systems , Daniel Wahl, 2016 The Narrative Self , Marya Schechtman, 2011 Why Everyone is a Novelist , The Times Literary Supplement, Daniel Dennett, 1988 Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death , Richard Sorabji, 2006 Economic Sociology , Michel Callon, 2005 Steps to an Ecology of Mind , Gregory Bateson, 1972 Global Warming of 1.5°C , United Nations IPCC, 2018 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth , Buckminster Fuller, 1968 I Seem to be a Verb , Buckminster Fuller et al, 1970 A simpler way , Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers, 1998 Rethinking decentralization , Peter Wang, 2019 Ibid 14 Defining Terms for Integrated (Multi-Inter-Trans-Disciplinary) Sustainability Research , Paul Stock and Rob Burton, 2011 Networks of control , Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann, 2016 (Why) Technology is Costing Us Agency , Umair Haque 2018 Political machines: governing a technological society , Andrew Barry, 2001 The Birth of the Prison , Michel Foucault, 1975 The Stack , Benjamin Bratton, 2016 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/09/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/generative-identity.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/02/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHero image generated from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/onecm/4400248063/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eoriginal image by Ryan Alexander\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m going to outline three ways to think about \u003cem\u003edigital identity\u003c/em\u003e to help move the conversation forward in line with \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation\u0026rsquo;s purpose\u003c/a\u003e\n. I\u0026rsquo;m not claiming any neat taxonomy per se, just exploring very different degrees of nuance with radically distinct implications.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRelating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, \u003cstrong\u003enaively\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRelating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, \u003cstrong\u003eexpertly\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRelating to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society\u0026rsquo;s accommodations of and approaches to identity, \u003cstrong\u003egeneratively\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"naively\"\u003eNaively\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt seems from observation alone that quite a few technologists work in this mode, excited to be bringing pre-digital bureaucratized identity into the digital age.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty"},{"content":"\nFirst published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .\nCo-author of Radical Markets Glen Weyl invited me to review Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection , co-authored with his colleague at Microsoft, Dr. Nicole Immorlica , and Stanford University\u0026rsquo;s Professor Matthew Jackson .\nThe topic is so-called digital identity, a term that could be mistaken for how personal and group identity is manifest online, but actually relates to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society\u0026rsquo;s accommodations of and approaches to identity.\nIt is not a challenge that anyone might describe as readily \u0026ldquo;solvable\u0026rdquo;, as my recent webinar for SSImeetup makes plain. If anything, it is a fine exemplar for H.L. Mencken\u0026rsquo;s witticism:\nFor every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.\nThis paper is an important contribution towards navigating this complexity appropriately. I do however identify a major problem — and therefore opportunity — relating to the conceptualizations of identity the authors have made their object. It appears they are intent on engineering for the trickiest yet perhaps the most societally important conceptualization, but then present it as a solution to a more mundane conceptualization, and one that desperately needs the balance of the former to mitigate its innate harmful potential.\nI finish with a brief explanation of the AKASHA Foundation\u0026rsquo;s work here. As you can imagine, this is core to our purpose .\nAbout \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo; Brubaker and Cooper (2000) argue that \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo; is in crisis, a devaluation of its meaning caused by a proliferation of varying conceptualizations and applications. \u0026ldquo;The term is richly — indeed for an analytical concept, hopelessly — ambiguous.\u0026rdquo;\nAmongst its uses they note:\nto highlight non-instrumental modes of action (i.e. particularized — e.g. characterized by religious or ethnic identity) to focus on self-understanding rather than self-interest to designate sameness across persons or sameness over time to capture allegedly core, foundational aspects of selfhood (relevant for example to a government seeking to distinguish one individual from another) to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist to highlight the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective self-understanding to stress the fragmented quality of the contemporary experience of the \u0026ldquo;self\u0026rdquo;, a self unstably patched together through shards of discourse and contingently \u0026ldquo;activated\u0026rdquo; in differing contexts. Stable and unstable. Concrete and malleable. Like and unlike. Within and without. Singular and multiple. Individual and collective. Separate and connected. Whole and partial. Enduring and varying. In being all things, \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo; apparently fails to distinguish itself.\nI interpret the authors\u0026rsquo; invoking \u0026ldquo;the modern state\u0026rdquo; in the opening line as qualifying their working conceptualization of identity as one setting out to satisfy a relying party\u0026rsquo;s need to recognize that this is Alice again, and by corollary assisting Alice in identifying herself as Alice again. My reason for explicating the other conceptualizations above is that they are not clearly delineated — as a bullet list might otherwise convey — but interwoven. Designs for one have emergent consequence for others.\nThe authors call on the properties of Georg Simmel \u0026rsquo;s conception of social circles.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re social animals To situate Simmel\u0026rsquo;s thesis in the most efficient way, albeit somewhat simplistically, you might like to imagine what identity was like before the modern state set out to bureaucratize it. Who you were was defined in terms of who you knew, what you did, and where you lived and worked. Given the corresponding lack of mobility back in the day, it was so unlikely that anyone else shared these properties that one hardly need bother with family names.\nAdam\u0026rsquo;s daughter Alice. Bob the blacksmith. Claire over in Clarence Court.\nThe authors\u0026rsquo; central claim relates to the core features of Simmel\u0026rsquo;s work:\nif such features can be formalized and accessed efficiently, they are a powerful foundation for many identity applications.\nThey support this assertion by eliminating other options: centralized, \u0026ldquo;big data\u0026rdquo; platforms, and self-sovereign identity.\nThey aim to supplant centralized identity systems, finding these:\nhighly insecure thin — reducing an individual to a small dimensional (binary) object; and artificial — bearing little resemblance to the \u0026lsquo;real\u0026rsquo; person. The authors note the attempts by the \u0026ldquo;big data\u0026rdquo; platforms (naming Facebook and Google) to address thinness, but this has been co-emergent and intimately linked with surveillance capitalism , or \u0026ldquo;panoptic identity\u0026rdquo; as the paper puts it.\nAs for self-sovereign identity (SSI), the authors acknowledge that current definitions are vague, but in general find the prospect to be thin, insecure, and artificial. I would go further, if only to explore a reconciliation of SSI with the paper\u0026rsquo;s development of Simmel\u0026rsquo;s social circles.\nAdopting a conceptualization of identity as a social construct — and what good can identity serve should you find yourself all alone on that fabled desert island? — how can it fundamentally emanate from oneself in the way \u0026ldquo;self-sovereign\u0026rdquo; intimates? The only basis for anything that might be called self-sovereign in this context is a self that reliably condenses its defining relationships informationally and some how reflects that out to the world personally, and verifiably to some degree. If it didn\u0026rsquo;t sound so oxymoronic, would that be socially-self-sovereign?\nWeb of Trust The authors identify the \u0026ldquo;Web of Trust\u0026rdquo; as the paradigm most closely related to their own. So do we. You can find AKASHA\u0026rsquo;s report from the Rebooting the Web of Trust meetup in Barcelona this March here . From that post:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with the phrase \u0026lsquo;web of trust\u0026rsquo;, it was coined in the early 90s by Phil Zimmerman, creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software.\nWhile it originally related to a specific technical execution, the term is invoked more generally today to describe the prospect of a private and secure peer-to-peer / person-to-person / agent-to-agent network, i.e. one that does not require a centralized intermediating service. And needless to say, the aspiration is to make it scalable and a beautiful user experience to drive mass adoption, requirements that haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been achieved — hence the need for a rebooting.\nTrust, just like identity, is a tricky concept to pin down, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think we need to explore that here. Just to say, trust is not a static thing. It is established and grows and shrinks and dies and rekindles over time. More a verb in nature than a noun. And if trust is dynamic, so then is a web of trust.\nVerb-like With such dynamism in mind, we consider various conceptualizations of identity in terms of being more verb-like or just plain noun-like. Birth certificates, driving licenses, and passports for example are noun-like — they\u0026rsquo;re not intended to be dynamic, by design. They are artificial, as Phil Windley notes so achingly well:\nDescartes didn\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;I have a birth certificate, therefore, I am.\u0026rdquo;\nThere are many scholars working on the topic of our multiple and fluid identities, linking them to many natural phenomena in our societies, not least one\u0026rsquo;s psychological and possibly physical safety. For brevity, I will reference just one typification.\nAfter Foucault, Stuart Hall conceptualized late-modern identity negatively as not signalling the \u0026ldquo;stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change.\u0026rdquo; (PDF ) As a founding figure of British Cultural Studies, Hall addresses the implications for group level identity. He argues against the idea that one might find one\u0026rsquo;s identity hiding amongst others coalescing around a common history or ancestry. The individual and so the group, the group and so the individual, cannot attain a unifying identity, rather identities are \u0026ldquo;fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions.\u0026rdquo;\nIn a recent article for the Omidyar Network\u0026rsquo;s Good ID project , I put it less elegantly.\nWhat do I share for example, socially speaking, with the little chap tottering off to his first day at school in the 1970s? Indeed, I feel different from just a few years ago, and fully expect to feel different again in the future. In fact, the way I conceive my own identity can vary from one context to another in the very same day. That\u0026rsquo;s living. Being. Becoming.\nAs noted in the SSI meetup webinar I referenced earlier, the art here will be ensuring that such essential human qualities are not obliterated by systems for noun-like digital identity as such systems erase the frictions that have kept noun-like concepts in check to date.\nMistaken identity Having attended diligently to the matter of assembling social identity from the qualities of redundancy, sociality, and intersectionality inherent to Simmel\u0026rsquo;s conceptualization, the authors suddenly remind the reader of their opening reference to the modern state by asserting (5.6.1):\nIn an identity system, it is important that each individual corresponds to a single identity.\nWe might read that as \u0026ldquo;in a particular noun-like identity system \u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nOn the other hand, Simmel himself conceives of identity (or \u0026ldquo;individualities\u0026rdquo;) as verb-like.\nWe are all fragments, not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgamations not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality and uniqueness — no longer distinguishable in principle — which envelops our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines. However, the view of the other broadens these fragments into what we never actually are purely and wholly. The fragments that are actually there can scarcely not be seen only juxtaposed, but as we fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, completely unconsciously of course, we construct the fullness of individuality from these fragments. (ref .)\n\u0026hellip; the procedures play out in the individual soul as well. In every moment these processes are of so complex a kind, harboring such an abundance of manifold and contradictory vicissitudes, that identifying them with one of our psychological concepts is always incomplete and actually falsifying: even the life moments of the individual soul are never connected by just one thread. (ref .)\nHaving journeyed through their design thinking inspired by Simmel\u0026rsquo;s natural and essentially human articulation of identities, verb-like and beautiful in their complexity and existentially vital, the authors switch back to a noun-like conceptualization. This involves a certain irony, as I will explain.\nThe disadvantage of noun-like sociotechnical identity systems, beyond the traversal of national borders and the payment of taxes and suchlike, is that they are so utterly rigid as to make their broader, frictionless application a danger to society.\nThe disadvantage of verb-like sociotechnical identity systems is they require such a sophistication of design and lengthy explanation to affected parties that many technicians \u0026lsquo;working on identity\u0026rsquo; find it difficult to appreciate such conceptualizations exist let alone reflect on ways they might be realised.\nThis paper appears to combine these disadvantages. Attacking the verb-like challenge is to be welcomed, of course! I\u0026rsquo;m arguing that it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t then be trained on a noun-like instantiation.\nInterpersonal data At AKASHA, we consider verb-like identity as co-emergent with interpersonal data, a term we employ deliberately to distinguish it from the term personal data as defined by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t the place to expand on interpersonal data — you can find out more in the SSImeetup webinar and in this post for the RadicalxChange Medium publication.\nBy design, interpersonal data is privacy preserving and socially meaningful, and has the innate qualities — at least when elevated to information — of redundancy, sociality, and intersectionality.\nAt the conclusion of the Twitter thread with Glen inviting my response here, he hints at a bigger vision, of which this recent paper constitutes one part, that \u0026ldquo;would replace money with a nonlinear mixture of identity and trust.\u0026rdquo; This is exciting and we hope AKASHA might collaborate. Our RadicalxChange post draws parallels between interpersonal data, money, and open money, concluding:\nMarkets don’t transform personal data so much as interpersonal data transform markets.\nVerb-like identities, collective intelligence, and new forms of currency. Bring it on!\nReference Immorlica, Nicole, Matthew O. Jackson, and E. Glen Weyl. “Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, April 20, 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3375436 .\nImage credit: Akio Takemoto, CC BY-SA 2.0 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/05/verifying-identity-as-a-social-intersection/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"people blur\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/people-blur-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/blog/2019/05/22/verifying-identity-as-a-social-intersection\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe AKASHA Foundation blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCo-author of \u003cem\u003eRadical Markets\u003c/em\u003e Glen Weyl \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1130463802091286532\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003einvited me\u003c/a\u003e\n to review \u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3375436.\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eVerifying Identity as a Social Intersection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n, co-authored with his colleague at Microsoft, \u003ca href=\"http://www.immorlica.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDr. Nicole Immorlica\u003c/a\u003e\n, and Stanford University\u0026rsquo;s Professor \u003ca href=\"https://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMatthew Jackson\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe topic is so-called digital identity, a term that could be mistaken for how personal and group identity is manifest online, but actually relates to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society\u0026rsquo;s accommodations of and approaches to identity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is not a challenge that anyone might describe as readily \u0026ldquo;solvable\u0026rdquo;, as \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/04/webinar-on-identity-interpersonal-data-and-collective-minds-for-ssi-meetup/\"\u003emy recent webinar for SSImeetup\u003c/a\u003e\n makes plain. If anything, it is a fine exemplar for H.L. Mencken\u0026rsquo;s witticism:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis paper is an important contribution towards navigating this complexity appropriately. I do however identify a major problem — and therefore opportunity — relating to the conceptualizations of identity the authors have made their object. It appears they are intent on engineering for the trickiest yet perhaps the most societally important conceptualization, but then present it as a solution to a more mundane conceptualization, and one that desperately needs the balance of the former to mitigate its innate harmful potential.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI finish with a brief explanation of the AKASHA Foundation\u0026rsquo;s work here. As you can imagine, this is core to \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eour purpose\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Verifying identity as a social intersection"},{"content":"\nWritten for Omidyar Network\u0026rsquo;s Good ID project and first published to the project\u0026rsquo;s blog .\nI love the way Derek Parfit introduces his book Reasons and Persons :\n“We are particular people. I have my life to live, you have yours. What do these facts involve? What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? What is the importance of the unity of each life, and of the distinction between different lives, and different persons?”\nThe more you study it, the more you realize that identity is a tricky concept to grasp. There are many different ideas to describe what it is and what it does, but Parfit\u0026rsquo;s emphasis of its innate social nature appeals to me. After all, what good can identity serve should you find yourself all alone on that fabled desert island, apart from different persons?\nMy identities form with others, as theirs are formed with others and with me. It\u0026rsquo;s a product of relationships.\nAnd those relationships? They\u0026rsquo;re established and defined through interactions.\nIf per chance you have only considered identity on what might be described an individualistic basis – atomistic perhaps – dedicated to the enumeration and differentiation of individuals, then the assertions here may sound odd. Until that is you ask who might seek to know an identity, to make the distinction and for what purpose, at which juncture you’ve arrived smack in the middle of an interaction signifying a relationship. Whether your intent is to establish identity out of difference or difference out of identity (Grossberg ), your subject only makes sense in the context of social relationships.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m the same person throughout my life, I am also different. What do I share for example, socially speaking, with the little chap tottering off to his first day at school in the 1970s? Indeed, I feel different from just a few years ago, and fully expect to feel different again in the future. In fact, the way I conceive my own identity can vary from one context to another in the very same day. That\u0026rsquo;s living. Being. Becoming.\nGiven this entanglement beyond ourselves, so to speak, let\u0026rsquo;s look at identity by not looking at identity directly. Let\u0026rsquo;s look in between.\nWe have already established that identity and relationships need each other. They cannot be said to exist to all intents and purposes without each other. Additionally, we\u0026rsquo;ve also noted that relationships involve interactions, which social scientists and information theorists will tell you entails the exchange of information.\nIdentity. Relationships. Information.\nTogether, these constitute a triarchy that Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers argue are the essential conditions and domains of organizing — which in human terms includes what we call society.\nThe domains are mutually constitutive and inseparable. In plainer language, they prop each other up.\nRelationships are formed with information exchange between identifying (and always evolving) individuals in identifying (and always evolving) organizations Identities assemble from whom we know (relationships) and what we do (entailing personally and socially material information) Information is contextual to individuals in relationships. This conceptual mutualism is unsurprising. The naturalist, environmental philosopher and so-called \u0026ldquo;Father of the US National Parks,\u0026rdquo; John Muir, famously noted:\n\u0026ldquo;When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.\u0026rdquo;\nIn a similar vein, the anthropologist, social scientist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson enjoined us not to focus on any thing as if it could ever be considered in isolation, but on \u0026ldquo;the pattern which connects.\u0026rdquo;\nBreak the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality.\nAt the AKASHA Foundation — a non-profit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence — we don\u0026rsquo;t then work on identity per se, or indeed \u0026ldquo;digital identity \u0026rdquo; as it\u0026rsquo;s become popular to say. We work in between (on the blue arrows in the diagram above), and aspire to do so with the interdisciplinary rigor that Gregory Bateson considered essential.\nFor example, our emerging framework for the assembling and reassembling of social networks (to use the popular term) is dedicated to the conditions required to support the emergence of collective intelligence rather than social networking per se. It\u0026rsquo;s very much blue arrows all the way.\nAnd whereas the General Data Protection Regulation \u0026rsquo;s definition of and focus on personal data places it directly in the information domain (circle) here, our research explores what we call interpersonal data.\nInterpersonal data surrounds us at all scales, nesting and interpenetrating, privacy preserving, and socially meaningful. \u0026ldquo;Intelligence\u0026rdquo; is invited to the data rather than have the data go to the \u0026ldquo;intelligence.\u0026rdquo; It is distributed and disintermediating, and it is about mutual value creation not property rights. The corresponding architecture is neither individualistic nor collectivized.\nThe following table provides a quick comparison of the two concepts:\nPersonal data Interpersonal data legal natural data subjects humans + node-centric edge-centric control agency tree-like rhizomatic facsimile cache privacy privacy + collective intelligence Note the node-centric attribute of personal data, i.e. residing in the information domain (circle), and the edge-centric attribute of interpersonal data, i.e. \u0026ldquo;living\u0026rdquo; and moving between.\nOne can adopt either personal or interpersonal data in one’s approach to identity, an addition perhaps to Jonathan Donner’s \u0026ldquo;sliders \u0026rdquo; offering alternative perspectives to illuminate the nuances of talking about identity let alone designing for it.\nGood ID Omidyar Network has presented its view of Good ID as \u0026ldquo;empowering individuals with privacy, security, and user control, and addressing power, exclusion, discrimination, surveillance, consent, and other key issues of our time.\u0026rdquo;\nAmong a less discerning audience my immediate response would communicate wholehearted support. Here however I would also add a recommendation to augment the description of Good ID to encompass the relational, social context I have described.\nI believe Good ID must distinguish between the controlling and inherently dangerous conceptualizations of identity we label noun-like, and the contextual, agency-enhancing and psychologically safer verb-like forms. Good ID system design should emanate from the \u0026ldquo;in betweenness\u0026rdquo; of the identity, relationships, and information triarchy. Good ID co-emerges with interpersonal data.\nTo find out more, you might enjoy this webinar for the self-sovereign identity (SSI) meetup in April 2019.\nPlease do get in touch if you would like to talk in between — that would be really good.\nImage credit: boypoolrhizome, copyright Mark Ingham , reproduced with permission.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/05/good-identity-lives-in-between/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"boypoolrhizome\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/boypoolrhizome-1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten for Omidyar Network\u0026rsquo;s Good ID project and \u003ca href=\"https://www.good-id.org/en/articles/good-identity-lives-between/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efirst published to the project\u0026rsquo;s blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"good id\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/good-id.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI love the way Derek Parfit introduces his book \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eReasons and Persons\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We are particular people. I have my life to live, you have yours. What do these facts involve? What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? What is the importance of the unity of each life, and of the distinction between different lives, and different persons?”\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe more you study it, the more you realize that \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eidentity is a tricky concept\u003c/a\u003e\n to grasp. There are many different ideas to describe what it is and what it does, but Parfit\u0026rsquo;s emphasis of its innate social nature appeals to me. After all, what good can identity serve should you find yourself all alone on that fabled desert island, apart from different persons?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy identities form with others, as theirs are formed with others and with me. It\u0026rsquo;s a product of relationships.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd those relationships? They\u0026rsquo;re established and defined through interactions.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Good identity lives in between"},{"content":"\nI was delighted to accept an invitation from Alex Preukschat to host a webinar earlier this week on the topic of digital identity for SSImeetup.org . My presentation is based on the reciprocally-defining, inseparable conceptions of identity, relationships, and personal data — or interpersonal data as I like to call it after my AKASHA colleague Mihai Alisie unjumbled my previous garbled attempts to make a distinction.\nThe presentation can be downloaded as a PDF here , and can be viewed as a Slideshare and video below. Please get in touch if you want to discuss any facet, over a cup of the good stuff if you find yourself London way.\nPhoto by Sharon McCutcheon .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/04/webinar-on-identity-interpersonal-data-and-collective-minds-for-ssi-meetup/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"boy with painted face\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/boy-painted-face.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was delighted to accept an invitation from Alex Preukschat to host a webinar earlier this week on the topic of digital identity for \u003ca href=\"https://ssimeetup.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSSImeetup.org\u003c/a\u003e\n. My presentation is based on the reciprocally-defining, inseparable conceptions of identity, relationships, and personal data — or interpersonal data as I like to call it after my \u003ca href=\"https://akasha.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAKASHA\u003c/a\u003e\n colleague Mihai Alisie unjumbled my previous garbled attempts to make a distinction.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Webinar on identity, interpersonal data and collective minds for SSI Meetup"},{"content":"\nIn light of the Radical Markets book chapter entitled Data as Labor , its co-author Glen Weyl invited me to write this post for the RadicalxChange blog, published 9 Feb 2019 .\nThe RadicalxChange mission dedicates the community to “using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build widely-shared prosperity, heal global political divides and build a richer and more cooperative social life.”\nOur values are aligned and our purpose very similar, but I will describe here some important considerations in designing for personal data that may not yet have received attention by the RadicalXChange community.\nCo-operating is essential It is, I think, critical to outline the emphasis I adopt here in framing the problem and the opportunity. Whereas the RadicalxChange mission aims to have competition lead to greater co-operation, I treat competition and co-operation here as equal and concurrent. Here are two quotes by way of explanation.\nThe brilliant and indomitable biologist Lynn Margulis discovered that:\nThe view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.\nAnd the progenitor of the invisible hand himself, Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, actually considered his Theory of Moral Sentiments to be the superior work. It is, as Gintis et al write , the perfect counterbalance.\nEffective policies are those that support socially valued outcomes not only by harnessing selfish motives [Wealth of Nations / competition] to socially valued ends, but also by evoking, cultivating, and empowering public-spirited motives [Theory of Moral Sentiments / co-operation].\nI had such a blend in mind a few years ago when I had a stab at defining the meaning of business beyond the outworn credo of shareholder value and the Newtonian simplicity of customer-centricity; that is, to establish and drive mutual value creation. Competitive and co-operative.\nInformation is critical Posner and Weyl envisage viscerally different markets with the intention, as the corresponding book review in the Economist points out, “to mount an onslaught against market power.” They’re searching for new kinds of market dynamic to eradicate the inequities of existing markets.\nThis places Posner and Weyl in the company of former World Bank chief economist (and fellow Georgist ) Joseph E. Stiglitz, renowned for railing against the unfettered application of free-market ideology. He notes that “one of the reasons that the invisible hand may be invisible is that it is simply not there.” He attributes such absence in part to imperfect or indeed entirely missing information, the focus of the microeconomic field of information economics.\nEqual access to information is critical, although each of us has the agency to interpret it as we think best. You and I have our own unique situation in the world, our own private reflections on it and relations and actions within it, which leads to you and I valuing things differently. This is perfectly natural. As Posner and Weyl put it:\nPeople’s valuations are private information; the genius of the market is its capacity for disseminating this information from consumers to producers through the price system.\nInformation is transmitted. Privacy is respected. Social knowledge is created. But this market process has some serious shortcomings very pertinent to our context here …\nPrice ≠ value Cynics believe people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honourable or unselfish reasons, and an Oscar Wilde character describes a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In resisting such cynicism, George Monbiot writes that “putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all”, most apt when reflecting on the data deluge.\nSame dollar, different value Money has diminishing marginal value (the more you have, the less you value an extra dollar), and so how can price alone be welfare-maximizing? Even if you don’t subscribe to the welfarist agenda, it’s hard to ignore the implication that, as inequality rises, the price mechanism may do a worse job of allocating resources, potentially compounding rentier capitalism .\nPrice is informationally meagre Price entails massive information loss. For example, why does Alice buy at that price and yet Bob does not? Was the product available to Claire? Why did Dylan determine the product doesn’t meet his needs? How can Ellen tell if the price encompasses all the societal and environmental costs? How might Fabio have faith in the after-sales relationship?\nAnswers could be sought when markets were predominantly conversations , but financialization has obscured such insight.\nIn The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, Thomas Greco writes that the nature of money has changed profoundly over the past three centuries unbeknownst to many and that it has become an instrument for centralizing power, concentrating wealth, and subverting popular government. But it remains about as informationally meagre as ever.\nIn response, open money has been the life mission of my Digital Life Collective colleague Michael Linton. Fiat money is dissociative whereas open money is connective, relational, social. It confers no power of one over another, only one with another. Linton and Greco first defined money as “an information system we use to deploy human effort” in the Whole Earth Review of Summer 1987 , and as David Boyle notes in his book The Money Changers, open money is “primarily a function of information — providing information about value so things can be exchanged …”\nWhere conventional money flows erratically in and out of our communities, creating dependencies that are harmful to the economy, society and nature, open money designs to re-circulate to enable business and trade.\nI’m no economist — I study the nature of information not wealth — but for me, any such device that seeks to grow the informational content describing a transaction, indeed any interaction, and maintains the objective of sustainable human flourishing at its heart, is a move in the right direction. Quite simply, we need all the informational richness we can get …\nIt’s complex Stafford Beer articulates the law of requisite variety as “variety absorbs variety”. In short, this means we need as much information in the control mechanism as the system we seek to control. Complexity exhibits itself as a random mix of order and chaos, and it would be invaluable then to encourage the conditions for sufficient emergent governing to maintain a liminal systemic plateau.\nGregory Bateson used the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.\nDeleuze and Guattari In other words , “the intensity is a goal-in-itself, a situation of constant evolution and becoming in which conflict does not build, but is expressed and released.” Such a desirable dynamic requires more information than expressed in a two-for-one deal! It is impossible to sustain such systemic plateaus with little more than the acute informational paucity that is price.\nThe requisite information exchange assists a process of interaction, in its multiple variables, that produces a mutual learning context — which just happens to be the very definition Nora Bateson gives the verb form of the neologism symmathesy . Such process is so critical it warrants its own word.\nCompetitive markets may offer a simplistic mechanism for navigating complexity for finite periods, but we’re far from entertaining the end of the associated undesirable extremes. If the very concept of market can be bent to new design, we need a re-framing that embraces massively richer information flows that accommodate, inform and encourage both competition and co-operation.\n(Inter)personal data isn’t like the information we call money, nor is its interpretation akin to price. Money is comparatively simplistic. Transactional. Binary. By distinct contrast, (inter)personal data is more like the rich, varied and complex information flows present in rainforests, in oceans, in human cultures. Its value far exceeds a market price; a market price would only strangle its value.\nThe radical, systematic, information rich combination of competition and co-operation is tantalizing and reminds me of Gandhi’s provocation :\nThe difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.\nNow we just need to get that information flowing appropriately …\nThe misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of “personal data” When talking human systems and human data, it’s not long before the GDPR makes its presence felt. According to the regulation, ‘personal data’ means:\nany information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.\nThe innovation, indeed transformation, I’m talking about here is in the spirit if not the letter of the regulation. Perhaps the most prominent and simplest explanation for why it cannot be to the letter is contained in the Regulation’s first definition (Article 4 ) by which “an identified or identifiable natural person” is thereafter known as a “data subject” — entirely the wrong framing.\nMoreover, nearly all data that meets the regulation’s definition of personal relates in fact to two or more persons / parties — consider that lunch date, that genome map, those photos, that bank account. Furthermore, the person is defined by the group, and the group by its participants, so the I and the we are inseparable. Whereas current technological designs for personal data have it sitting with and transferring between nodes (individuals and organizations including mediators), I’m thinking in terms of the data defining and ‘residing’ on the edges (relationships).\nI’m looking at humans not mere data subjects. I’m looking at digital humans. I’m looking at the dignity of digital humans including their agency and privacy. And rather than each of us in isolation, I’m looking at digital humans living and working together directly and indirectly and achieving amazing things. My confrère Mihai Alisie stepped up and labelled what I am in fact looking at. Interpersonal data. And by interpersonal I’m including groups and organizations (and cyborgs!) as persons.\nA few weeks later, I introduced the concept in a series of posts on the AKASHA Foundation blog:\nThe misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of “personal data”. Metaphor defiance The title of the blog series includes reference to metaphor defiance, and here’s what I mean by that. While accepting that language is metaphor, there doesn’t appear to be a wholly useful metaphor that can apply to anything but a fragment or two of the required data architecture. It seems that there’s never been anything like personal or indeed interpersonal data. No metaphor can be extended to analogy that’s for certain.\nI’ve looked at data-as-property, data-as-labour, data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me. All are useful in learning about the nature of data, but I conclude that they’re all far from ideal, or indeed practicable, to varying degrees. Sticking too tightly to a pre-digital metaphor may not just be fruitless, it could produce more problems that it addresses. In short, there is no other way to say it other than data is unlike anything else. Data is data.\nI will address the property and labour metaphors without repeating too much from my earlier posts.\nData as property From observation, the idea that we can treat personal data as property is currently the most widely held conceptualisation of those who have given it any thought at all. The idea spreads in reaction to the growing awareness of and deep concern for the business models of the likes of Facebook and Google — so-called Surveillance Capitalism. But personal data is not property. We cannot own it like property.\nUnlike property, it isn’t rivalrous and should in fact be anti-rivalrous in many contexts (where the value is all the greater the more it’s shared around). Indeed, it is of little or no value to anyone in isolation — data needs other data to acquire the potential to become information, and information needs other information to acquire the potential to crystallize as knowledge.\nNow ask yourself, do you really own your image , or the fact that you have roots in a specific ethnic group? No. Nevertheless, you should expect not to have this information used discriminately. Your image is one thing; its capture, analysis and association with your identity (facial recognition) is quite another, let alone the actual application of such information. Asserting that data isn’t property doesn’t mean you relinquish all agency over it, but it does mean that “control” is the wrong way to think about it — such control cannot scale .\nIn aiming for brevity, here are two visceral conclusions on the subject. Martin Tisné argues that the idea of data ownership is a category error with pernicious consequences, and the European Data Protection Supervisor dislikes these consequences so intensely it likens a market for personal data to a market for live human organs. Personal data is not property, and we shouldn’t even try to treat it like property.\nData as labour On the face of it, the connection between data-as-labour and data-as-property is easily made.\nA market is a system for the exchange of goods and services, including labour. One can only offer for exchange that which one owns, and one owns one’s labour. These are different types of ownership — owning a tractor and the crops it helps nurture is different from owning the very hands that operate the tractor for example — but if this distinction is irrelevant, data-as-labour very quickly looks like a rebadging of data-as-property replete with its fatal flaws.\nRadical Markets grapples with a closely related poverty of outcome in a different context. Our current property ownership paradigm is predicated on the Lockean labour theory of property whereby property originally comes into being by labouring on natural resources. Were you first to labour the land? Yes, then that land is yours. As the Property is Monopoly chapter points out, this has led to some stubbornly unfair outcomes. We shouldn’t then pursue anything that looks like a ‘data labour theory of property’.\nNevertheless, philosophical theories of labour, of work, do imbue such activities with different meaning. I don’t discuss these at length in my three blog posts because, well, they’re blog posts not a doctoral thesis. I offer up more detail here by pointing you to last year’s DECODE project report Data-driven disruptive commons-based models (pp25–36), which presents a thorough yet reasonably accessible deeper dive into the labour aspects of the digital economy. The report concludes that the conception of data-as-labour with which the RadicalxMarket community is familiar denies “the intrinsically collective dimension of value and wealth created by Internet users through their interactions in a network economy.”\nThis corresponds to two points I raised earlier. First, collective and network economy accord with my stressing co-operation not just competition. Second, value tallies with my assertion that the potential here far exceeds a market price. The data and algorithmically-derived insights are the product of commons, of community, and the challenge then is to have that value circulate back into the community (quoting Casilli 2015), which should remind you of the intention for open money of course.\nIf you want to continue to think in terms of labour, perhaps co-operative labour is more apt. And there is no labour market so to speak because such co-operation is non-rivalrous, and indeed likely anti-rivalrous. It is in fact not too distant from some of the original hopes and dreams for the societal contribution of the Internet and World Wide Web.\nInterpersonal data — decentralized by nature In a blog post for the World Wide Web foundation, I describe decentralization as a deep cause of causes you care about deeply.\nThe ultimate information technology challenge is the care and maintenance of a digital infrastructure that can help us rise up to so-called super wicked problems, collectively. Given the growing appreciation of the nature of complexity and the complexity of nature, we know we’re in the domain of systems thinking and sustainability — the health and resilience of living systems including our planet, our societies, and our organisations.\nSustainability requires healthy, distributed networks, with both diversity and individual agency, to facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence. It is these qualities our digital technologies must enable and encourage.\nWhen considering the sociotechnical architecture for personal data — to create socially valued outcomes from the digitalized flux of our living, labouring, learning, creating, co-operating, competing — we can contemplate a design along the lines of the oligopolistic mediated status quo, or a design that requires, encourages and supports decentralization. It’s clear which of these I work on and why.\nTo me, the goal of initiatives such as The Data Union , as well-intentioned as it may be, is defensive rather than creative, constraining rather than liberating. Unfortunately, if they are successful in unionizing users of the major digital platforms, they might well help lock-in this very early status quo in commercial terms making the exploration of alternative more valuable and, I would argue, existentially necessary constructs all the more challenging. The more attention we pay to architectures that effectively respect the binary simplicity of them-and-us — of gargantuan data corporates .v. individuals — the harder it will be to seed and nurture what I would describe as a more natural design. We may well find ourselves with the mother of all Nash equilibria.\nThe situation shares much in common with the current trajectory for data-driven agriculture. When the collation and sense-making of farming data is in the hands of a few powerful IT companies, every farmer becomes a tenant farmer whether or not they managed to secure some ‘compensation’ in the process. (I’m involved in a project engineering an alternative to this otherwise inevitable outcome — do get in touch if this is your field, pun intended.)\nInterpersonal data architecture is neither individualistic nor collectivized. The data surrounds us at all scales, nesting and interpenetrating, privacy-preserving and socially meaningful. ‘Intelligence’ is invited to the data rather than have the data go to the ‘intelligence’. It is distributed and disintermediating. And it is about mutual value creation not property rights.\nI feel I know what the authors of Radical Markets and Jaron Lanier (who discussed the data-as-labor idea in 2013) are striving for, but it appears we have different ideas for exactly what and exactly how. Nevertheless, all dissonance offers potential resolution, and perhaps that might entail taking the subject of the data chapter deeper so to speak, amplifying the potency of the other chapters in the process, and those yet to be written.\nFor a start, we share a desire to locate our designs somewhere between the extremes of fanatical individuality and the total subjugation of the individual in favour of the collective. It feels to me that this is compatible with the majority view, at least in terms of the European cultures with which I’m most familiar.\nAs Hitzig and Weyl write in a recent paper :\n… Radical Markets are not based on welfarist values, nor are they in pursuit of a wholly individualistic notion of autonomy. … Radical Markets are both means and ends to fostering dynamic collectives and individual freedom to move about them, securing a greater degree of equality and a greater diversity and depth of collective organization than today’s standard capitalist institutions could bring about.\nThey continue:\n… Radical Markets is far from fully instantiating these ideas, and even contrasts with them in some ways. For example, the primarily individualistic focus of [the chapter on] Data as Labor is in tension with the above ideas.\nThe cause of this tension is to be found I think in locating the challenge and opportunity of personal data on the wrong ontological plane. We can change the plane and relieve the tension. If ontologies aren’t your thing, I can translate this as:\nMarkets don’t transform personal data so much as interpersonal data transform markets.\nIn effect, personal data shouldn’t just sit in or on a market. Interpersonal data moves underneath the market (or indeed an expansion of what might be considered a market as discussed above).\nAKASHA We believe that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. This is why we nurture projects helping individuals amplify their potential through open systems that expand our collective mind at local, regional and global scales.\nThe first sentence of the AKASHA Foundation purpose statement is taken from Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations . The technical architecture for interpersonal data (when we get there) will extend innately to all human systems not just markets, expanding both individual agency and the emergence of a new home of mind . Well that’s the plan anyway!\nOur labour, and our work, and our actions (per the human condition ) enable and fuel the transformation and revitalization of markets. Radical.\nPhoto by Sagar .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/02/the-interpersonal-data-at-the-heart-of-all-human-digital-systems-including-markets/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The ecosystem of a coral reef\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/photo_by_sagar.jpeg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn light of the \u003ca href=\"http://radicalmarkets.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eRadical Markets\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n book chapter entitled \u003ca href=\"http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/data-as-labor/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eData as Labor\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n, its co-author Glen Weyl invited me to write this post for the RadicalxChange blog, \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/radicalxchange/the-interpersonal-data-at-the-heart-of-all-human-digital-systems-including-markets-6316701184a9\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epublished 9 Feb 2019\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe RadicalxChange \u003ca href=\"https://radicalxchange.org/about/#core-values\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003emission\u003c/a\u003e\n dedicates the community to “using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build widely-shared prosperity, heal global political divides and build a richer and more cooperative social life.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur values are aligned and our purpose very similar, but I will describe here some important considerations in designing for personal data that may not yet have received attention by the RadicalXChange community.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"co-operating-is-essential\"\u003eCo-operating is essential\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is, I think, critical to outline the emphasis I adopt here in framing the problem and the opportunity. Whereas the RadicalxChange mission aims to have competition lead to greater co-operation, I treat competition and \u003ca href=\"https://link.medium.com/t1kZY8xcaU\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eco-operation\u003c/a\u003e\n here as equal and concurrent. Here are two quotes by way of explanation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe brilliant and indomitable biologist Lynn Margulis \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eo_sMMRxgAUC\u0026amp;lpg=PP1\u0026amp;dq=Margulis%20and%20Sagan%2CMicrocosmos%2C\u0026amp;pg=PA28#v=onepage\u0026amp;q\u0026amp;f=false\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ediscovered\u003c/a\u003e\n that:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the progenitor of the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003einvisible hand\u003c/a\u003e\n himself, Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, actually \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lODx6lH3EaMC\u0026amp;lpg=PP1\u0026amp;dq=Rae%2C%20John%20%281895%29.%20Life%20of%20Adam%20Smith.\u0026amp;pg=PA436#v=onepage\u0026amp;q\u0026amp;f=false\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003econsidered\u003c/a\u003e\n his Theory of Moral Sentiments to be the superior work. It is, as Gintis et al \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jsVpDIIGzQoC\u0026amp;lpg=PA4\u0026amp;ots=4CpZRe5lJK\u0026amp;dq=adam%20smith%20%22Effective%20policies%20are%20those%20that%20support%20socially%20valued%22\u0026amp;pg=PA4#v=onepage\u0026amp;q\u0026amp;f=false\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewrite\u003c/a\u003e\n, the perfect counterbalance.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEffective policies are those that support socially valued outcomes not only by harnessing selfish motives [Wealth of Nations / competition] to socially valued ends, but also by evoking, cultivating, and empowering public-spirited motives [Theory of Moral Sentiments / co-operation].\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI had such a blend in mind a few years ago when I had a stab at defining \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@sheldrake/the-meaning-of-business-c40f125379ed\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe meaning of business\u003c/a\u003e\n beyond the outworn credo of shareholder value and the Newtonian simplicity of customer-centricity; that is, to establish and drive mutual value creation. Competitive and co-operative.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets"},{"content":"\nIn the first post of this series I asserted that data is data. In other words, it\u0026rsquo;s not like anything else. The second post explored and dismissed conceptualisations of data-as-property and data-as-labour. This, the last post in this series, explores data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, and then points to some architectural principles for a new direction — interpersonal data.\nThe problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem Data-as-reputation Rachel Botsman discusses reputation scoring in her book What\u0026rsquo;s Mine Is Yours (check your library ), and summarises the opportunity in a later magazine article:\nImagine a world where banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan; where headhunters hire you based on the expertise you\u0026rsquo;ve demonstrated on online forums such as Quora; where your status from renting a house through Airbnb helps you become a trusted car renter on WhipCar; where your feedback on eBay can be used to get a head-start selling on Etsy; where traditional business cards are replaced by profiles of your digital trustworthiness, updated in real-time. Where reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can\u0026rsquo;t be trusted.\nWelcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.\n\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.\nThe most basic level is verification of your true identity \u0026ndash; is this person a real person? Are they who they say they are?\nRachel Botsman, Wired Magazine There is nothing to dislike about the advantages touched upon here. Unfortunately, like most things in life, the upsides come with downsides.\nProgrammatic quantification of reputation is an inevitable evil due to the unavoidable self-moderation and modulation it inflicts on its subjects beyond that which might be argued as \u0026lsquo;good for society\u0026rsquo;. To be clear, the social accretion of local, contextually relevant reputation with forgiving opportunities for reparation has served communities for millennia. We are however considering universal, non-contextual and irremediable scoring and algorithmic assessment. Mix in a naïve conceptualization of identity, as inferred by the final paragraph of the quote above, and we will have excluded from society anyone for whom identification is a question of personal safety, and shackled the very psychological change processes we all experience and rely upon.\nContext is a keyword. I want to know if Alice is trustworthy to drive me safely from A to B. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t care less if she\u0026rsquo;s up on her mortgage payments, or has been dropping litter (I do care about that generally, but not in this context), or has been \u0026lsquo;dutifully\u0026rsquo; supportive of the current government, which of course would be an abhorrent context here and one we must ensure we don\u0026rsquo;t engender accidentally. The introduction to Botsman\u0026rsquo;s latest book, Who Can You Trust? (check your library ), does describe such an emerging system as this in China as Orwellian, and warns that we\u0026rsquo;re creating \u0026ldquo;reputation trails where one mistake or misdemeanour could follow us potentially for the rest of our lives.\u0026rdquo;\nSome may think the GDPR limits such poor outcomes, but the regulation does not give anyone the right to an explanation of automated decision-making for example, and when algorithms feed other algorithms in complicated sequence with dashes of machine learning for good measure, with its inevitable biases , a black box can be just as opaque to its operators as to those on whom it operates.\nWe change ourselves, consciously and subconsciously, when we know we\u0026rsquo;re a subject of gaze — witness the \u0026lsquo;selfie-generation \u0026rsquo;, poor bastards. And in fact, if only a small coterie gets to set the associated algorithms, there is a massive potential abuse of power .\nPEN America, an organization that exists to protect open expression in literature and related arts, reported in 2013 that writers are engaging in self-censorship directly attributable to their concerns about government surveillance, a system that inevitably \u0026lsquo;scores\u0026rsquo; its subjects. Approximately a quarter of writers surveyed had curtailed or avoided social media and had deliberately avoided certain topics in phone and email conversations, and that\u0026rsquo;s before the current President\u0026rsquo;s Orwellian attacks on the media .\nIf you resist censorship, it seems you must also resist reputation scoring.\nFortunately, we\u0026rsquo;re not actually interested in reputation per se, only as a proxy for trustworthiness and accountability. With some forethought we can engineer our way around these challenges and avoid a Nosedive . I suspect the architecture will resemble the past in terms of our having to re-engineer appropriate contextual and social frictions.\nData-as-public-good The title of Mariana Mazzucato\u0026rsquo;s latest book strikes at the heart of my focus here — The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. The book revisits her previous work, noting how much of the technology underpinning the success of the dominant digital companies today was actually funded by the state, e.g. the Internet, GPS, the touchscreen, voice activation. She then expands on her grievance:\nFacebook\u0026rsquo;s and Google\u0026rsquo;s business models are built on the commodification of personal data, transforming through the alchemy of a two-sided market our friendships, interests, beliefs, and preferences into sellable propositions.\nMariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy , (check your library )\nMazzucato believes the public should own its own data, not merely with the possibility of selling it to the tech giants, but also to allow the public to have more collective agency over its collective application for public benefit. She is not a technologist so does not expand on the technical architecture that might be required beyond namechecking big data and artificial intelligence. As an economist she is considerably more cogent in criticising the application of neoclassical economics to personal data, the reduction of value to a market price, the market\u0026rsquo;s inability to distinguish between value creation and value extraction, and a dedication to the latter leading ultimately to value destruction.\nAs Mazzucato concludes in an accompanying article:\nOnly by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We\u0026rsquo;re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there\u0026rsquo;s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it\u0026rsquo;s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators.\nMariana Mazzucato, Technology Review Viktor Mayer-Schönberger advocates a \u0026ldquo;progressive data-sharing mandate\u0026rdquo;.\n\u0026hellip; regulators wanting to ensure competitive markets should mandate the sharing of data. To this end, economists Jens Prüfer and Christoph Schottmüller offer an intriguing idea . They suggest that large players using feedback data [essential to machine learning] must share such data (stripped of obvious personal identifiers, and stringently ensuring that privacy is not being unduly compromised) with their competitors.\n\u0026hellip; Building on this idea, we suggest what we term a progressive data-sharing mandate. It would kick in once a company\u0026rsquo;s market share reaches an initial threshold \u0026mdash; say, 10 percent. It would then have to share a randomly chosen portion of its feedback data with every other player in the same market that requests it.\nViktor Mayer-Schönberger, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (check your library )\nAcademics such as Mazzucato and Mayer-Schönberger see a deeper and perhaps higher value in personal data than they believe the market can realise.\nSimilarly, in Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy (check your library ), Professors Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke argue that today\u0026rsquo;s dominant players are in fact now freed from the market\u0026rsquo;s invisible hand. Indeed, one Silicon Valley businessman, Peter Thiel, considers this an aspirational outcome when he spouts that \u0026ldquo;competition is for losers\u0026rdquo;.\nOn reading a draft of this post, Elizabeth Renieris noted that the role of regulatory frameworks, such as antitrust laws, shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be under-appreciated. They are core to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger\u0026rsquo;s outlook. In a subsequent conversation we noted that antitrust principles are founded on ensuring consumer benefit through competition. They typically focus on acts of monopolizing behaviour rather than monopolies per se, where there is an actual or potential consumer detriment. Many could argue however that the main centralizing, data-hoarding companies have provided consumer benefit rather than detriment, dismissing mere \u0026lsquo;philosophical\u0026rsquo; concerns as raised here in the process. It seems the application of such regulatory frameworks will first require their revision, as indeed is under review in Europe — this 2016 Franco/German study on Competition Law and data for example.\nIn conclusion, I share the academics\u0026rsquo; concerns, but at the end of the day market regulators can only regulate markets, and markets are dedicated to property ownership. The second post in this series already dismissed data-as-property.\nData-as-me In 2005, Professor Luciano Floridi pointed out that personal-data-as-property completely fails to resolve some very real privacy concerns. Information contamination for example, where our privacy is invaded by junkmail and loud and intrusive chatter. In public contexts in which privacy norms still exist without any concept of ownership — the right not to have the contents of your packed lunch logged even though you eat it in plain sight for example. And perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the data-as-property view of the world as noted in my previous post — it\u0026rsquo;s non-rivalrous.\nFloridi offers up an alternative:\nInformational privacy requires radical re-interpretation, one that takes into account the essentially informational nature of human beings and of their operations as informational social agents. Such re-interpretation is achieved by considering each person as constituted by his or her information, and hence by understanding a breach of one\u0026rsquo;s informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one\u0026rsquo;s personal identity.\nProfessor Luciano Floridi After all, we call a type of privacy transgression identity theft. He observes that digital technologies must then be developed to allow individuals the opportunity:\n\u0026hellip; to design, shape and maintain their identities as informational agents. \u0026hellip; [and that] collecting, storing, reproducing, manipulating etc. one\u0026rsquo;s information amounts now to stages in stealing, cloning or breeding someone else\u0026rsquo;s personal identity.\n\u0026hellip; one\u0026rsquo;s informational sphere and one\u0026rsquo;s personal identity are co-referential, or two sides of the same coin. \u0026lsquo;You are your information\u0026rsquo;, so anything done to your information is done to you, not to your belongings.\nThis is an exciting vista. Nevertheless, it requires some modification in the wei spirit (see the first post in this series) to encourage the emergence of collective intelligence and our anti-rivalrous flourishing.\nHow might we realise this value while respecting personal dignity and agency? Indeed while respecting personal privacy, because what agency can anyone be said to have if they cannot maintain personally desired and contextually appropriate privacy?\nWith some hope of bringing this three post series to a conclusion, I can at least aspire to identify some qualifying architectural principles.\nInterpersonal data architectural principles Humans, not data subjects You and I are not mere data subjects. Data is now integral to what it means to be human.\nAll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights This is the first part of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , and harks back to Thomas Jefferson\u0026rsquo;s immortal declaration . It must be a core principle here of course.\nInterpersonal, not personal This principle was presented in the first post of this series, so I won\u0026rsquo;t repeat the explanation here.\nEdge-centric, not node-centric If you accept the reframing in terms of interpersonal data, then architecturally the locus of our attention is shifted from the nodes to the edges.\nData is data No pre-existing conceptualisation or metaphor can be ported to our needs here, and definitely not one based on a property paradigm. So wave goodbye to words such as my in the context of data ownership. But not I, me and we in combination — or indeed wei.\nAgency, not control Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place. \u0026hellip; To be able to \u0026lsquo;act otherwise\u0026rsquo; means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.\nAnthony Giddens Agency entails a negotiation in and with the world that the word control appears to deny.\nSociologists appreciate that agency is unevenly distributed. Subscribing to a humanist emancipatory ideal dedicated to human flourishing on top of a natural self-interest in nurturing resilient living systems, one might want for digital technologies and services to expand agency on the whole, attenuate pre-digital constraints, and potentially spread it around a little more evenly.\nSupport posthumanism Human beings are, of course, prioritised here over other person types (e.g. corporates), and it is worth then considering what we mean by human being in the digital age, specifically our digital augmentation as touched upon in the first post when defining person. Norbert Wiener anticipated this informational, cyber extension of ourselves way back in 1950!\n\u0026hellip; where a man\u0026rsquo;s word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere.\nNorbert Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings Two thirds of a century later it seems almost timid to (re)define the human as biological, psychological, social, informational (i.e. \u0026lsquo;personal data\u0026rsquo;, per Floridi, and interpersonal data), and interfacial (the application of information for the self-sovereign sense-making of information, per the hi:project ).\nIn terms of the three levels of detachment referred to at the top of the first post in this series, Floridi observes that information technologies enhance the corporeal membrane, empower the cognitive membrane, and extend the consciousness membrane, but I would go further. The informational and interfacial aspects of the human being may weaken the individualising effects of Floridi\u0026rsquo;s three membranes by casting new complementary wei-shaped ones. Once again, we\u0026rsquo;re surveying a landscape first identified decades ago:\nGregory Bateson has clearly shown that what he calls the \u0026rsquo;ecology of ideas\u0026rsquo; cannot be contained within the domain of the psychology of the individual, but organizes itself into systems or \u0026lsquo;minds\u0026rsquo;, the boundaries of which no longer coincide with the participant individuals.\nFelix Guattari, The Three Ecologies The concept of mind may be considered a consequence of our being social animals rather than just what\u0026rsquo;s in here [taps skull]. Conceptualisations of cognition encompass the very digitally-enabled information flows that are our focus here, enabling embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition.\nDifferences, not absolutes Given Bateson\u0026rsquo;s definition of information as a difference that makes a difference, it would seem a little unnecessary to include this architectural principle. Nevertheless, it\u0026rsquo;s worth noting the broader potential value of focusing on difference in the positive rather than negative (i.e. A minus B) sense.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re all human. We\u0026rsquo;re also all now on one worldwide network, and we need to keep that human too. Nothing is more human than our differences — not only from each other, but from our former selves, even from moment to moment and context to context.\nDoc Searls [This new era] ushers in the concept that difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That technology is not separate but part of the body. That dependence, not individual independence, is the rule.\n\u0026hellip; Form follows dysfunction.\nLennard J. Davis Rhizomes, not trees Deleuze and Guattari use the word rhizome to describe theory that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. They define it negatively in good part as not hierarchical, not tree-like. This is an important assertion given how frequently tree-like metaphors pepper our sciences, computing, and social constructions.\n\u0026hellip; unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature \u0026hellip; The rhizome is reducible to neither the One nor the multiple. \u0026hellip; It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. \u0026hellip; Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions \u0026hellip; the rhizome is made only of lines. \u0026hellip; In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, non-signifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.\nDeleuze and Guattari Cache, not facsimile A cache is a store of data solely for the purpose of serving future requests for that data faster. Caching is integral to IPFS for example. On the other hand, I use facsimile here in the sense of a mere copy of lesser import than the master record. You may have a facsimile of your bank account transactions for example, but you would never expect your bank to refer to your copy of events.\nNote that the data is rendered into information — into valuable, actionable insight — when data flows in combination. Flow does not require static facsimile. Combination does not require isolated facsimile. Moreover, facsimile will by definition never be master. I contend then that the concept generally known as personal data store (also vault or wallet) is redundant before it\u0026rsquo;s even made its way into the world. Rather, we need insight into where interpersonal data is flowing and for what purposes and with what consequences, entailing an interface into and onto the permissions and flows.\nUltimately, if we get this right, your bank\u0026rsquo;s cloud (should they continue to maintain one, and should banks continue to be necessary to banking) will be the facsimile.\nInformation is simply complex We are dealing with a phenomenon here that appears atomistically simple but in fact forms, informs and infects everything. It\u0026rsquo;s the original complex. Identity is information. Relationships is information. Reputation is information. Exchange is information. Organizing is information. Life is information. We should then proceed with due caution — ethically and technically. Ethically, we need to take appropriate time for due diligence. Ethically, we cannot delay and allow the data-as-property protagonists time to establish the mother of all Nash equilibria.\nPlease get in touch A human being\u0026rsquo;s subjectivity (our biases when it comes to perceiving and assessing reality) may continue to emphasise itself, by which I mean over-emphasise its self, but the rate at which information technologies transform the interconnecting and interdepending is considerably greater than in the context of the self alone — because that\u0026rsquo;s what information technologies do.\nWe are each conscious as evolution has rendered sufficient complexity for such phenomena to arise. The complexity in which we are bound may not (yet) be conscious, but it is nevertheless inseparable. As we co-engineer sufficient complexity in the flow of interpersonal data, we may develop the ecology of mind required for a step change in wei\u0026rsquo;s intelligence, and perhaps its consciousness. Our co-development of regenerative planetary systems may depend on it, and so the survival of our species and others.\nAre you a like or dislike mind? Please do get in touch.\nThis post, the final in a series of three, was first published to the AKASHA blog , and is also on Medium .\nImage 1 by Gratisography . Image 2 by Sergey Yurkov . Image 3 by Luboš Plný .\nTo the point made in the first post, I cannot thank a thousand interlocutors, and their thousand interlocutors. But I can thank those who commented on the drafting of these posts: Tony Fish , Elizabeth Renieris , Mihai Alisie , Martin Etzrodt , Andrei Sambra , Adrian Gropper , Christina Bowen , Roy Brooks , John Grant , Jim Pasquale , Sergio Maldonado , Marc Lauritsen , Joel Doerfel , Rui Vale .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data-part-3-of-3/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/abstract-art-bright-134_1024.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data/\"\u003efirst post\u003c/a\u003e\n of this series I asserted that data is data. In other words, it\u0026rsquo;s not like anything else. The \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data-part-2-of-3/\"\u003esecond post\u003c/a\u003e\n explored and dismissed conceptualisations of data-as-property and data-as-labour. This, the last post in this series, explores data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, and then points to some architectural principles for a new direction — interpersonal data.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-problem-of-the-way-we-frame-the-opportunity-and-problem\"\u003eThe problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"data-as-reputation\"\u003eData-as-reputation\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRachel Botsman discusses reputation scoring in her book \u003cem\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s Mine Is Yours\u003c/em\u003e (\u003ca href=\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/whats-mine-is-yours-how-collaborative-consumption-is-changing-the-way-we-live/oclc/1018435478\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003echeck your library\u003c/a\u003e\n), and summarises the opportunity in a later magazine article:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImagine a world where banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan; where headhunters hire you based on the expertise you\u0026rsquo;ve demonstrated on online forums such as Quora; where your status from renting a house through Airbnb helps you become a trusted car renter on WhipCar; where your feedback on eBay can be used to get a head-start selling on Etsy; where traditional business cards are replaced by profiles of your digital trustworthiness, updated in real-time. Where reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can\u0026rsquo;t be trusted.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWelcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most basic level is verification of your true identity \u0026ndash; is this person a real person? Are they who they say they are?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.co.uk/article/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRachel Botsman, Wired Magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is nothing to dislike about the advantages touched upon here. Unfortunately, like most things in life, the upsides come with downsides.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of \"personal data\" — part 3 of 3"},{"content":"\nIn the preceding post I proposed that reframing personal data as interpersonal data is much more appropriate, more useful, more valuable. I also asserted that data is data — i.e. not like anything else. To support these points, this post explores and dismisses the dominant conceptualisation of personal data as property, and then reviews the less well-known data-as-labour framing.\nThe problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem Data-as-property Let\u0026rsquo;s linger a while on markets and the fundamental components of money and property. I\u0026rsquo;m working on the supposition that cryptonetworking may be integral to a future interpersonal data architecture, and given that Bitcoin is the genesis of cryptonetworking, it\u0026rsquo;s doubly instructive to reflect on money.\nMoney is attributed value, but value is far deeper and broader than the mere monetary sense — in the money can\u0026rsquo;t buy you love sense for example. Nevertheless, our current civilization is monotheistic in its veneration of the market, and our first inclinations when grappling with any shiny new idea is to see if we can\u0026rsquo;t quantify its value and subject it to the manipulations of Adam Smith\u0026rsquo;s invisible hand. Despite quite substantial evidence to the contrary, our idolatry of this mechanism truly marks it out as a religion imho.\nSometimes free markets work best. Sometimes well-regulated markets work best. Sometimes, markets don\u0026rsquo;t work best.\nThe vast majority of our digital interactions are mediated by for-profit entities operating in markets. This means for example:\nIf you are not paying for it, you\u0026rsquo;re not the customer; you\u0026rsquo;re the product being sold.\nAndrew Lewis, MetaFilter, 2010 This isn’t peculiar to the digital age. The earliest statement of this ilk that I can find dates back to 1973:\nThe product of television, commercial television, is the audience. Television delivers people to an advertiser.\nRichard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People, 1973 Nevertheless, digital media pervade our lives in ways that make television seem simply quaint; the consequences are incomparable.\nMotivated in part by the recent parametric shift of regulation, there are more than a few parties out there looking to help you “take back control” of your data and monetise it. For example:\nBitclave “blockchain-based decentralized marketplace” Databook “control and monetize your data” Datacoup “sell your anonymous data for real, cold hard cash” Datawallet “get paid when you share your data” Datum “monetize your digital life” Enigma “users can collectively and independently monetize their data” Hu-manity “participate in the human data marketplace” Madana “market for data analysis” Metame “enrich your life with your data” Opiria “earn money with your data” People.io \u0026ldquo;connect with the value of your data\u0026rdquo; PikcioChain “the monetized personal data marketplace” Sun “for data ownership and privacy … and monetization” Truth Data Cloud “Your data. Rewarded” The rationale appears straightforward. Some high-profile companies have generated significant revenues and accrued substantial market values from developing products and services that create, harvest, and process personal data. The market has therefore awarded personal data monetary value, and if we now get the kind of control over it a regulation such as the GDPR requires, then we can own it and sell it.\nData is the new oil.\nClive Humby Ka-ching!\nExcept that oil is rivalrous (its consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers), whereas data is naturally non-rivalrous and quite possibly anti-rivalrous in some contexts (where the value is all the greater the more it\u0026rsquo;s shared around). Moreover, do you really own the light reflected from your face , or the fact that you have roots in a specific ethnic group? No. Nevertheless, you should expect not to have this information used discriminately. Light reflected is one thing; its analysis and association with your identity (facial recognition) is quite another, let alone the actual application of such information.\nMany of these \u0026ldquo;monetize your data\u0026rdquo; projects have been inspired by Project VRM , albeit with the urgency of a corresponding business model not necessarily integral to the VRM (vendor relationship management) vision. VRM tools are customers’ counterpart to vendors’ customer relationship management (CRM) systems. VRM tools give customers greater control; as the sub-title of the book The Intention Economy puts it, it’s When Customers Take Charge. With such tools:\n\u0026hellip; liberated customers enjoy full agency for themselves and employ agents who respect and apply the powers that customers grant them.\nDoc Searls, The Intention Economy , 2012 (check your library )\nVRM calls the customer the first party. The second party is the vendor. The third party is vendor-driven, and on the vendor’s side. The fourth party is customer-driven, and on the customer’s side. And while the fourth party tools have been labelled customertech, we can generalise the role beyond that of customer to, say, citizen, or any role the individual might occupy. In his book, Doc places significant emphasis on personal agency, albeit still in the context of markets if only to catalyse a market response somehow.\nAgency is personal. It is the source of confidence behind all intention. By its nature, the networked marketplace welcomes full agency for customers.\nDespite such clues, too many have constrained their imaginations, ignored agency, and jumped on the monetize-your-data train. I was similarly guilty on writing The Business of Influence nearly a decade ago.\nDoc had previously co-authored The Cluetrain — way back in 1999 — and despite self-quoting in The Intention Economy, too many it seems do not see beyond a binary world of big organizations and little people connected by market transactions.\nFor thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. … Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.\nThe Cluetrain And if that wasn’t a big enough hint, this last year:\nLooking at VRM or customertech [market] opportunities through the prism of data is to borrow tarnished optics from exactly the creatures and systems [advertising tech] we don’t want in the room to start out with if we’re going to do this thing right.\nDoc Searls, ProjectVRM mailing list Yet just when we begin to contemplate the miserable failure a market for personal data represents, it can go lower still. Where there are transactions in the world of finance, there is securitization — it is part and parcel of the financialization at Capitalism’s extreme. There is a nascent Political Action Committee (PAC ) in the US dedicated to this assertion:\nEvery place that data is transacted, is an opportunity to index. And every index is an opportunity for securitization and risk management.\nJames Felton Keith John Stuart Mill, the 19th Century British philosopher and political economist, worried that capitalism’s pressure to accumulate money could lead to a “tyranny of conformity”, a resignation that an improved system couldn’t be found. He feared the middle classes in the US and other countries had succumbed to such conformity, displaying:\n\u0026hellip; a general indifference to those kinds of knowledge and mental culture which cannot be immediately converted into pounds, shillings and pence.\nJohn Stuart Mill And here we remain. Conforming. Compliant. Wondering if there might be a better way.\nThe securitization of personal data is wholly unlike any fabric of a co-operative and civilized society I recognise or wish to help build. Do we really want to reduce this fantastical digital facility to a question of data ownership and market participation? Seriously, is that the best we can do? We need to design a resistance to the siren calls of the market in favour of something more valuable.\nShouldn\u0026rsquo;t we raise questions of identity and agency and collective intelligence and ethics rather than securitization and markets? Should we not strive to offer and derive unquantifiable value in all combination of wonderful variety and purpose rather than construct a simplistic mechanism by which someone might package up the personal data equivalent of a collateralized debt obligation ?\nThere might well be a market for personal data, just like there is, tragically, a market for live human organs, but that does not mean that we can or should give that market the blessing of legislation. One cannot monetise and subject a fundamental right to a simple commercial transaction, even if it is the individual concerned by the data who is a party to the transaction.\nThe European Data Protection Supervisor, 2017 Human rights — in stark contrast to property rights — are universal, indivisible, and inalienable. They attach to each of us individually as humans, cannot be divided into sticks in a bundle, and cannot be surrendered, transferred, or sold. \u0026hellip; While they may be codified or legally recognized by external sources when protected through constitutional or international laws, they exist independent of such legal documents. The property law paradigm for data ownership loses sight of these intrinsic rights that may attach to our data. Just because something is property-like, does not mean that it is — or that it should be — subject to property law.\nElizabeth M. Renieris The venture capital mindset inevitably perceives a data marketplace in terms of providing economic incentive for the more efficient allocation of data. But efficiency is merely first order, transactional. Effectiveness is second order, transformational. That didn’t stop one VC firm running the numbers though, concluding that even the mighty Facebook only manages to make your account worth about twenty bucks per annum.\nHow much is that six cents a day worth to you? Is it sufficient remuneration to allow others to continue construction of their ‘data doubles ’ of you, designed to answer their questions about you more efficiently to varying degrees of (in)accuracy, eroding your agency in the process?\nNo.\nInterestingly, Professor Alex Pentland writes:\nSocial physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.\nAlex Pentland, Wired Magazine Pentland has also mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data.\nPersonal data isn’t money as we know it. Simplistic. Transactional. Binary. It is more akin to the rich, varied and complex information flows present in rainforests, in oceans, in human cultures. It is worth a lot more than six cents a day when markets don’t reduce it and its application to a mere transactional exchange. At the very moment we might conceive an awesome, distributed and continuous crystallization of collective knowledge, the signalling known as price entails monumental information loss and inevitable consequential inequalities.\nIf anything, rather than reducing personal data to mere money at such great loss, we might elevate money.\nVery few people realize that the nature of money has changed profoundly over the past three centuries, or that it has become a political instrument used to centralize power, concentrate wealth, and subvert popular government. \u0026hellip; a fundamental change in the way we mediate the exchange of goods and services [is required to] shift from elite rule based on command and control hierarchies and military force to a more inclusive, participatory, just, harmonious, and sustainable order.\nThe End of Money and the Future of Civilization , Thomas Greco, 2009 (check your library )\nData-as-labour Jaron Lanier describes the thinking behind data-as-labour:\nIt’s magic that you can upload a phrase in Spanish into the cloud services of companies like Google or Microsoft, and a workable, if imperfect, translation to English is returned. It’s as if there’s a polyglot artificial intelligence residing up there in the great cloud server farms.\nBut that is not how cloud services work. Instead, a multitude of examples of translations made by real human translators are gathered over the Internet. These are correlated with the example you send for translation. It will almost always turn out that multiple previous translations by real human translators had to contend with similar passages, so a collage of those previous translation will yield a usable result.\n… With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment.\nJaron Lanier,Who Owns the Future? (check your library )\nAnd given that labour is sold and bought in markets:\nIn the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value, will be due to the person. … A market economy should not just be about ‘businesses,’ but about everyone who contributes value.\nTo be clear, Lanier sees some folly here. Nevertheless, he takes it seriously enough to return to the topic in a recent jointly authored paper — Should We Treat Data as Labor? — framed in terms of popular concern for employment and income distribution in this digital age.\nIt’s distinguished from the current model:\nIssue Current model Data as labour Ownership Corporate Individual Incentives Entrepreneurship “Ordinary” contributions Future of work Universal Basic Income Data work Source of self-esteem Beyond work Digital dignity Social contract Free services for free data Countervailing power to create data labor market This work’s value is in the questions it asks, but not in its answers. Here’s what’s wrong.\nData-as-labour is effectively a rebadging of data as property — one owns one\u0026rsquo;s labour after all. Labour is remunerated based on time and/or output at a market value. Here, the value is contingent on factors way beyond any conceptualization of work that I know. The shoehorning simply serves to connect the treatment of personal and similar data to concerns for the impact on employment of all variety of digital technologies, not least artificial intelligence. That might be honourable, but it’s also tenuous at best.\nMoreover, it seems I must privatise the value of my data if others privatise the value derived thereof. The authors justify this on the basis that artificial intelligence is centralized, but it need not be of course. They also assume that price remains the best way to signal and derive value in this context, yet perhaps we should test other options before reaching such a conclusion.\nFinally, while the authors acknowledge an inevitable decline in value (after a while, yet another human translation adds next to nothing to the accuracy of the cloud translation service), they don’t acknowledge that Deepmind’s AlphaGo Zero has been teaching itself without human-originated data .\nThe question remains, is there a better way to frame “personal data”?\nThe third and final post explores the conceptualisations of data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, before pointing to some architectural principles for a new direction suggested in the first post of this series – interpersonal data.\nThis post, the second in a series of three, was first published to the AKASHA blog , and is also on Medium .\nImage 1 by Ilya lix . Image 2 by Art by Lønfeldt .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data-part-2-of-3/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/ilya-lix-490522-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data/\"\u003eIn the preceding post\u003c/a\u003e\n I proposed that reframing personal data as interpersonal data is much more appropriate, more useful, more valuable. I also asserted that data is data — i.e. not like anything else. To support these points, this post explores and dismisses the dominant conceptualisation of personal data as property, and then reviews the less well-known data-as-labour framing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"the-problem-of-the-way-we-frame-the-opportunity-and-problem\"\u003eThe problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"data-as-property\"\u003eData-as-property\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s linger a while on markets and the fundamental components of money and property. I\u0026rsquo;m working on the supposition that cryptonetworking may be integral to a future interpersonal data architecture, and given that Bitcoin is the genesis of cryptonetworking, it\u0026rsquo;s doubly instructive to reflect on money.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMoney is attributed \u003cem\u003evalue\u003c/em\u003e, but value is far deeper and broader than the mere monetary sense — in the \u003cem\u003emoney can\u0026rsquo;t buy you love\u003c/em\u003e sense for example. Nevertheless, our current civilization is monotheistic in its veneration of the market, and our first inclinations when grappling with any shiny new idea is to see if we can\u0026rsquo;t quantify its value and subject it to the manipulations of Adam Smith\u0026rsquo;s invisible hand. Despite quite substantial evidence to the contrary, our idolatry of this mechanism truly marks it out as a religion imho.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes free markets work best. Sometimes well-regulated markets work best. Sometimes, markets don\u0026rsquo;t work best.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of \"personal data\" — part 2 of 3"},{"content":"\nWe have a problem and an opportunity currently labelled \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo;.\nThe opportunity encompasses nothing less than a complete redesign of our lives and societies and our collective ability to grapple with complex adaptive systems including super-wicked problems — but this will remain elusive until we\u0026rsquo;ve wrestled with the \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo; problem, including the problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem.\nWhile we needed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR ) to stop some very disrespectful and frankly unethical and harmful practices relating to personal data, no regulation can require innovation. The innovation, indeed transformation, I\u0026rsquo;m talking about here is in the spirit if not the letter of the regulation. Perhaps the most prominent and simplest explanation for why it cannot be to the letter is contained in the Regulation\u0026rsquo;s first definition (Article 4 ) by which \u0026ldquo;an identified or identifiable natural person\u0026rdquo; is thereafter known as a \u0026ldquo;data subject\u0026rdquo;, which is entirely the wrong framing for the kind of innovation I envisage.\nThis topic is core to my work and this post serves two purposes. First, selfishly, it\u0026rsquo;s a way to communicate efficiently without having to repeat the contents on a weekly basis. Second, I hope to identify more like and dislike minds in seeking the collective intelligence needed to explore the bountiful and indeed existentially critical opportunity sooner than later.\nI do have some ambition for brevity here, so don\u0026rsquo;t expect a full thesis on the topic but rather an outline with some decent signposts. The brevity I did manage still better suited a series of three posts. This is the first of the three.\nThe early Internet and Web communities entertained some big dreams — democratized access to information, a more inclusive and just world, and so healthier and happier citizens. We were simply to slough off the old ways and resign the previous \u0026lsquo;order\u0026rsquo; to history.\nBut it hasn’t worked out like that. So far.\nRather, we have disinformation rebranded “fake news”, deep privacy invasions by both state and industry, and a growing hegemonic concentration of digital products and services, and — most vitally — of data.\nAnd just a few weeks ago we got another reminder that our politicians still obsess with the false dichotomy of security versus privacy, and do so with sufficient stupidity to believe the laws of their country superior to the laws of mathematics. Good luck with that.\nJoking aside, their efforts undermine the very societal qualities they believe they\u0026rsquo;re defending. A very different approach is required.\nI research and help engineer the development and application of cryptonetworking with a focus on so-called personal data. The goal is individual empowerment and, concurrently, encouraging the emergence of collective intelligence. I\u0026rsquo;m fortunate to be doing so under the auspices of the AKASHA Foundation , the Digital Life Collective , and Southampton University\u0026rsquo;s School of Electronics and Computer Science .\nThe \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo; problem Simply speaking, the problem is this \u0026hellip; the I and the we are not really separable.\nStereotypically, the Weltanschauung of Western cultures emphasises individuality, perhaps most naively personified by Ayn Rand adherents. From a different perspective, Professor Luciano Floridi seeks to understand the informational nature of personal identity, exploring three levels of individuating detachment:\n\u0026hellip; selves emerge as the last step in a process of detachment from reality that begins with a corporeal membrane encapsulating an organism, proceeds through a cognitive membrane encapsulating an intelligent animal, and concludes with a consciousness membrane encapsulating a mental self or simply a mind.\n\u0026hellip; The self emerges as a break with nature, not as a super connection with it.\nProfessor Luciano Floridi Equally stereotypically, some Eastern cultures are attributed with giving the collectivity primacy. I\u0026rsquo;m guessing most people who might read my stuff will be immersed in individualistic culture, so here are just three alternative perspectives.\nOn my interpretation, for the Confucians there are only interrelated persons, no individual selves.\n… By emphasizing our sociality, the Confucians simultaneously emphasize our relationality: an abstract individual I am not, but rather … a particular son, husband, father, grandfather, teacher, student, colleagues, neighbor, friend, and more. In all of these roles I am defined in large measure by the other(s) with whom I interact, highly specific personages related to me in one way or another; they are not abstract autonomous individuals either. Moreover, we do not “play” these roles, as we tend to speak of them, but rather live our roles, and when all of them have been specified, and their interrelationships made manifest, then we have, for Confucius, been thoroughly individuated, but with nothing left over with which to piece together an autonomous individual self. Being thus the aggregate sum of the roles I live, it must follow that as I grow older my roles will change, and consequently I become quite literally a different person.\nHenry Rosemont, Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of \u0026hellip; Going even further east geographically speaking, here\u0026rsquo;s a personal reflection:\nI am not an individual; I am an integral part of the cosmos. I share divinity with my ancestors, the land, the seas and the skies. I am not an individual, because I share a tofi (inheritance) with my family, my village and my nation. I belong to my family and my family belongs to me. I belong to my village and my village belongs to me. I belong to my nation and my nation belongs to me. This is the essence of my sense of belonging.\nTui Atua Tupua Tamasese Taisi Efi, Head of State of Samoa 2007-2017 And to mix it up a bit more, a South American:\nOur original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope. In every human being are combined the most distant epochs, passivity, mistakes, sufferings, the pressing urgencies of our own time, the pace of history.\nPablo Neruda To my mind, neither the individual nor the collectivity can be nor become without the other, in which case we need to take a look at the language here in preparing the ground for thinking about \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo;.\nThe establishment of gender-neutral pronouns across many languages is well underway for the simple reason that binary conceptions of gender do not represent the world, as anyone with a rudimentary grasp of complexity can appreciate. Similarly, the number-based singular and plural forms serve to reinforce a conceptualisation of the world as consisting of parts and wholes. This has practical quotidian application of course but falls short in accommodating situations demanding sense-making of and action-taking within complex adaptive systems.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s recognising and in fact celebrating such complexity that led me to a biologically inspired term for exploring the regenerative interweave of the digital fabric — the Internetome .\nComprehending complexity requires some shifts in thinking. For me, these include:\nAway from the reductionism of \u0026lsquo;parts and wholes\u0026rsquo; towards the simultaneity of a thing being both a part and a whole (holonic philosophy), and perhaps then to an implicate order — a sort of holism beyond the scope of this post Away from a focus on the agents (nodes, things, groups) towards a focus on the relationships (the edges, dynamics, liminality, interdependencies), per Actor-Network theory and ultimately to agencement — the continuous flux of assembling and reassembling. Perhaps we need a number-neutral pronoun in the context of complex systems and I sometimes invoke Wei – a portmanteau of we and I that I pronounce way. I\u0026rsquo;m not writing this, wei is — concurrently I in the context of we and we in the context of I; neither singular nor plural.\nFor every hyperlinked acknowledgement in this post there are a thousand conversations and shared insights that are being channeled right here, right now, that are simply impossible to tease apart let alone reference individually. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of \u0026ldquo;original thinking\u0026rdquo; originates in the wei not the I.\n—— For readability, I will revert to I. ——\nSimilarly, I have concluded that the response to the current and deeply unhealthy dominance of their tech (think Facebook, Google, and their Chinese counterparts) is not my tech but ourtech — a self-sovereignty where the \u0026ldquo;self\u0026rdquo; in question refers to various wei not just I, and where the combining (agencement) of humans and technologies is indivisible (hence the elision of our and tech).\nOur world needs neologisms, as indeed it always has. Nevertheless, you will probably agree that offering up a new pronoun to technologists and lawmakers isn\u0026rsquo;t going to form the basis for the most effective communication! Fortunately, following a conversation with my colleague Mihai Alisie, I think we can make a functionally similar point in the specific context here with more readily understood language.\nIt turns out that there is very few data that may be described as purely personal data. That lunch date, that genome map, those photos, that joint bank account — all turn out to be interpersonal data. In fact, a personal bank account also records the relationship between two parties / persons (the bank and its customer), and lists transactions between the account owner and other parties / persons.\nThe prefix inter is familiar and requires an apparently simple shift in locus, and yet deeper down it offers a way forward to engineer the complexity needed to respond to the complexity (per the law of requisite variety ).\nMaintaining the word person just about stretches to our needs in terms of personhood , encompassing legal persons (organizations recognized as having privileges and obligations under law) and quite reasonably transhumans . To press the point home fully however, any organizing (assemblage, however ephemeral or enduring) would also need to be a person.\nI am a person Alphabet Inc. is a person, as are its subsidiaries, e.g. Google Her Majesty\u0026rsquo;s Government is a person, as are its Departments A family is a person of persons Molly Millions is a person Hawking Incorporated was a person. Now let\u0026rsquo;s consider persons living — i.e. relating, interdepending, responding, learning. In other words, exchanging information, where the information is a difference that makes a difference . We\u0026rsquo;re now in the realm of interpersonal data.\nBefore progressing to the problems propagated today by the very ways we frame the problem and opportunity of personal data, one final observation here — data has no scale.\nSociologists reflect on the agent (individual) and the structure (society). Computer scientists think in terms of client (individual device) and server (including its agglomeration as \u0026ldquo;the cloud\u0026rdquo;). And yet such duality is akin to insisting a fractal be viewed at no more than two discrete scales. Nature doesn\u0026rsquo;t work like this, and:\nIf one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature\u0026rsquo;s way.\nAristotle\nWe are then contemplating interpersonal data with no scale at every scale.\nThe problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem Our first forays in the digital world are, naturally, informed by prior experience and knowledge. We moved from mail to email, from files and folders to files and folders, from desktops to desktops, etc. Only much later does it occur to us that digital has unprecedented qualities — e.g. that search and discovery is preferable to filing, and new forms of communication may just beat email.\nAs noted above, language helps and constrains us. Language is metaphor, and our metaphors predate the innovation we attempt to describe and shape with our language. When it comes to personal data, this really isn\u0026rsquo;t working out well for us, and in aspiring to head-off the potential disastrous consequences Tony Fish notes :\nData is data.\ni.e. It is not like anything else. And I couldn\u0026rsquo;t put it better myself. Yet here\u0026rsquo;s what we\u0026rsquo;re up against: data-as-property, data-as-labour, data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, data-as-me.\nIn the second post in this series of three , I explore the dominant conceptualisation of personal data, that is as property, explaining why it is a woefully inadequate approach, and review the less well-known data-as-labour framing.\nThis post, the first in a series of three, was first published to the AKASHA blog , and is also on Medium .\nImage 1 by Art by Lønfeldt . Image 2 by Art by Lønfeldt .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/art-by-lonfeldt-636728-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe have a problem and an opportunity currently labelled \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe opportunity encompasses nothing less than a complete redesign of our lives and societies and our collective ability to grapple with complex adaptive systems including \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem#Super_wicked_problems\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esuper-wicked problems\u003c/a\u003e\n — but this will remain elusive until we\u0026rsquo;ve wrestled with the \u0026ldquo;personal data\u0026rdquo; problem, including the problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile we needed the General Data Protection Regulation (\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGDPR\u003c/a\u003e\n) to stop some very disrespectful and frankly unethical and harmful practices relating to personal data, no regulation can require innovation. The innovation, indeed transformation, I\u0026rsquo;m talking about here is in the spirit if not the letter of the regulation. Perhaps the most prominent and simplest explanation for why it cannot be to the letter is contained in the Regulation\u0026rsquo;s first definition (\u003ca href=\"https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eArticle 4\u003c/a\u003e\n) by which \u0026ldquo;an identified or identifiable natural person\u0026rdquo; is thereafter known as a \u0026ldquo;data subject\u0026rdquo;, which is entirely the wrong framing for the kind of innovation I envisage.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis topic is core to my work and this post serves two purposes. First, selfishly, it\u0026rsquo;s a way to communicate efficiently without having to repeat the contents on a weekly basis. Second, I hope to identify more like and dislike minds in seeking the collective intelligence needed to explore the bountiful and indeed existentially critical opportunity sooner than later.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of \"personal data\""},{"content":"\nAldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term global village as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).\nWhen centralization is mediated by an organization, governmental or corporate, its best interests must be aligned perfectly and continuously with the parties subject to its gravity in the mediating context – otherwise decentralization must be preferred to avoid the appropriation and erosion of those parties\u0026rsquo; valuable agency. Importantly, decentralization demands decentralization at every level without exception for any exception would be centralization. By definition.\nThis post aims to scope the challenge that still lies ahead to secure decentralization even with the rise and rise of cryptonetworks such as Ethereum . For more information about decentralization in general and why it\u0026rsquo;s important, see Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply , written for the World Wide Web Foundation.\nThe Internetome UPDATE July 2021: see https://internetome.org/ In computing, a set of network layers that work together is often referred to as a stack eg, the OSI Reference Model . Each layer is designed with a particular purpose in mind and interacts directly with the layers immediately above and below, metaphorically speaking.\nStacks are a useful construct to conceptualize a system. In seeking to do the same for the topic of decentralization in the context of people and digital networks, I wanted to identify the main things – for want of a better word – involved. I call it the Internetome, a repurposing of the name I gave an Internet of Things conference I designed and hosted in 2010. It incorporates the suffix -ome used to denote the object of a biological field of study (eg, genome, interactome, connectome, biome).\nThe Internetome evolved naturally into a circular rather than columnar form. Here\u0026rsquo;s how I portray it and each vertex is discussed briefly below. I don\u0026rsquo;t consider it set in stone but more of a thinking device that will undoubtedly adapt based on the criticism it might attract.\nThe Internetome\nThe physical Humans, digital devices, and instrumented non-digital things With human agency as my primary concern, it makes sense to start with humans. The current definition of a human is entirely within the physical realm, so sticking in that realm I immediately consider the connected things around us with which we interact. I determine two types – digital devices (eg, smart phones), and instrumented non-digital things (eg, our homes, our streets).\nThe primary functioning of digital devices is digital. Instrumented non-digital things on the other hand are those things that would exist in a non-digital sense but some advantage is sought with the integration of digital sensors. This distinction could be important when considering self-sovereignty (see below).\nThe non-physical Reflecting on my two main themes – people and digital networks – we can dive into the non-physical from either the human or the digitalized physical realm. Let\u0026rsquo;s start here from the latter.\nPost-TCP/IP networking Digital devices prove most potent when they are connected, so the next thing is the communications network. Today, we rely predominantly on the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) but such reliance is problematic.\nWhile IP was originally architected to effect the internet\u0026rsquo;s distributed architecture, for various reasons of market dynamics and/or government policies, IP addresses or proxies to an IP address (in a system design known as network address translation) are available today only via decreasingly few internet service providers (ISPs) in their role as local internet registry . While there may be many brands in some markets vying for business, in reality there may be just two or three networks on the \u0026lsquo;back end\u0026rsquo;. The majority of internet traffic in any given country goes through just a small handful of fixed line providers and cellular operators.\nThis means, for example, that when a government chooses to instigate mass surveillance of its citizens\u0026rsquo; Internet use (eg, the UK\u0026rsquo;s so-called snoopers charter ), contrary to their human rights (article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ), the government in question needs only require a relative tiny number of companies to do its work for them. (Such thinking may be sincere, even heartfelt, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t make it less flawed .)\nThe Internetome does not then reference TCP/IP but rather post-TCP/IP networking. A candidate approach could be named content networking , which employs unique identifiers based on what a resource is rather than where it is. Resources are more distributed and it becomes much harder to track who accesses what.\nNow, how do you make sense of it when you find it?\nSemantic Such context is provided by semantic technologies, and it\u0026rsquo;s critical that such interpretive capability not be the domain of one or a few organizations. Sense-making must be distributed to attenuate a systematic scaling of bias or misinterpretation, deliberate or accidental.\nI include machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly. Saying that, I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely convinced that\u0026rsquo;s appropriate \u0026hellip; AI feels like it could be qualitatively different in the context here. On the one hand, there are semantic technologies that facilitate the explicit expression of meaning (eg, this is a date and it\u0026rsquo;s Bob\u0026rsquo;s birthday), whereas on the other hand AI might work on a corpus to find meaning we don\u0026rsquo;t yet know is \u0026lsquo;in there\u0026rsquo;.\nRegardless, the meaning and the intelligence must come to our data rather than have our data go to the intelligence. That\u0026rsquo;s not to say personal data should reside in personal data stores – I see little need for them. Rather, we can still engineer for personal data to \u0026lsquo;breathe\u0026rsquo; amongst other data to better facilitate its transformation into information and knowledge without relinquishing domain over it.\nLegal It\u0026rsquo;s not just the semantics of content that counts in our society, but the semantics of behaviour too. How do we express which behaviours are acceptable and which are not and adjudge accordingly? This takes us into the legal domain. Many may consider the system of law to be very centralized – after all, much law is determined at the national and international scale – but I\u0026rsquo;m referring here to the adaptive interweaving of our social code and digital code.\nA blockchain fan may shout \u0026ldquo;smart contracts !\u0026rdquo; at this juncture – software protocols designed to verify or enforce the performance of a contract. However, the application of devices formed in the context of Shannon\u0026rsquo;s information theory to the behaviours of humans more used to interaction along the lines of Pask\u0026rsquo;s conversation theory is undoubtedly problematic. Kieron O\u0026rsquo;Hara (2017) points out ways in which smart contracts might in fact be a dumb idea . If anything, the DAO debacle in 2016 demonstrated that consensus systems are sociotechnical, and I\u0026rsquo;m very much viewing the internet here as a sociotechnical system rather than merely technical as you\u0026rsquo;ll have noted from the etymological choice of Internetome.\nSocial And now then we\u0026rsquo;re at social. Conversations. Relationships. Communities.\nSocial media has been a mainstream phenomena for more than a decade now and classic network effects have consolidated our online social attention to very few platforms indeed. More than a few social media projects with decentralized architecture have attempted to break this hegemony, but the gravity of the connection, comfort and convenience offered by the centralized platforms has proved too irresistible. This will continue to be the case in my opinion until a decentralized project plays to different and unprecedented network effects.\nSome believe antitrust examination will come to the rescue, but if such scrutiny hinges on consumer detriment then a defense may be constructed based on delivery of quite the opposite despite the deep but what some might dismiss as \u0026lsquo;mere\u0026rsquo; philosophical concerns.\nThe troubles of fake news and filter bubbles have filled mainstream media in recent times, but this isn\u0026rsquo;t the space to expand on all the chilling effects of such centralization. I\u0026rsquo;ll limit myself to just one reference.\nCouldry (2014) posits that the success of some social media services – he refers to Facebook – is based not just on connecting us to our immediate friends and family, but by invoking a broader ‘we’, a collectivity extending way beyond our immediate network. In making this broader connection, the service is setting itself up as the arbiter of what’s happening, what’s trending, and so, importantly, by accumulation, what matters. By corollary, the user is discouraged at best and disempowered at worst from making this assessment herself.\nThe human interface Couldry\u0026rsquo;s observation is the perfect segue to the last Internetome vertex – in terms of my discussion here rather than any particular order – the human interface.\nUser interface (UI) is a more common term, and appropriately so when the interface in question treats the person as a mere user or indeed a used-by. You are used by services hungry to construct services from your behaviours, your movements, your data, and eager to use you as their interface into the world.\nIf you do not have domain over the interface into and onto the digital fabric of the world around you, by definition some other party does. And the medium is the message. In other words, to design your experience is to control your experience, including what you will not experience.\nCiting Deleuze (1992), Benjamin Bratton (2015) describes the emergence of a new control structure, “for which anyone’s self-directed movements through open and closed spaces is governed in advance at every interfacial point of passage” algorithmically, an evolution “marked by the predominance of computational information technology as its signature apparatus.” More prosaically, that public space in your local community that you love is already partly privatized. Sure, it remains public in the physical sense, but the physical and digital are enmeshed inseparably and your interface onto and into your surroundings while sitting on that park bench is in private hands today.\nFoucauldian disciplining is in play, a conditioning process whereby individuals are nudged into aligning their behaviours with the interests of the source of power wielding the disciplining strategy. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet used the word dystopia, but I have now.\nThe human interface project – the hi:project – seeks to supplant the user interface.\nJef Raskin (2000), a human-computer interaction expert who conceived and started Apple’s Macintosh project, defines the interface as follows:\nThe way you accomplish tasks with a product – what you do and how it responds – that’s the interface.\nThe hi:project defines the UI specifically:\nThe way a machine or service helps you accomplish tasks with or through it, that’s the user interface.\nWhat some refer to as the \u0026lsquo;personal assistant\u0026rsquo; (eg, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa), the hi:project calls the surveillance interface .\nThe way a machine or service surveils, records, interprets and to some degree controls as much as it can about your life to help you accomplish tasks with or through it, for the profit of the service provider, that’s the surveillance interface.\nAnd finally:\nThe way your software helps you accomplish tasks with other software, that’s the human interface.\nYou will notice that our journey around the Internetome is complete – we\u0026rsquo;re back to humans.\nTech We Trust: self-sovereignty + ourtech UPDATE July 2021: The following description hints at the tension between \u0026ldquo;self\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;our\u0026rdquo;. In more recent work, I have been highly critical of the founding principles of self-sovereign identity in particular, a foundation of self-sovereign technology — see the generative identity website.\nThe hi:project is an example of self-sovereign technology. Self-sovereign technologies are designed with just the one master in mind, the individual defined digitally by a self-sovereign identity .\nDevon Loffreto (2012) defines sovereign source authority (the erstwhile turn of phrase) as “the actual default design parameter of human identity, prior to the ‘registration’ process used to inaugurate participation in Society.” He contends that the societal registration of birth currently eliminates self-sovereign identity and replaces it with an identity in society’s gift, asserting that this is a denial of the basic human right to self-declare participatory structure and authority; “Government is not formed to manage this process, but to be managed by this process.”\nAs Phil Windley puts it :\nDescartes didn\u0026rsquo;t say ‘I have a birth certificate, therefore, I am.’\nNot everything can be (re)configured as self-sovereign technology, but nor need it be. I made the distinction between digital devices and the instrumented non-digital above as I doubt the latter may be designed as self-sovereign but will rather be accessed \u0026rsquo;through\u0026rsquo; self-sovereign technology as appropriate.\nSelf-sovereign technologies are a step along the path to the redefinition of the human as biological, psychological, informational (Floridi 2005), and interfacial, but it remains that no person is an island – we will continue to interact with others and the world around us of course.\nIdentity, relationships, and information are fundamentals of organization (Wheatley, 1999) and identity is followed closely by both relationships and information as fundamentals of self-sovereignty. Everything in-between is co-operating (or, less optimistically, finding cause not to). I\u0026rsquo;ve attempted a diagram accordingly. It\u0026rsquo;s far from perfect but I include it here in the hope it might inspire someone with greater graphical communication skills.\nIt references the idea of Tech We Trust, defined by the Digital Life Collective as those technologies that are equitable and accessible, putting our autonomy, privacy and dignity first.\nSelf-sovereign technologies are a subset of Tech We Trust, with the latter also extending out into the world in the form of technologies that aid our interactions and co-operation. (The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative, as a quick aside.) Many may consider my tech the ultimate response to their tech, but the Collective recognizes its redundant isolation. It\u0026rsquo;s actually ourtech that matters. Self-sovereign tech is qualified by its ability to enable and be enabled by ourtech.\nSelf-sovereign technology, Tech We Trust, identity, relationships, information, and co-operation\nConsensus protocols There\u0026rsquo;s one further feature of the Internetome linking the non-physical vertices – consensus protocols. In short, such protocols set out to secure agreement among a number of decentralized processes / agents. Blockchains are perhaps the most famous type of consensus protocol.\nBefore the advent of consensus protocols one could have a centralized, incorruptible database, or a decentralized, corruptible one. Now we have the prize of both decentralization and incorruptibility, and a systematization of such protocols may be called a cryptonetwork given their cryptographic basis.\nCryptonetworks glue things apart.\nThe corresponding engineering is not straightforward, especially when taking into account my comments above regarding the sociotechnical imperative otherwise known as good governance.\nTo the title of this blog post – decentralization needs cryptonetworks, but clearly decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks. They offer resolution to a major engineering challenge, now we just need to crack on with the rest.\nThis post is based in part on a report submitted May 2017 in the process of my research at the University of Southampton.\nPhoto by Annie Spratt on Unsplash .\nBratton, B.H., 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press.\nCouldry, N., 2014. Inaugural: A necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world: A necessary disenchantment. Sociol. Rev. 62, 880–897. doi:10.1111/1467-954X.12158\nDeleuze, G., 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59, 3–7.\nFloridi, L., 2005. The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy. Ethics Inf. Technol. 7, 185–200. doi:10.1007/s10676-006-0001-7\nHuxley, A., 1937. Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization. Transaction Publishers.\nLevy, S., 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Anchor, Garden City, N.Y.\nLoffreto, D., 2012. What is “Sovereign Source Authority”? Moxy Tongue.\nMcLuhan, M., 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press.\nNegroponte, N., 1995. Being digital. Vintage Books.\nO’Hara, K., 2017b. Smart Contracts-Dumb Idea. IEEE Internet Comput. 21, 97–101.\nRaskin, J., 2000. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. Addison-Wesley Professional.\nSchumacher, E.F., 1973. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Harper, New York.\nWheatley, M., 1999. A Simpler Way. McGraw-Hill Education.\nWiener, N., 1950. The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society. Houghton Mifflin.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2018/02/decentralization-needs-more-than-cryptonetworks-internetome/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/annie-spratt-531018-unsplash.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAldous Huxley (1937) regarded the decentralization of industry and government necessary for a better society. Norbert Wiener’s insights (1950) into the dynamics and ethics of humans and large computer systems hinted at the advantages. Marshall McLuhan (1962) anticipated a shift from the centralized mechanical age to the decentralized electronic age, coining the term \u003cem\u003eglobal village\u003c/em\u003e as shorthand for such a welcome outcome. E.F. Schumacher (1973) considered decentralization allied with freedom and one of “the truths revealed by nature’s living processes”. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic (1984) includes the tenet “mistrust authority – promote decentralization”. And Nicholas Negroponte (1995) regards decentralization as one of the four cardinal virtues of the information society (alongside globalization, harmonization and empowerment).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen centralization is mediated by an organization, governmental or corporate, its best interests must be aligned perfectly and continuously with the parties subject to its gravity in the mediating context – otherwise decentralization must be preferred to avoid the appropriation and erosion of those parties\u0026rsquo; valuable agency. Importantly, decentralization demands decentralization at every level without exception for any exception would be centralization. By definition.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post aims to scope the challenge that still lies ahead to secure decentralization even with the rise and rise of cryptonetworks such as \u003ca href=\"http://ethereum.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEthereum\u003c/a\u003e\n. For more information about decentralization in general and why it\u0026rsquo;s important, see \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/2016/11/decentralization-deep-cause-causes-care-deeply/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDecentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply\u003c/a\u003e\n, written for the World Wide Web Foundation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why decentralization needs more than cryptonetworks – the Internetome"},{"content":" The Digital Life Collective co-operative is officially launched today. Here\u0026rsquo;s some text I helped develop for the new website to situate why our mission is important \u0026hellip;\nToday, we cannot determine if technology is trustworthy else when it’s betraying our trust.\nTrust is a vital aspect of every friendship, every family, every society. When you and another person trust each other, you’ve worked out that your interests are suitably aligned. You both believe the other will behave in ways that ‘look out’ for the two of you, that serve you both well.\nTrust supports our interactions as social animals. We’ve evolved to look for clues that tell us how trustworthy another might be, and to explore ways to test and build that trust without really thinking about it. We end up with:\nYou trust someone else to do X.\nWhat does trust mean in technological terms?\nYou trust Technology to do X.\nAnd actually, this is a lot more complicated.\nYou must trust the organization that makes the technology in the context of it doing X. Yet the organization is not another person with the social characteristics you can interpret for trustworthiness. You never get to meet the organization, or more precisely any person meaningfully representing it.\nThere is no mutual agreement. You must accept the organization’s terms and conditions else not get to use the technology. And the organization is not compelled to tell you about its motivations or values, or indeed live up to those it does communicate.\nAnd your problems don’t stop there.\nAs information technologies intermingle and inter-operate, it’s not always obvious how you might spot any behaviours that betray your trust, or relate any you do identify to any given technology and therefore any given organization.\nYou end up needing an intermediary expert to indicate the technology’s trustworthiness and the organization’s trustworthiness in developing and sometimes maintaining and operating it. In other words, you now need to trust a third-party expert. The Digital Life Collective will be the expert as soon as we co-operate to make this happen.\nAs an example, we know that our trust in technology exposed to others’ surveillance and manipulation is eroded and we’re left not knowing what can be trusted. You may have heard of instances of this playing out in recent times, going by the names of fake news, filter bubbles, and automated profiling.\nWe know that if we cannot trust our tech it’s increasingly difficult to trust ourselves. And if we cannot trust ourselves, we cannot trust each other.\n\u0026hellip;\nThe Digital Life Collective researches, develops, funds and supports Tech We Trust: technologies that prioritize our autonomy, privacy and dignity. Our tech, not their tech.\nThe norm today is Tech We Don’t Trust. Every time we engage with digital technologies, we should ask – what’s actually going on here? – and the answer is too typically illusive.\nWe cannot wait for the invisible hand of the market to help solve this. If anything, it seems to guide many companies in the opposite direction for now. We cannot wait for governments to solve this either. In short, we need to co-operate. And that’s why we exist, why we are incorporated as a co-operative, and why we need you to join us. Find out more at www.diglife.com .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2017/10/digital-life-collective-launches-co-operative-nurturing-tech-trust/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.diglife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"screenshot from the diglife.com website\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/screenshot-from-the-diglife.com-website.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"https://www.diglife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDigital Life Collective\u003c/a\u003e\n co-operative is officially launched today. Here\u0026rsquo;s some text I helped develop for the new website to situate why our mission is important \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday, we cannot determine if technology is trustworthy else when it’s betraying our trust.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTrust is a vital aspect of every friendship, every family, every society. When you and another person trust each other, you’ve worked out that your interests are suitably aligned. You both believe the other will behave in ways that ‘look out’ for the two of you, that serve you both well.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTrust supports our interactions as social animals. We’ve evolved to look for clues that tell us how trustworthy another might be, and to explore ways to test and build that trust without really thinking about it. We end up with:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYou trust someone else to do X.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does trust mean in technological terms?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Digital Life Collective launches – a co-operative nurturing Tech We Trust"},{"content":"\nCompetitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from scale anymore. The rate at which big players in any and all industries beach their supertanker is unprecedented.\nCompetitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from efficiency anymore either. What’s the point of making unwanted product efficiently?\nCompetitive advantage and profitable growth comes from adaptability. Pure and simple. Adapt or die.\nA 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review pronounced adaptability the new competitive advantage. It asks how your managers can pick up the right signals to understand and harness change when they’re overwhelmed with changing information. The conclusion – instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new things.\nAs Peter Senge points out, organizations only learn through individuals who learn, perhaps aided by machine learning these days. And learning craves meaningful data.\nLack of data was the problem of the 20th Century, yet the opportunity and challenge of the 21st is having too much of the stuff. This is the landscape of digital transformation and, I believe, the very bedrock of the meaning of business: establishing and driving mutual value creation (PDF ).\nValue flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been on a mission to find out how to make this happen.\nToo much of not enough Under-investment in IT isn’t the problem. Time and money have gone in, yet with the benefit of hindsight the resultant infrastructure too frequently strangles as much as liberates. As one CIO put it to me, “It nearly does what we need.” He pauses. “But nearly is effectively not.”\nOn examination, this remark is an indictment of some popular approaches to designing enterprise IT, not least enterprise architecture and service oriented architecture.\nEnterprise architecture In IT terms:\nEA is about aligning an enterprise’s IT assets (through strategy, design, and management) to effectively execute the business strategy and various operations using the proper IT capabilities. … it aims to reduce IT costs through technology reuse and eliminating duplicate functionality. [1]\nThe process is considered the glue between business and IT.\nUnfortunately, EA in IT terms has not kept abreast of EA in non-IT terms. Enterprise IT architecting is mechanistic, a servant to the business strategy, and it fails too frequently to consider IT part of the holistic and dynamic whole [2]. Thinking of it in terms of the agile manifesto , enterprise IT architecture falls short by defining and pursuing a plan rather than striving to support and drive continuous change.\nThe most evolved form of EA – enterprise ecological adaptation – is more my kinda groove, but it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to float above the technical foray and merely hope it catches up. It’s the tension between ecological adaptation and IT architecting that informs Gartner’s dedication to bimodal IT, more on which later.\nIn short, if you find that your business does what its IT allows rather than your IT doing what your business requires, your IT may have been EAd to death. Your business is indeed glued to its IT.\nService oriented architecture SOA emerged to address this EA problem. While definitions vary considerably, Microsoft describes it as :\na loosely-coupled architecture designed to meet the business needs of the organization.\nSOA is a philosophy rather than a methodology or technology. It’s an approach to building systems from autonomous services. A means rather than an ends. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly challenging to wield those means in a meaningful way.\nAdmittedly, much criticism of SOA focuses on the technology (eg, XML) rather than the philosophy, but any approach for which the dominant technological instantiations are flawed will rightly be cast in the same shadow.\nA major flaw can be framed in terms of a primary ambition of the SOA Manifesto : intrinsic interoperability over custom integration. No matter the technology, services are too frequently reusable and not especially useful, or useful but not especially reusable. Striving for usefulness ties the SOA implementation in cloddish and complex knots, particularly when such services crave consumer context, and reusable stateless services create significant governance and security headaches.\nFinally – in what might be a fatal case of SOA thrown under the (enterprise) bus – the SOA community has been grappling for many years with top-down versus bottom-up design and development. No-one argues that SOA is top-down by nature, but with business adaptability and corresponding tech agility in mind, many practitioners have sought to work it bottom-up. And they’ve failed . SOA may have a place in the increasingly rare world of deliberate strategy, but with emergent strategy in the ascendant, SOA’s sun is setting.\nMicroservices But SOA isn’t dead just yet. Some consider microservices the latest SOA incarnation – “fine grained SOA” according to Adrian Cockcroft at Netflix [3] – in which the granularity is married to more rigorous decoupling. There’s no agreed definition, although I like this attempt [4]:\nan approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms.\nCan microservices rise above the flaws of prior SOA manifestations? Things look promising although it’s not all plain sailing:\nAlmost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up. Almost all the cases where I\u0026rsquo;ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble. [5]\nUnfortunately, there\u0026rsquo;s a further problem. Each and every service may have its own \u0026lsquo;flavour\u0026rsquo; so to speak, lacking any standardised, semantic context – far from ideal, by definition, when striving for meaningful data flow.\nBig data. Big mess. Big opportunity. During the latter part of the 20th Century, leading manufacturers transitioned from pushing production through the factory to the warehouse, to pulling production through to meet market demand. The emphasis moved from stocks to flows, and this history is instructive for our working with data today.\nOur relatively recent facility to deal with previously unimaginable quantities of data – the word big doesn’t really do it justice – invokes ideas of stocks, compounded by phrases such as data warehousing. Even the term data lake conjures up a relatively static body even if there are flows in and out.\nIt is then time to make the data supply chain real. Instead of having deliberate strategy push services onto the business, we need to help the data flow with the emerging needs of the business by allowing it to express and expose itself, guided by and \u0026lsquo;working alongside\u0026rsquo; the right people in the organization (i.e. not just those in the IT Dept. or Data Office).\nBimodal It’s tricky to get IT to be resilient and nimble, rock steady and malleable, and for this reason Gartner developed the concept of bimodal IT in 2014:\nthe practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.\nThe previous year, McKinsey had argued for the development of “greenfield IT ” (effectively Mode 2):\n… the creation of a new technology that lives and is independently managed outside the CIO. The reason for considering this is that so many companies are hampered by legacy technologies that they are unable to be flexible and simply cannot innovate.\nGartner claims that it’s “IT with traditional efficiency and predictability, yet with the agility and speed to use the digital core with utmost effectiveness.” [6] I add a critical caveat – so long as the two modes (of both the technology and people) co-exist harmoniously.\nBimodal shapes up to be a realistic response to a multi-faceted challenge and has a lot going for it in my opinion, but others aspire to a more ‘perfect’ single-mode world represented by the combination of continuous delivery and lean IT .\nContinuous delivery and lean IT Continuous delivery couldn’t be more evocative of the flow we’re devoted to here. And Lean IT extends the lean principle I briefly alluded to earlier (pull over push).\nLean entails the identification and elimination of waste (muda) and unevenness (mura), with the latter effectively synonymous with flow. Lean IT maps this dedication onto two types of value stream: business services that are directly value adding, and IT services that are wholly necessary and sufficient to deliver the business services.\nNow I don’t want to be pedantic, but could it be that lean’s business and IT services and bimodal’s adaptive and systematic IT bear some resemblance to each other.\nIf you agree, this is how I explain that coincidence – there will always be stocks, and we all want to get those flows a-flowing, and we are therefore merely contemplating the juxtaposition of the two. Whether one considers it a hard boundary, or more a graduation, the incongruity must be resolved to play to the strengths and purpose of both modes, and, critically, to do much the same for all the people involved as well as the technology.\nBraintribe I\u0026rsquo;m excited to have the opportunity to be working alongside the Braintribe team (disclosure: they are a partner and client, not just the conclusion to my search). Without getting down deep into the mathematics, the company applies Gödel numbering in its development environment, Cortex.\nCortex is model driven, guaranteeing type-safe relationships between the formal terms. Gödelization facilitates the modeling of both the operands and operations, effectively normalizing the entire system and enabling the description and implementation of all variety of reflective operations (JVM runtime behavior modifications).\nThe result, I believe, is unrivalled power of expression and control. Cortex has some aspects in common with model driven architecture and object-oriented programming, with a dash of aspect-oriented programming and more than a sprinkling of expert systems concepts.\nBraintribe\u0026rsquo;s data-as-a-service platform, Tribefire, is built on Cortex. It decouples data from the infrastructure and allows data to express itself the same way your people do. It really is a joy to witness non-technical people discover and build and combine visual data models, explore the previously inconceivable with simulated data, and expose APIs automatically for any innovation or incubation purposes before even going into production.\nTo my mind, this makes Tribefire the ideal platform for digital transformation, if that is you agree that digital transformation must be preceded by data transformation. And I\u0026rsquo;m already wondering about a Mode 3, the logical long-term conclusion to a bimodal reality.\nExponential technology Your data supply chain is everything you need it to be when the energy previously expended merely finding, extracting and working with data is re-focused on exploration, learning, and knowledge building. When data is instantly available, navigable, intuitive, and meaningful, it finally emerges as the exponential technology it\u0026rsquo;s made out to be, central to your organization breaking free of the linear world – hierarchical, centralized, closed, top down, and obsessed with scarcity.\nYou and your colleagues and everyone with a stake in your organization\u0026rsquo;s success will be shaping and exploring and testing and reshaping decentralised value networks, making your organization permeable to ideas and connections, and catalysing mutual value creation.\n[1] Lapalme, J. 2012. ‘Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture’. IT Professional 14 (6): 37–43. doi:10.1109/MITP.2011.109.\n[2] Ibid.\n[3] https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html [4] Ibid.\n[5] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html [6] Gartner Executive Programs, Renovate the IT Core: Laying the Foundation for Digital Business, 2014, No. 8\nImage credit: Thomas Schultz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpg , CC BY-SA 3.0\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2017/09/value-flows-data-flows-meaningfully-sociotechnical-networks-search-ideal-data-architecture/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCompetitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from scale anymore. The rate at which big players in any and all industries beach their supertanker is unprecedented.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCompetitive advantage and profitable growth doesn’t come from efficiency anymore either. What’s the point of making unwanted product efficiently?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCompetitive advantage and profitable growth comes from adaptability. Pure and simple. Adapt or die.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2011/07/adaptability-the-new-competitive-advantage\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eA 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review\u003c/a\u003e\n pronounced adaptability the new competitive advantage. It asks how your managers can pick up the right signals to understand and harness change when they’re overwhelmed with changing information. The conclusion – instead of being really good at doing some particular thing, companies must be really good at learning how to do new things.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Peter Senge points out, organizations only learn through individuals who learn, perhaps aided by machine learning these days. And learning craves meaningful data.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLack of data was the problem of the 20th Century, yet the opportunity and challenge of the 21st is having too much of the stuff. This is the landscape of digital transformation and, I believe, the very bedrock of the meaning of business: \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@sheldrake/the-meaning-of-business-c40f125379ed\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eestablishing and driving mutual value creation\u003c/a\u003e\n (\u003ca href=\"http://eulerpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Euler-sense-Summer-2016-The-Meaning-of-Business.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePDF\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eValue flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been on a mission to find out how to make this happen.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Value flows when data flows meaningfully through sociotechnical networks – in search of the ideal data architecture"},{"content":"\nThis is the newsletter about the Digital Life Collective sent to hi:project subscribers 24th April 2017 and posted to the hi:project blog .\nThe hi:project team is collaborating with others interested in trustworthy and empowering technologies. We’re working to launch the Digital Life Collective and we\u0026rsquo;d love you to be part of it.\nNow for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of an ambitious, open-source, nonprofit vision such as the hi:project, I provide a fuller debrief below. For those who prefer their updates bitesize, everything you need is contained in the next six paragraphs.\n…\nYou’ll recall the hi:project has some mighty challenges in its sights. We will help: solve personal data \u0026amp; privacy; secure a citizen-centric Internet of Things; transform accessibility \u0026amp; digital inclusion.\nJust as for many free open source software projects, no-one profits with the hi:project but rather everyone because of it. And therein lies both the broad opportunity and the deep problem. If everyone secures the return on investment, if the profit cannot be privatised, who exactly is going to make the investment?\nIn other words, markets aren’t designed to address such particular potential, but that hasn’t stopped us appealing to commercial players – more on how that works below. Moreover, it doesn’t seem foundations can fund and foster such fundamental architecture. And our brush with academic funding was a brush off. In all, we’ve been working across four fronts, failing at these three, and seeing if we can succeed at the fourth.\nAt first the fourth appears counter-intuitive \u0026hellip; if the hi:project seemed too big, fifty of us have banded together so far to go bigger. The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative dedicated to “tech we trust for the world we want”, and today is the day we go all official. Today we put the incorporation paperwork in the post and invite you to become a co-founding member so that together we can give the market a miss for the moment, pause the powwow with foundations, give up grinding the grant applications … and start simply co-operating.\nTechnology of, by and for the people. Our tech, not their tech. Find out more now at www.diglife.com .\nAs for engineering the hi:project … well we’ll be making our case to the Collective in due time.\nThe debrief From the moment we started talking about the hi:project, we contrasted the user interface (UI) and the human interface (HI), the former describing the status quo in which you, the mere user, are actually the used, where you are in fact the product being sold, the civilian being controlled . By adopting HI as our terminology, we communicate the intent to reinstate your sovereignty, your dignity, your humanity.\nIn the ensuing four years we’ve witnessed a new type of UI emerge that feels sufficiently transformed as to warrant its own acronym. Some call them conversational interfaces, or intelligent personal assistants, or chatbots, which sounds ever so friendly. I prefer to name them after their primary function however … the surveillance interface (SI). Google Assistant. Amazon Alexa. Apple Siri. Microsoft Cortana. And Facebook appears intent on developing similar capabilities. The only thing more alarming than SI’s intrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.\nVery very few companies are positioned to offer SI because it requires a huge amount of context (the surveillance ideally pre-dates the SI), enormous computing power, and therefore an existing dominant position in the consumer electronics and web services marketplace. Consequently, our global digital infrastructure is further centralized – saying that half a dozen companies are left in the race is likely an overestimate.\nAnd yet it’s tricky to convey the criticality of decentralization. In the here and now it seems irrelevant compared to the facility to utter “Alexa, play Sheeran’s Shape of You”. We were invited to write an article on the topic by the World Wide Web Foundation, and we hope the title alone does it justice: Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply .\nWe need to redecentralize the interface layer in ‘the stack’. We need to re-center things on you so you can chose to work with companies to create shared value rather than have them work on you. And we need to make sure everyone is invited.\nNow I’ve touched on some of the context, here’s a brief look at the challenge we face trying to fund such an enterprise.\n1. Foundations. We haven’t spoken to every foundation with an Internet or Web related programme I’m sure. Nevertheless, the story I related in my last update (Feb 2016) hasn’t progressed any. We’re consistently aligned with these programmes, but our scope is waaaay too ambitious. As someone with more experience of foundations describes it \u0026hellip; if you’re transforming the relationship between civilians and their police service, then here’s some funding, but seek to reconfigure our relationships with all variety of public, private and governmental organizations and you’re clearly smoking something.\n(For the record, she was merely employing metaphor.)\n2. Academic research. On the back of the hi:project, I find myself pursuing a PhD on the issues. This is wonderful. Less so my experience of a multi-university application for European funding. We failed. And personally speaking, it’s not something I have any intention of ever doing ever again ever.\n3. Old-fashioned self-interest. In Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy (Nov 2016), the authors question whether the invisible hand of the market still holds sway over some of those very privileged companies I listed above. I spent a good part of 2015 and 2016 talking to tier 2 tech firms (i.e. massive firms who didn’t make this tier 1 algorithmic hegemony) about staying tier 2 forever and paying the tier 1 tollgates forever. Would they not rather invest together in re-levelling the playing field to everyone\u0026rsquo;s benefit including their own?\nI’m delighted we secured the interest of a well-known organization that hosts collaborative development of open, non-differentiating tech, but no breakthrough yet on securing collaborative investment from their members or beyond. Still working on it.\nAs it becomes increasingly obvious to the leadership and technologists across many sectors – automotive, financial services, home automation, healthcare, sports, entertainment, etc. – that they’ve been mediated out of contending for a direct relationship with any customer or indeed any stakeholder, this must change.\nAnd so to our fourth way forward \u0026hellip;\n4. Co-operation. I recently learned two things about Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s considered one of the top three US presidents (ref ), and in a 1912 speech at the People’s Forum in New York he proclaimed: “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”\nCompetition has ‘left off’ and we’re left with growing, numbing centralization. We’re resigned to deepening, meticulous surveillance. We’re abdicating to the pervasive, unknowable influence of opaque algorithms. Where once others constructed digital profiles of us, we are now the mere biological shadows of these digital entities.\nHang on a minute, you say. Did he mention something earlier about smoking something?!\u0026hellip; well allow me to ground this last observation.\nWhen your home and car insurance premiums are determined, who exactly do you think the insurer is quantifying? The remote, inaccessible, biological you, or one or more of those digital fabrications? The latter of course, and irrespective of the corresponding omissions or accuracy. Now combine your lack of control over the digital entities that are taken to be you with your lack of control over your interface into and onto this digital world, and your situation doesn’t look too bright. Our situation doesn’t look too bright.\nIt’s plain to me that we can’t wait for tier 2 business leaders to wake up. If they only view things through the lens of direct competition, the best they can achieve is number 1 of tier 2.\nNo. We must co-operate amongst ourselves to address this mess, and they can come and co-operate with us once we’ve got things rolling.\nThe co-operative way dates back to the 18th Century, and the Rochdale principles set out the operational ideals for co-operatives in 1844. Working co-operatively is perfectly suited to our challenge here, and in an interesting synergy identified and championed by Platform Cooperativism , our work will actually enhance the vibrancy of the co-operative way in the digital age.\nIf we don’t co-operate to help ourselves, no-one will.\nYou’re invited to become a co-founder right now. You can find out more at www.diglife.com .\nBest wishes, Philip @Sheldrake.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2017/04/hiproject-digital-life-collective/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Digital Life Collective\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/the_collective.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the newsletter about the \u003ca href=\"http://www.diglife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDigital Life Collective\u003c/a\u003e\n sent to hi:project subscribers 24th April 2017 and \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/2017/04/hiproject-digital-life-collective/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eposted to the hi:project blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe hi:project team is collaborating with others interested in trustworthy and empowering technologies. We’re working to launch the Digital Life Collective and we\u0026rsquo;d love you to be part of it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of an ambitious, open-source, nonprofit vision such as the hi:project, I provide a fuller debrief below. For those who prefer their updates bitesize, everything you need is contained in the next six paragraphs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e…\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou’ll recall the hi:project has some mighty challenges in its sights. We will help: solve personal data \u0026amp; privacy; secure a citizen-centric Internet of Things; transform accessibility \u0026amp; digital inclusion.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJust as for many free open source software projects, no-one profits \u003cem\u003ewith\u003c/em\u003e the hi:project but rather everyone \u003cem\u003ebecause\u003c/em\u003e of it. And therein lies both the broad opportunity and the deep problem. If everyone secures the return on investment, if the profit cannot be privatised, who exactly is going to make the investment?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn other words, markets aren’t designed to address such particular potential, but that hasn’t stopped us appealing to commercial players – more on how that works below. Moreover, it doesn’t seem foundations can fund and foster such fundamental architecture. And our brush with academic funding was a brush off. In all, we’ve been working across four fronts, failing at these three, and seeing if we can succeed at the fourth.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt first the fourth appears counter-intuitive \u0026hellip; if the hi:project seemed too big, fifty of us have banded together so far to go bigger. The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative dedicated to “tech we trust for the world we want”, and today is the day we go all official. Today we put the incorporation paperwork in the post and invite you to become a co-founding member so that together we can give the market a miss for the moment, pause the powwow with foundations, give up grinding the grant applications … and start simply co-operating.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTechnology of, by and for the people. \u003cem\u003eOur tech, not their tech\u003c/em\u003e. Find out more now at \u003ca href=\"http://www.diglife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.diglife.com\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs for engineering the hi:project … well we’ll be making our case to the Collective in due time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-debrief\"\u003eThe debrief\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the moment we started talking about the hi:project, we contrasted the user interface (UI) and the human interface (HI), the former describing the status quo in which you, the mere \u003cem\u003euser\u003c/em\u003e, are actually the \u003cem\u003eused\u003c/em\u003e, where you are in fact \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/2016/08/less-shaped-manipulated-enjoy-enjoying/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe product being sold, the civilian being controlled\u003c/a\u003e\n. By adopting HI as our terminology, we communicate the intent to reinstate your sovereignty, your dignity, your humanity.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"the hi:project and the Digital Life Collective"},{"content":"\nAn invitation to build our technology together … tech we trust for the web we want.\nOur motivation Digital technologies are undermining our privacy, permitting mass state surveillance, enabling censorship, undermining journalism, and spreading fake news. It feels forbidding, uncertain, unsafe – more problem than solution, and far from the original vision for the Internet and Web.\nAnd yet we’re optimistic that we can join together to fix it. The problem isn’t really the technologies we have to work with of course, but rather the way they’re crafted and who gets to do the crafting.\nOur purpose We’re forming the Digital Life Collective to combine our resources to research, design, develop and certify digital products and services to protect privacy, foster trust, and work towards a sustainable and equitable world. We aim to pool $20m p.a. to make this happen.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re invited Please join the Digital Life Collective, indeed be the Digital Life Collective. We need you. We can’t do this without each other.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s our 16-page stack with a bit more detail. [UPDATE 25th April 2017 – visit www.diglife.com ]\nIf you love it, please join us.\nIf you sense the deep potential, please join us.\nIf you feel today\u0026rsquo;s digital landscape is selling us all short, please join us.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re intrigued about making this happen as a co-operative, please join us.\nNext steps There\u0026rsquo;s a handful of us right now. We\u0026rsquo;re talking to people who work in this space so that we become dozens or possibly hundreds of likeminds in the coming weeks.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve been careful to scope the why? and qualify the what? \u0026hellip; but we\u0026rsquo;ve stopped short of detailing the what? until we\u0026rsquo;ve accrued greater collective intelligence \u0026hellip; by your joining us of course.\n✿ We\u0026rsquo;ll be plugging into all the riot.im goodness very soon.\nUPDATE 15th June 2017 removing references to our Slack instance. We have since migrated to our own instance of Mattermost, and participation there is restricted to members of our co-operative.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2017/01/digital-life-collective/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Digital Life Collective\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/collective-logo-800-300x181.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAn invitation to build \u003cem\u003eour technology\u003c/em\u003e together\u003c/strong\u003e \u003cstrong\u003e… tech we trust for the web we want.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"our-motivation\"\u003eOur motivation\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDigital technologies are undermining our privacy, permitting mass state surveillance, enabling censorship, undermining journalism, and spreading fake news. It feels forbidding, uncertain, unsafe – more problem than solution, and far from the original vision for the Internet and Web.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet we’re optimistic that we can join together to fix it. The problem isn’t really the technologies we have to work with of course, but rather the way they’re crafted and who gets to do the crafting.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Digital Life Collective"},{"content":" We could see it coming. Sort of.\nI wrote a post titled myChannel back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded:\n\u0026hellip; mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. \u0026hellip;The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel \u0026hellip; and they own it. It is myChannel.\nSeems I got some part right. Two thirds of Facebook users and 59% of Twitter users in the US get their personalised news from the social network. Facebook counts a quarter of the world\u0026rsquo;s population as users.\nSeems I got some part wrong, to our collective misery. My post referenced user choice of personalisation service, which is of course absent under monopoly conditions. And alarmingly, my assumption that the individual would own their own channel was way off target.\nThe Internet and the Web have been radically centralized in the intervening years. The network effect has left many abdicating their choice of media, exposure to ideas, facility to corroborate stories, and the opportunity to debate different points of view, to algorithms written by distant employees of centralised and centralising services whose commercial motivations do not necessarily extend to ensuring you get anything other than the instant gratification that your current viewpoint is spot on. You are right. They are wrong. Empathy be damned.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve seen this with Brexit and during the US election this year.\nSince 2011, the effect has become known as a filter bubble – automated information separation that isolates each of us in own cultural or ideological bubbles.\nThe hi:project intends to help sort out this mess by re-establishing each and everyone of us back in the driving seat of our own lives. I like this metaphor because driving entails responsibilities as well as rights.\nImage source: By Jeff Kubina, BY-SA 2.0 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/12/unfreedom-filter-bubbles-lets-pop-bloody-things/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"bubbles\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/bubbles.jpeg\"\u003e We could see it coming. Sort of.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI wrote a post titled \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2005/04/mychannel/\"\u003emyChannel\u003c/a\u003e\n back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026hellip; mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. \u0026hellip;The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel \u0026hellip; and they own it. It is myChannel.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The unfreedom of filter bubbles – let's pop the bloody things"},{"content":"[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30414\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1024\u0026rdquo;] An aerial image of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.\nPhotographer: GCHQ/Crown Copyright. CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption]\nArguing that you don\u0026rsquo;t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don\u0026rsquo;t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.\nEdward Snowden, 2015 (source )\nI get asked now and then how to improve one\u0026rsquo;s personal privacy, digitally speaking. It\u0026rsquo;s unsurprising that such questions are directed my way given privacy is a core objective of the hi:project , and yet I seemed to have attracted more than the usual number of questions since my last post – Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface .\nYou might want to stop commercial entities intruding – it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to sum up in a sentence or two how egregious the state of commercial surveillance is today. You might want to help head off the realisation of a surveillance state if only because you\u0026rsquo;ve read somewhere that such things don\u0026rsquo;t end well. You might simply want to have less data about your movements and purchases and media habits and general proclivities out there because it\u0026rsquo;s not a case of if the corresponding databases are hacked but when.\nImportantly, I write this post the very week the UK has passed the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy. The so-called Snoopers\u0026rsquo; Charter is disgusting, distressing and, in good part, stupid.\nWhy stupid?\nWell here\u0026rsquo;s some information about how I protect my privacy. It takes just a little tech savvy and a little money. I have both, as will very many of the people the surveillance state supposedly exists to fight, leaving only the masses – the innocent, technically less literate and/or poor and/or couldn\u0026rsquo;t care – the subject of Orwellian intrusion and risk. The chilling impact on the vibrancy of our society effects everyone.\nVirtual private network Subscribe to a VPN now and always use it – on your phones, tablets, computers.\nI use Private Internet Access . For the monthly price of a flat white (disclosing my metropolitan proclivities there), my broadband ISP and mobile phone operator can\u0026rsquo;t see what I\u0026rsquo;m doing – my web browsing is invisible to them, immediately undermining one of the major thrusts of the new UK law.\nIt also hides my IP address so commercial surveillance cannot use that unique identifier to attribute and connect up my various activities.\nImportantly, Private Internet Access logs nothing so there is nothing that might be subpoenaed. Whichever VPN service you choose, make sure this is the case.\nAdded bonus – if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever wanted to access some media but have been prevented from doing so because you\u0026rsquo;re outside a specific country (eg, the BBC while abroad, or some US content while you\u0026rsquo;re in the UK), you can just change the endpoint of the VPN to that country in a click and you\u0026rsquo;re sorted.\nDo not track Turn on Do Not Track (DNT) in every browser on every device you use. There is no legal requirement for any company to obey your request not to be tracked, but at least the more ethically minded listen. And use Firefox – the only browser that only has your best interests at heart.\nDNT instructions for:\nFirefox Safari Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Opera By the way, if you\u0026rsquo;re still using Internet Explorer (IE), you should know this browser is no longer maintained by Microsoft. You should stop using it immediately and chose one of the above instead.\nSecure web surfing You should make sure that your browser establishes a secure connection to the website or web service you\u0026rsquo;re visiting whenever that facility is available. Use HTTPS Everywhere .\nAnonymous search Use DuckDuckGo . As good as Google and Bing 90% of the time. And seriously, do you really want to look up that sexual disease or \u0026rsquo;not normal\u0026rsquo; thing and have the search provider add it to your profile?\nIn appropriate instances, just use Wikipedia and follow the links from there.\nBlockers There are a variety of browser add-ons available to frustrate commercial surveillance. They stop the trackers embedded into websites from doing their thing. I use Privacy Badger . Not all blockers are created equal \u0026hellip; check out Better for Safari, where you\u0026rsquo;ll also be able to read more on that topic.\nGoogle Analytics When those running a website want to understand how others use it, they configure some web analytics capability. The Google Analytics service is the market leader. Opt out here .\nEmail This one is tricky. Configuring your own email service isn\u0026rsquo;t going to suit very many people. So right here I\u0026rsquo;m going to recommend gmail as the most secure / private of all the major email services. Of course, as soon as you let Google into your life, you\u0026rsquo;re now relying on the services of the proprietor of the world\u0026rsquo;s largest digital advertising business and therefore the most prolific tracker.\nFor the more adventurous: Hushmail and ProtonMail .\nMessaging If you\u0026rsquo;re serious about privacy, you don\u0026rsquo;t text / use SMS – that\u0026rsquo;s entirely unencrypted – you use a messaging service. And if you\u0026rsquo;re serious about messaging privacy, you check two things:\nthat it employs so-called end-to-end encryption, and nothing goes via or gets logged with the service provider. Last I checked, the second of these excludes anything from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Recent revelations also throw doubt on Apple\u0026rsquo;s services too. Without hesitation, I recommend Signal .\nVoice Calls from your landline and mobile phone are unencrypted and they are being recorded. Use Signal .\nTransactions Use cash. Yes. I often find it\u0026rsquo;s the payment choice for software engineers. What more validation do you need?!\nOr Apple Pay \u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;protects your personal information, transaction data, and credit, debit, and prepaid card information with industry-leading security.\u0026rdquo;\nWhere you only have a choice of electronic methods, use the most niche. For example, I always use Oyster (dedicated payment method for London public transport services) rather than a bank card contactless payment.\nLocation Prevent Android apps from tracking your movements .\nStop your Apple devices from tracking your movements .\nFacebook The blockers (above) will frustrate Facebook from building the most detailed digital profile of you that you might imagine. (The profile would take hundreds of pages to print.) But perhaps the best method here is too much for you \u0026hellip; leave Facebook.\nIf you think I\u0026rsquo;ve missed anything, or worse have anything wrong, please do leave a comment accordingly. Thanks.\nMore reading Amnesty International – Urgent: Stop the new Snooper’s Charter annihilating our rights Open Democracy – The UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill is about to become law – here\u0026rsquo;s why that should terrify us Gizmodo – Investigatory Powers Bill: A Closer Look at the Plans to Monitor Your Online History The Independent – Investigatory Powers Bill: \u0026lsquo;Snoopers Charter 2\u0026rsquo; to pass into law, giving Government sweeping spying powers Liberty’s briefing on the Investigatory Powers Bill for Report Stage in the House of Lords ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/11/strive-maintain-privacy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30414\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1024\u0026rdquo;]\u003cimg alt=\"GCHQ at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/GCHQ.jpg\"\u003e An aerial image of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.\u003cbr\u003e\nPhotographer: GCHQ/Crown Copyright. CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArguing that you don\u0026rsquo;t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don\u0026rsquo;t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEdward Snowden, 2015 (\u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/just_days_left_to_kill_mass_surveillance_under/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esource\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI get asked now and then how to improve one\u0026rsquo;s personal privacy, digitally speaking. It\u0026rsquo;s unsurprising that such questions are directed my way given privacy is a core objective of \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe hi:project\u003c/a\u003e\n, and yet I seemed to have attracted more than the usual number of questions since my last post – \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2016/10/introducing-google-assistant-surveillance-interface-si/\"\u003eIntroducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou might want to stop commercial entities intruding – it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to sum up in a sentence or two how egregious the state of commercial surveillance is today. You might want to help head off the realisation of a surveillance state if only because you\u0026rsquo;ve read somewhere that such things don\u0026rsquo;t end well. You might simply want to have less data about your movements and purchases and media habits and general proclivities out there because it\u0026rsquo;s not a case of \u003cem\u003eif\u003c/em\u003e the corresponding databases are hacked but \u003cem\u003ewhen\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImportantly, I write this post the very week the UK has passed the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy. The so-called Snoopers\u0026rsquo; Charter is disgusting, distressing and, in good part, stupid.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How and why I strive to maintain my privacy – a post in light of the Snooper's Charter"},{"content":"\nA new kind of interface has surfaced over the past five years – artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘personal assistants ’.\nApple Siri started the ball rolling, swiftly followed by Google Now , Microsoft Cortana , Amazon Alexa , and half a dozen others. But it now has a new apogee, a new sector defining moment, a revolution dressed up as evolution. The only thing more alarming than its instrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.\nGoogle Now is now Google Assistant , and it comes integrated into Google’s first full-on (i.e. not just a reference design) mobile phone – the Pixel.\nhttps://youtu.be/FPfQMVf4vwQ Google’s CEO announced Google Assistant earlier this month in a blog post titled:\nA personal Google, just for you. He writes:\n… in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally available … This is why we built the Google Assistant, which allows you to have a natural conversation between you and Google.\nOur name for this new category of interface is Surveillance Interface (SI), and I can explain why by teasing apart the title of that blog post and that one paragraph.\nHere’s the definition in my dictionary of personal:\nbelonging to or affecting a particular person rather than anyone else; of or concerning one’s private life, relationships, and emotions\n“A personal Google.”\nBut Google feels the need to append “just for you.”\nWho else?!\nAh, now there’s a question. You see, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product [ref ]. “A personal Google” actually conveys that it’s about your person for Google because the company is in the business of surveillance capitalism . Appending “just for you” almost seems a clumsy way to hide the intent.\nNow to Google’s claim to effect “a natural conversation between you and Google”.\nI’m searching for an adjective to describe this claim, but in polite company let me stick to disingenuous.\nHow natural is it for your interlocutor to be logging every single interaction ever, forever? How natural is it for them to know every place you’ve been and your purpose for going there? Does your everyday natural experience of conversation entail the other party recording every website you visit, every video you watch, every purchase you make, every message you send? Do you find it natural to have all this subject to constant, real-time, systematic analysis to forecast what you’ll do in the future so it can be sold as actionable ‘consumer insight’?\nShould you naturally ask in conversation “why do you say that?”, are you naturally told “can’t say”?\nIs it natural conversation for your personal power to be partially absorbed by a corporate you’ve never met applying software you don’t understand to nudge your actions in ways you don’t appreciate?\nFor the avoidance of any doubt that might remain, Google Assistant is NOT a natural conversation. Google Assistant is a most unnatural conversation involving a level of surveillance even the most imaginative dystopian writers of the 20th Century couldn’t quite muster.\nGoogle is an awesome company, with awesome people, that creates awesome technology, but it must reconsider the way such technology is manifest in our lives and in our societies if they don’t want to create a reality distinctly at odds with what I understood the founding values of the company to be.\nHere’s Natasha Lomas at Techcrunch telling it how it is:\nSo the actual price for building a ‘personal Google for everyone, everywhere’ would in fact be zero privacy for everyone, everywhere.\nAnd William Turton doesn’t pull any punches in his Gizmodo post:\nGoogle’s AI Plans Are A Privacy Nightmare The Human Interface Part of our attempt to explain the Human Interface (HI) is to compare and contrast it to the User Interface (UI), quite simply because it’s easier to imagine things in relative rather than absolute terms. Here then is how Surveillance Interface weighs in on our comparison table:\nUser Interface (UI) Surveillance Interface (SI) Human Interface (HI) 50 year old construct fit for 20th Century computing for the pervasive digital environment of the 21st Century for the pervasive digital environment of the 21st Century up close to the machine up close to the service provider up close to the individual designed for an ‘average’ user designed to surveil the individual uniquely assembled uniquely for the individual the organization’s the service provider’s the individual’s the user must fit to the machine fitted to the individual fits to the individual provides interactive information requires knowledge building by the service provider enables knowledge building by the individual no AI intelligence (AI) is outsourced intelligence (AI) is supplied degrees of awkwardness concealed, blackbox, so ‘disappears’ transparent, ideal, so ‘disappears’ largely static design dynamic, in the moment dynamic, in the moment ‘the interface is the product’ you are the product the product is the product decentralized centralizing, eroding the Web We Want decentralizing, supporting the Web We Want Originally posted to the hi:project blog .\nImage source: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/not-ok-google/ ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/10/introducing-google-assistant-surveillance-interface-si/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"google assistant by techcrunch\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/google-assistant-techcrunch.jpeg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA new kind of interface has surfaced over the past five years – artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_personal_assistant\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epersonal assistants\u003c/a\u003e\n’.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eApple Siri\u003c/a\u003e\n started the ball rolling, swiftly followed by \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Now\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle Now\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_%28software%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMicrosoft Cortana\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon Alexa\u003c/a\u003e\n, and half a dozen others. But it now has a new apogee, a new sector defining moment, a revolution dressed up as evolution. The only thing more alarming than its instrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGoogle Now is now \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Assistant\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle Assistant\u003c/a\u003e\n, and it comes integrated into Google’s first full-on (i.e. not just a reference design) mobile phone – the Pixel.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface (SI)"},{"content":"\nPrime Minister Teresa May has presented the conclusion that many experts (yes, the very same derided by Brexiteer Michael Gove) worked out some time ago. There is no such thing as a \u0026lsquo;soft\u0026rsquo; Brexit.\nThe very idea of a \u0026lsquo;soft\u0026rsquo; Brexit may as well have been called \u0026lsquo;have-your-cake-and-eat-it\u0026rsquo; Brexit, because very rarely if ever does one get such an opportunity, particularly when there are 27 others at the table.\nAin\u0026rsquo;t gonna happen.\nAt the first day of the Conservative Party conference yesterday May put herself entirely the wrong side of history, embracing nationalism and isolationism at a time when the only way our species is going to get along together better – and it really needs to get along together better – is if we work at it together.\nInstead she harrumphed and told everyone we were going to take our ball home.\nShe did so in the name of sovereignty even though our sovereignty is denuded in this connected world when its broader influence is diminished.\nPerhaps most astonishingly, she had the arrogance to tell us Remainers that we\u0026rsquo;re trying to subvert democracy by our constant attention to protecting the best interests of our economy and therefore our jobs, our schools and our healthcare system. She appears to have forgotten rather conveniently that the EU Referendum offered voters the opportunity to tell the government what they didn\u0026rsquo;t want. A vote against membership of the EU was not a vote for anything quite simply because no-one had actually presented a picture of the alternative. That is only taking shape now.\nI just tweeted the following diagram. We must ascertain what proportion of \u0026lsquo;soft\u0026rsquo; Brexiters, perhaps reluctant Brexiters, would now prefer to Remain given the true, shocking, wrenching vista of Brexit.\nBy denying an answer to this question, May is subverting democracy.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/10/pot-calling-kettle-black-teresa-may-subverting-democracy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Daily Mail front page 3 Oct 2016\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Daily-Mail-front-page-3-Oct-2016.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePrime Minister Teresa May has presented the conclusion that many experts (yes, the very same derided by Brexiteer Michael Gove) worked out some time ago. There is no such thing as a \u0026lsquo;soft\u0026rsquo; Brexit.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe very idea of a \u0026lsquo;soft\u0026rsquo; Brexit may as well have been called \u0026lsquo;have-your-cake-and-eat-it\u0026rsquo; Brexit, because very rarely if ever does one get such an opportunity, particularly when there are 27 others at the table.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The pot calling the kettle black – Teresa May 'subverting democracy'"},{"content":"\nBitcoin is an experiment. That\u0026rsquo;s granted. The fact that it\u0026rsquo;s trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m.\nNevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a ballpark limit of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has \u0026lsquo;gone through\u0026rsquo; – non-recourse transactions – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you\u0026rsquo;re looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that\u0026rsquo;s not for this post.)\nWhile 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week.\nState channel – more exciting than it sounds The crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It\u0026rsquo;s at the heart of the currency\u0026rsquo;s success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It\u0026rsquo;s with a fair degree of excitement then that I\u0026rsquo;ve been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013.\nThe jargon here is state channel – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!)\nNew, just like before Joseph Poon, a co-inventor of Lightning, observes :\nI think that it is important to look at the way financial systems work because bitcoin development is replaying the history of money. The Lightning Network has significant similarities with how existing financial systems solve this problem.\nThis immediately makes sense to me. I ran a peer-to-peer payments company called Nochex from 2001 to 2003, and my experience there might help you grasp Lightning more readily.\nNochex was effectively the UK equivalent of Paypal (which only operated in US dollars in the US back then), and we became the dominant e-payment service used on eBay(UK). In designing our service, we had two options for processing customer transactions: (1) move the value of each transaction out of and back into the traditional payment infrastructure, incurring the associated transaction costs and passing these costs plus our mark-up onto our customers; or (2) allow customers to keep a pool of money circulating within the system at no fee, charging only when they wished to transfer money in or out of the system.\nThese two approaches were known as straight-through and stored-value respectively, a distinction I recall labouring over when asked to advise the forerunner of Her Majesty\u0026rsquo;s Revenue and Customs about the money laundering ramifications. We opted for the latter to avoid excessive costs and encourage \u0026lsquo;flow\u0026rsquo;. (It also helped that we earned a bit of interest on the millions in the bank.)\nLightning might be said to be Bitcoin\u0026rsquo;s stored-value equivalent. It achieves the same ends in not too dissimilar a fashion, ie, avoiding mining costs and encouraging \u0026lsquo;flow\u0026rsquo;. And I mean a helluva lot more flow.\nBy thunder To explain this, I need to introduce a couple more names that may well be new to you. Sorry about that, but new worlds come with new words. \u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m prompted to write this post today having just read that later this month we might see a 100,000 transactions per second proof-of-concept of Raiden.\nWhere Bitcoin has Lightning, Ethereum has Raiden , its instantiation of Lightning. The word Raiden is derived from Raijin , the Japanese god of Thunder.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s Ethereum?\nBorrowing from the US fondness for verb-izing nouns, I tend to describe the Ethereum project as platform-izing the blockchain – the project is developing a blockchain-based distributed computing platform. They are making it easier for everyone to innovate with blockchains for all variety of applications, including but not limited to currency.\nRaiden makes Ethereum relevant for high volume, distributed micro-payments for example, which undoubtedly sounds useful when it comes to billions of things looking to earn their keep in the emerging Internet of Things.\nDecentralized and distributed disruption Your organisation needs to understand how such technologies transform your competitive landscape – and indeed the land beneath you.\nTake this slide from a stack I presented at Workfront\u0026rsquo;s annual shindig earlier this year for example. Just as we contemplate the incredibly rapid rise and dominance of disruptive \u0026lsquo;sharing economy\u0026rsquo; brands in certain sectors – Uber in transport and Airbnb in accommodation are most often referenced in this context – then we can also contemplate the imminent disruption of the disruptors.\nFor the benefit of anyone using a screen reader here, the image describes Sharing Lite as decentralized and monopolistic, commercialising surplus for extractive value. It\u0026rsquo;s biggest threat is Sharing Original. The characteristics of Sharing Original are distributed, natural, liberating surplus for mutual value. It\u0026rsquo;s worth emphasising the definitions the slide adopts for decentralized and distributed:\nA decentralized system decentralizes location but not control A distributed system also distributes control. The blockchain may have been mentioned in your organisation. Perhaps someone is keeping tabs on Ethereum. Maybe you\u0026rsquo;re now the first to know of Lightning. Either way, there is no doubting the speed with which these distributed technologies are redefining the possible.\nFurther reading An introduction to transaction blockchains A three-part explanation of the Lightning Network by Bitcoin Magazine: one , two , three . What is Ethereum? Distributed heterarchical organisation The hi:project – distributed technology (to advantage your products and services, or indeed deposition others\u0026rsquo;) Note: I have had nothing to do with Nochex since departing, and have no knowledge of its current products or business model.\nImage credit: Fernando Flores, BY-SA 2.0 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/08/lightning-cryptocurrency-internet-things/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"lightning\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/lightning.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBitcoin is an experiment. That\u0026rsquo;s granted. The fact that it\u0026rsquo;s trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a \u003ca href=\"https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Maximum_transaction_rate\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eballpark limit\u003c/a\u003e\n of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has \u0026lsquo;gone through\u0026rsquo; – \u003ca href=\"https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:FAQ#Why_do_I_have_to_wait_10_minutes_before_I_can_spend_money_I_received.3F\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003enon-recourse transactions\u003c/a\u003e\n – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you\u0026rsquo;re looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that\u0026rsquo;s not for this post.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"state-channel--more-exciting-than-it-sounds\"\u003eState channel – more exciting than it sounds\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It\u0026rsquo;s at the heart of the currency\u0026rsquo;s success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It\u0026rsquo;s with a fair degree of excitement then that I\u0026rsquo;ve been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe jargon here is \u003cem\u003estate channel\u003c/em\u003e – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Lightning – cryptocurrency and the Internet of Things"},{"content":"\nWhy do firms exist? Strangely, no-one appears to have asked this question until a 27 year-old economist did so in 1937.\nRonald Coase published his answer in The Nature of the Firm, now considered a seminal text. He studied the circumstances that led entrepreneurs to hire people as employees instead of simply contracting jobs out to traders and came up with the answer we now simply refer to as transaction costs. People are hired when the various associated costs are lower than they would be otherwise.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a similar sounding question, but one that is actually fundamentally different. What is the meaning / the purpose of business?\nCoase needed to look no further than economics to explain why firms exist. Their existence is a binary thing. But any question seeking to address meaning and purpose encompasses philosophy, sociology, and politics.\nUnavoidably, any answer is framed in terms of \u0026hellip; What\u0026rsquo;s best? What\u0026rsquo;s optimum? Why? How? And for whom?\nThe answer was in fact framed economically for a long time in terms known as shareholder value, and perhaps Coase\u0026rsquo;s question and answer influenced this blinkered perspective. But we\u0026rsquo;ve found and are still finding that a different answer can lead to superior economics, and not just in terms of profitability but in terms of the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit.\nEuler Partners\u0026rsquo; just published its sense Summer 2016 report, The meaning of business. Available here as PDF and also on Medium.com . If you\u0026rsquo;re frustrated with today\u0026rsquo;s typical responses to this question, and / or if you want to build sustainable business, you\u0026rsquo;ll find the report provoking.\nImage credit: By Leo Reynolds , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/07/the-meaning-of-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"open for business\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/open-for-business.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy do firms exist? Strangely, no-one appears to have asked this question until a 27 year-old economist did so in 1937.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRonald Coase\u003c/a\u003e\n published his answer in \u003cem\u003eThe Nature of the Firm\u003c/em\u003e, now considered a seminal text. He studied the circumstances that led entrepreneurs to hire people as employees instead of simply contracting jobs out to traders and came up with the answer we now simply refer to as transaction costs. People are hired when the various associated costs are lower than they would be otherwise.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The meaning of business"},{"content":"\nThe quickest glance at my posts and tweets will tell you two things: (1) we just voted on a multi-faceted complex issue with too little understanding further muddied by the lies pedalled by both sides , and (2) I believe everyone in the UK is better off by our remaining in the European Union.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a reason Margaret Thatcher concurred with Lord Attlee in describing referenda as \u0026ldquo;a device of dictators and demagogues\u0026rdquo; – the same reason the UK has representative parliamentary democracy and not direct democracy. (If only David Cameron had paid more attention in class.)\nFormer Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describes the resultant mess as a \u0026ldquo;debilitating cocktail of hubris, incompetence and dishonesty \u0026rdquo;.\nYet putting the well-known shortcomings of direct democracy to one side for the moment, we must accept that just shy of 52% of voters went to the polling stations last month and put a cross against Leave. The majority has spoken, right?\nNeither Leave nor Remain is perfect, of course, yet to my mind the Leave argument is akin to trashing your car because the ride is a bit bumpy, so I find myself asking \u0026hellip; which majority should we be thinking about?\nHashtags The hashtag #wearethe48 has emerged in recent days, self-referencing the 48% who voted Remain. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit weak if you ask me, particularly if you compare it to #thefiftypointtwo .\nWhat do I mean by \u0026ldquo;the fifty point two\u0026rdquo;?\nWell no-one appears to be arguing that we can negotiate a Brexit under the now famous Article 50 in less than two years. Indeed, Iceland negotiated with the EU for five years , despite having only one major product, fish, and a population of a third of a million. Negotiations failed.\nBut let\u0026rsquo;s be stupidly over-optimistic for a moment and assume we can close a deal in 2018. What might the population, as we know it today, think then? Time for some quick maths. Let\u0026rsquo;s assume:\nEveryone votes in a June 2018 referendum the same way they did in June 2016 (ie, we ignore the reports of Leave voters regretting their decision ) Those too young to vote this year vote in future years in proportion to 18-24-year-olds this year. And hey presto, we find that 50.2% vote in 2018 to Remain, and that majority keeps growing after that.\nMy calculations are available to review here . The calculations are not straightforward and simplification has been chosen in favour of the Leave campaign. It would be valuable to have this analysis repeated by a psephologist.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/07/eu-referendum-majority-now-matters/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Brexit march June 2016\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/brexit-march-june-2016.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe quickest glance at my posts and tweets will tell you two things: (1) we just voted on a multi-faceted complex issue with too little understanding further muddied by the \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2016/06/eu-referendum-campaigns-learn-aristotle/\"\u003elies pedalled by both sides\u003c/a\u003e\n, and (2) I believe everyone in the UK is better off by our remaining in the European Union.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s a reason Margaret Thatcher concurred with Lord Attlee in describing referenda as \u0026ldquo;a device of dictators and demagogues\u0026rdquo; – the same reason the UK has representative parliamentary democracy and not direct democracy. (If only David Cameron had paid more attention in class.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFormer Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describes the resultant mess as a \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/03/britain-general-election-before-article-50\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003edebilitating cocktail of hubris, incompetence and dishonesty\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYet putting the well-known shortcomings of direct democracy to one side for the moment, we must accept that just shy of 52% of voters went to the polling stations last month and put a cross against \u003cem\u003eLeave\u003c/em\u003e. The majority has spoken, right?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeither \u003cem\u003eLeave\u003c/em\u003e nor \u003cem\u003eRemain\u003c/em\u003e is perfect, of course, yet to my mind the \u003cem\u003eLeave\u003c/em\u003e argument is akin to trashing your car because the ride is a bit bumpy, so I find myself asking \u0026hellip; which majority should we be thinking about?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A majority now or when it matters? #thefiftypointtwo"},{"content":"\nOn June 23rd 2016, 51.9% of UK voters opted to leave the European Union. I’m writing here to say:\nWe made a mistake We should have another think about it, and The Liberal Democrats might hold the key and not realise it. _________\nUPDATE: Approximately eight hours after my post here, Liberal Democrats pledge to keep Britain in the EU after next election . This is great news. We now just need to persuade the party that they need to run at it on a single-issue basis. By doing so, pro-EU voters can cast a clear vote without other policies clouding the matter, and there can then be no ambiguity in interpreting the vote. This could make the difference between winning and not, and winning by a massive margin. As I write in conclusion to this post, I’m sure the electorate would then thank them in the follow-on election.\n_________\nWinston Churchill, considered one of the Founding Fathers of the EU , noted that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. It’s wonderful to live in a democracy, and I find it exciting and exasperating, fascinating and frustrating, to be part of the European union of democracies.\nA democracy cannot be perfect. The people can make mistakes — of course— and I believe we just made one. A really really big one. Whereas we might change our minds every five years with general elections, leaving the EU is the sort of thing that impacts for generations.\nWho am I to say we made a mistake? Well, I’m no-one other than someone who cares about the UK, who doesn’t want to see the Scottish leave us , who doesn’t want the Northern Irish to think about leaving us , who cares about our economy and people’s jobs , who cares about our environment , who cares about our global leadership in scientific research , who enjoys cultural differences, and who was kinda influenced by an overwhelming consensus for Remain amongst experts in all fields of expertise.\nOn the one hand, The Economist made a neat compilation of this expert insight. On the other hand, Michael Gove pleaded with the electorate to ignore experts.\nI think people in this country have had enough of experts.\nWTF. Seriously. Is this how we decided this one ? And you tell me this Gove bloke now wants to help lead the country?!\nSuch dismissal of the facts makes me think that a bunch of people made a protest vote not really thinking that perhaps votes can tip the balance .\nhttps://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/746452158904680448 The future UK wants a future in the EU Did those under 50-years of age, who it seems clearly want to remain in the EU , just get pushed out to sea by those over-50\u0026rsquo;s who, with all due respect to the maths, won’t be around so long to live with the consequences?\nYoung people are NOT happy .\nIt seems the result would have been to Remain had the voting age been 16 as it was for the Scottish referendum in 2014. And just in case you have a problem with 16-year olds voting, just think that had we run this referendum in 2018 rather than this year, the effect is the same. Remain.\nAnd the funny thing is (no, actually, none of this is funny) … there’s no way we will have left the EU by then !\nPut that another way, in 2018 the UK will be busy as the underdog trying to negotiate an exit that the majority of us won’t want. And all the more so as those who voted to Leave start to see the Leave campaign’s lies for what they were — as we are already seeing by their own admissions .\nAnother vote … no not like that So how can we fix this?\nOver a million people have already signed a petition to run a second referendum with a new rule requiring a majority of 60% and turnout of at least 75%. I’ve signed it, but I’m not sure where those numbers were plucked from to be honest.\nNo. I fear that won’t do it. It’s all a bit too fabricated. So how about this?…\nI got an email yesterday evening from Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats. (Not just to me — I’m sure thousands got it. I get email from all mainstream parties, fyi.) He writes:\nI’m devastated. Today fear has beaten hope, fiction has beaten fact and our country has been catapulted into the unknown.\nI’m with you Paddy. And Tim feels the same .\nThe Liberal Democrats accept that the people have chosen and this is the result we must move forwards with.\nNo Paddy! No. No. No.\nThe Lib Dems hold the key!\nI believe that if we had a bit of a rethink, if we let a few more of those 17 year-olds get to 18, if we sit and watch how Boris \u0026amp; Co. get on, then any party that runs a one-issue campaign at the next UK election, on remaining in the EU, will win. And that result, being the most recent, would top this week’s.\nRemember that the next UK election will almost certainly take place before we’re anywhere near having brexited. And long before if two-thirds of MPs decide to vote for an early election in light of this week’s events (and three quarters of them were in the Remain camp ).\nYou guys kept the Conservatives in balance during the coalition government, and now it’s time to step in again. You can do the job, and then call another general election on all the other issues we really should be grappling with as a country. And you never know, we might show our deep gratitude.\nImage source: Tim Peake of the European Space Agency (ESA) shared this nighttime photo on Jan. 25, 2016, writing, “Beautiful night pass over Italy, Alps and Mediterranean.”\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/06/doh-can-another-think-brexit-thing-please/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"ISS-46_Italy,_Alps_and_Mediterranean_at_night_Tim_Peake\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/ISS-46_Italy_Alps_and_Mediterranean_at_night_Tim_Peake.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn June 23rd 2016, 51.9% of UK voters opted to leave the European Union. I’m writing here to say:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWe made a mistake\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWe should have another think about it, and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Liberal Democrats might hold the key and not realise it.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eUPDATE: Approximately eight hours after my post here, \u003ca href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-referendum-result-lib-dems-remain-liberal-democrats-live-policy-stay-leave-a7103186.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLiberal Democrats pledge to keep Britain in the EU after next election\u003c/a\u003e\n. This is great news. We now just need to persuade the party that they need to run at it on a single-issue basis. By doing so, pro-EU voters can cast a clear vote without other policies clouding the matter, and there can then be no ambiguity in interpreting the vote. This could make the difference between  winning and not, and winning by a massive margin. As I write in conclusion to this post, I’m sure the electorate would then thank them in the follow-on election.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWinston Churchill, considered one of the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_fathers_of_the_European_Union\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFounding Fathers of the EU\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill#column_207\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003enoted\u003c/a\u003e\n that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. It’s wonderful to live in a democracy, and I find it exciting and exasperating, fascinating and frustrating, to be part of the European union of democracies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA democracy cannot be perfect. The people can make mistakes — of course— and I believe we just made one. A really really big one. Whereas we might change our minds every five years with general elections, leaving the EU is the sort of thing that impacts for generations.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Doh! Can we have another think about this Brexit thing please?"},{"content":"\nAn email sent to all my friends and family.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica calls him the first genuine scientist. And it\u0026rsquo;s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago.\n(That\u0026rsquo;s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!)\nI read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012 , and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are:\nEthos – argument by character Logos – argument by logic Pathos – appealing to the emotions. Practitioners of such persuasive techniques experiment with their combination. The article features rhetoric expert Jay Heinrichs who shares his secret recipe: \u0026ldquo;I have found that pathos and ethos come first. Add a dash of logos to work in your position, then bring it on home with a dose of pathos.\u0026rdquo;\nIt appears then that I may be no great persuader. Having been born logical of mind, I always try logos, then some more logos, and if that doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, repeat the logos even as my interlocutor runs for the door. Logically then, I realise that describing myself as \u0026rsquo;logical of mind\u0026rsquo; is far from self-congratulatory.\nThe article opens and closes with a description of a persuasive campaign to reduce binge drinking in the UK \u0026hellip; the image is inebriated people sprawled on the pavement, legs akimbo. But I\u0026rsquo;m not emailing about binge drinking. I\u0026rsquo;m emailing about the appalling Remain and Leave campaigns for next week\u0026rsquo;s referendum on the UK\u0026rsquo;s membership of the European Union.\nMy fascination with rhetoric contrasts with my disgust at its execution in recent months. It appears my beloved logos is reduced to think-of-a-number and think-of-just-one-thing. Actually _\u0026rsquo;_reduced\u0026rsquo; is being too kind. Spoiled? Bastardised? Corrupted? And most importantly, as Aristotle surmised, it\u0026rsquo;s to the detriment of the overall debate and therefore the quality of the outcome \u0026hellip; how we\u0026rsquo;ll all feel and behave whatever the majority concludes on the 23rd.\nIn terms of think-of-a-number, the Remain campaigners would like you to know that \u0026ldquo;Britain would be permanently poorer if we left the EU to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the country. That\u0026rsquo;s a fact everyone should think about.\u0026rdquo; The corresponding speech is delivered in front of a poster reading : \u0026ldquo;£4,300 a year. Cost to UK families if Britain leaves the EU.\u0026rdquo;\nIs this right? \u0026ldquo;No\u0026rdquo;, says the Guardian . \u0026ldquo;The Treasury has arrived at the number by taking the annual gross domestic product of the economy, about £1.7tn. It has then assumed that the some of the benefits of EU membership – stronger trade growth, higher inward investment and improved productivity – would be lost.\u0026rdquo;\nEconomics is notoriously difficult to comprehend let alone communicate, yet in treating you and me as children, the Remain campaign transforms a detailed, diligent, and independent analysis – and not least one of very many to present a similar pessimistic outlook for the Brexit scenario – into a joke soundbite.\nFortunately for them, the Leave campaign is also vying for position as Liar-In-Chief of the Ministry of Propaganda.\nImagine you hand over a fiver when buying a pint of milk \u0026hellip; the Leave campaign will then tell you milk costs five pounds a pint. That\u0026rsquo;s the same \u0026rsquo;logic\u0026rsquo; it applies in its relentless reference to Brussels costing us £350m a week, when independent analysis shows this to be a gross exaggeration to the point where there\u0026rsquo;s no other way of describing the claim than as a bald lie.\nAs for think-of-just-one-thing, Leave campaigners prefer to avoid all of the complex, inter-related factors, and focus the majority of attention on migration. More precisely, \u0026ldquo;uncontrolled\u0026rdquo; migration from other EU countries, a deliberate word choice to get that pathos fired up. In the process, they also blank the independent economic analysis that concludes these migrants – from both Eastern and Western countries – are net contributors to our economy, and make almost no mention of British ex-pats.\nThere are 8.3 million foreign-born people in the UK and 5 million UK-born people living abroad (2014 figures ). The difference is approximately three Birminghams. The current housing crisis and real stresses on education and healthcare services are blamed on EU migration because governments of all colours have for years used Brussels as a scapegoat for their policy failings, including under-investment in housing, schools and hospitals. All politicians should have known that membership of a broader union would involve turbulent ebbs and flows, a characteristic of all complex adaptive systems. How on Earth did they expect equilibria in the early decades? Why on Earth do they appear to have been so ill-prepared?\nRemainers are guilty of much the same think-of-just-one-thing, avoiding broad and deep multi-issue dialogue, defaulting instead to spreading economic fear, uncertainty, and doubt.\nAgh! This isn\u0026rsquo;t what Aristotle had in mind!\nPersuasion should corral the undecided. Persuasion should bring people over to your camp from the other. Yet I personally don\u0026rsquo;t know any one person that evidences either of these outcomes. One chap I chat with most days on the way into town describes himself as \u0026ldquo;increasingly undecided\u0026rdquo;! For persuasion to best succeed it needs pathos, ethos AND logos.\nWe have in fact learned of one defection of late, an MP so repelled by the lies of her Leave colleagues that she\u0026rsquo;s joined forces with the Remain liars instead. You couldn\u0026rsquo;t make this sort of stuff up.\nBut how then should I finish my email here? Heinrichs offers me advice \u0026hellip;\nAmong the three most potent weapons – pathos, ethos, and logos – ethos, or argument by character, is the most effective. “And by the way, clichés – we call them ‘commonplaces’ – are among the most useful devices in rhetoric if you use them right.”\nThis observation may as well be The Sun\u0026rsquo;s motto as they pronounce: \u0026ldquo;We must set ourselves free from dictatorial Brussels .\u0026rdquo; Cliché through-and-through. How having no say on the future of the EU when we must still comply with the market\u0026rsquo;s rules improves our freedom I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know! Isn\u0026rsquo;t having \u0026rsquo;no say\u0026rsquo; the very definition of being dictated to? And how about freedom to influence our continent, freedom to continue to move around the EU, freedom to exert global influence through the EU?\nBut heh, why spoil a cliché?\nPerhaps though, given my confessed shortcomings when it comes to this rhetoric art, I should leave the final sentiment to a \u0026rsquo;national treasure'.\nDespite every map providing documentary evidence to the contrary, cricketer Ian Botham concludes : “Personally, I think that England is an island.\u0026quot; (He might just be forgiven for not knowing the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom, but he actually played for England so you\u0026rsquo;d think he might know about Scotland and Wales and the absence of interposing seas. On the other hand, maybe he\u0026rsquo;s already thinking about metaphoric drawbridges.)\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; And I think that England should be England. And I think that we should keep that.”\nI wonder which historic version of England that might be exactly. Perhaps an imaginary, bucolic one, with the regular sound of leather on willow before tea and scones. I wonder whether, on his global sporting travels, Botham ever contemplated one humanity on one planet and the corresponding imperative to get along better together. To communicate. To seek understanding. To co-operate. To share. To adapt. For all our sakes.\nDrawbridges are a medieval resort suited to medieval sociology. This century we can and indeed must attend to the interconnectedness and interdependencies of our societies, our markets, our species and our environment if we\u0026rsquo;re to co-pilot this one and only planet of ours.\nAnd I wonder then of course whether you\u0026rsquo;ll vote with me to keep the UK engaged in the world, engaged with our biggest marketplace, engaged in a peace project past and future , engaged in a vibrant, imperfect, and ever exasperating collaboration of different cultures with shared aspirations for a mutually prosperous, democratic, peaceful and sustainable future.\nHowever you decide to vote, I hope we\u0026rsquo;re all agreed that we need to improve our democracy\u0026rsquo;s facility to grapple with complex and complicated issues, particularly as that describes just about everything we all really care about.\nThanks for taking the time to read this email. Do please forward to anyone you think might like it.\nKind regards, Philip.\nImage source .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/06/eu-referendum-campaigns-learn-aristotle/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Aristotle\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Aristotle.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAn email sent to all my friends and family.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica \u003ca href=\"http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Author?author=Aristotle\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ecalls\u003c/a\u003e\n him the first genuine scientist. And it\u0026rsquo;s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(That\u0026rsquo;s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-15/jay-heinrichss-powers-of-persuasion\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eI read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cem\u003eEthos\u003c/em\u003e – argument by character\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cem\u003eLogos\u003c/em\u003e – argument by logic\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cem\u003ePathos\u003c/em\u003e – appealing to the emotions.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e","title":"The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle"},{"content":"\nNote: the IIW community adopted the qualifying prefix \u0026ldquo;self-\u0026rdquo; not too long after this post was first written, ie. self-sovereign technology.\nAgency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.\nTo be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.\n(Giddens 1986 )\nTechnology must always be a component of agency as tools change our capacity to ‘act otherwise’. And it’s a component that’s all the more pervading and penetrating as the delineation of the analogue and digital dissolves, as ‘the device’ assumes an exo-brain role and as sensory ‘things’ form our exo-nervous system.\nSimultaneously, I have a digital self and a self with digital presence.\nSimultaneously, this is me and it is my representative, my agent.\nSimultaneously, it is core to my agency and must be subject to it.\nThe degree to which the information technologies and services available to me are subject to my agency and subject to the agency of third parties varies. Considerably. One might postulate that it spans the entire spectrum and find no objection. Given that the distribution of technologies up and down that spectrum has varied individual and societal ramifications, it is useful to help locate any given technology on the spectrum. This question is a great start …\nHow might we define sovereign technology?\nThe question is at the heart of the hi:project and it was on a recent project call that I learned from Adrian Gropper that the 22nd Internet Identity Workshop grappled with answering it (26th , 27th , 28th April).\nAdrian has translated that work into the 10 components of sovereign technology, presented here for your information / comment / critique.\nThe 10 components of sovereign technology In no particular order.\n1/ Policy assertions The technology must be able to store and assert the owner’s policies.\neg. DNT , VRM , UMA Authorization Server run as a component of sovereign technology\n2/ Authentication This refers to the authentication of the owner of the sovereign technology. A range of owner authentication methods (eg. a password, biometrics) can and should be offered.\neg. FIDO 3/ Longitudinal notification endpoint The technology should include a way to accept notifications from the services it interacts with. The technology can then decide what to do with the notifications (eg. alert the owner, modify the policies). To the extent the notification endpoint is registered with a service it provides a longitudinal context for interaction with that service. The common use of email as a pseudonymous identity as well as a longitudinal notification endpoint is convenient but it introduces privacy and spam risks.\n4/ Non-repudiable link To enable the sovereign technology to engage in non-repudiable (legally binding) transactions to the extent that the non-repudiable link is kept safely within the technology.\neg. biometric\n5/ Whitelist of IdPs for RqP claims When external requesting parties and services approach with claims, the technology must have a way to manage trust in the associated assertions. Claims may be presented in a standardized manner such as OpenID Connect or emerging blockchain -based methods. The owner should be provided with a user interface for whitelisting identity providers.\n6/ Backup and recovery of the tech Sovereign technology should be protected from loss or compromise. This can be as simple as keeping an offline copy or it can be associated with an owner-controlled voting mechanism where the owner decides the rules.\neg. M of N 7/ Delegation The sovereign technology may be associated with a subject that is unable to operate technology (eg. parents of a minor, children of incompetent parents). In that case the technology and the protocols that it uses must support control by a custodian without confusing the identity of the custodian and the sovereign subject. We define ownership of the technology as the ability to take it off-line or delete it. A custodian is typically the owner of the sovereign technology but can transfer that ownership at will to another custodian or to the subject herself.\n8/ Competence tests / partial delegation The sovereign technology may be associated with a subject that is only partially competent to operate it. This is the case for younger children accessing web services and some elders. Sovereign technology may offer custodial features to serve this. The custodian may be a person or the state and ownership might be subject to regulation which calls into question the definition of sovereign technology.\n9/ Filter for incoming data A sovereign technology often acts as a filter for incoming data. This is related to the notification endpoint above but broader, in the sense that any interaction with a sovereign technology may change its state.\n10/ Logging A sovereign technology should provide a log of operation. The log may be private to the technology or public in order to meet trust and compliance requirements. Blockchain-based public logs, to the extent they are permission-less and governance-free meet the definition of a sovereign technology (no privacy policy) and are a significant enabler.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/05/defining-sovereign-technology-can-build-know-see/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"head\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/head.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNote: the IIW community adopted the qualifying prefix \u0026ldquo;self-\u0026rdquo; not too long after this post was first written, ie. self-sovereign technology.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAgency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(\u003ca href=\"http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520057289\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGiddens 1986\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTechnology must always be a component of agency as tools change our capacity to ‘act otherwise’. And it’s a component that’s all the more pervading and penetrating as the delineation of the analogue and digital dissolves, as ‘the device’ assumes an exo-brain role and as sensory ‘things’ form our exo-nervous system.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimultaneously, I have a digital self and a self with digital presence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimultaneously, this is me and it is my representative, my agent.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimultaneously, it is core to my agency and must be subject to it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Defining Sovereign Technology, so we can build it, and so we know it when we see it"},{"content":"\nI was interviewed by Rob Smith, Editor, Influence magazine . Published in two parts , May 2016.\nWhat does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional? You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Unfortunately, the English language also has us using the word ‘influence’ in terms of something someone might possess.\nI always prefer to work with the first meaning here for two reasons: first, the changing of hearts, minds and deeds is the actual object of interest to public relations professionals (reciprocally of course, more on which later); second, we might quantify the former better than the latter, and indeed many of the better attempts to score influence as something someone might possess rely to a certain extent on that capacity being demonstrated (ie, the former again).\nWhat does this mean to PR practice right now? Well that depends on your flavour of practice, characterised rather usefully at this juncture by Andy Green as simply old school and new school.\nOld school still places its faith in the publicity model. Some might say spin. It’s about controlling the message and getting the right message out there. It’s about perceptions with some hope that collectively such manipulated perceptions might lend an organisation a reputation somewhat resembling the one the board would like the organisation to have.\nIn my experience, such practitioners have little interest in understanding the wheres and whyfors of measurement and evaluation just so long as the metrics show what they need to show. This group is the last redoubt of AVE, and if you have any numbers that purport to show that we’ve spoken to more of the more influential type of people, that’s just absolutely fabulous.\nTo my mind, new school works primarily with the reality from which perceptions are formed, and must then work as hard getting the message in to inform the organisation’s continual adaption. The practice appreciates that if an organisation wishes to be perceived as a great company, a great employer, a great citizen and a great custodian of our planet, then it must be just that. Reality is perception in the digital age of increasing connectedness and transparency where every single person packing a smartphone has more potential in the right situation than a 1990s camera crew.\nThe profession of public relations entails the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill. The process is critical to growing and maintaining relevance, reputation and trust, and therefore public relations is central to setting and achieving organisational objectives. Influence is not the sole domain of the public relations team, but rather its effort must be to facilitate everyone else’s facility to influence and be influenced appropriately.\nIn your 2011 book The Business of Influence you discuss the measurement of influence and how there has been a trend towards measuring popularity (lots of hits retweets etc) rather than how something has changed behaviour. Has the PR business come any closer to accurately measuring influence since then? It’s not unfair to say that there was some degree of snake oil for sale. It’s not unfair to say that where this was taken up by PR practitioners, there was some degree of snake oil then proffered to their internal and external customers. In a 2010 conference presentation I put it like this:\nInfluence is not some quantity invented by a PR firm, analytics provider, or measurement and evaluation company that rolls up a number of indices and measures into some relatively arbitrary compound formula that makes any appreciation of the underlying approach, variables and mathematics completely opaque to the end-user thereby radically attenuating any little use it may have been but in such a way that it can be branded nicely and sold as ‘unique’.\nI had calmed down a bit by this slide – the main word on the title slide had been ‘Bullshit’.\nAnd yet network science should allow us to better understand how societies, communities and markets work. My own company is named after the mathematician who invented graph theory, so I obviously sense the potential.\nSome of today’s vendors of influence-related analytical services are clear about both the power and the shortcomings of their technology, and some procurers are getting smarter in knowing what questions to ask.\nWe can wield these technologies to help us navigate complexity, but remember this – you don’t know yourself exactly why you think or behave the way you do, so the idea that some remote technology can divine this precisely is fantasy, and what a good thing too!! Rather, we’re just looking to develop communities and networks to tune into signals that allow us to get ‘the message’ in and out more efficiently to respond more appropriately and more quickly than the competition.\nSuch reciprocity is not a given by the way. In this recent guide to influencer marketing , it looks like I was the only expert quoted really emphasising such symmetry.\n(Disclosure: I’m on Traackr’s board of advisers.)\nYou speak in your book about the need for Chief Influence Officer – would you say this is something that has been taken on board? If not has any other role taken on this responsibility? What benefits would it bring to have a dedicated CInflO? Who needs a new C-title, right?! I wasn’t the first to float a new one, and I won’t be the last. But in this instance, I don’t feel too bold in claiming that I might have been half right.\nThe domain of influence is clearly deeper and wider than the scope of the PR professional today – there’s influence in everything an organisation does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do. I wrote the book in 2010, and consider the rise of the Chief Data Officer since then (courtesy of Google Trends as of 26th Nov 2015):\nWhy should I refer to CDOs in answer to your question when I don’t mention the title in The Business of Influence?\nWell, as conveyed at greater length in my free ebook Attenzi – a social business story , we can consider information technology as both the information and the technology. We don’t think about the tech so much now that it’s all run for us in the cloud – just as we don’t pump our own water or generate our own electricity; so the focus is on the information. Information is data given meaning and relevance in a specific context or for a specific purpose. And information may make people think something they wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done; in fact, a highly referenced definition of information in the field of information philosophy is – a difference that makes a difference.\nIn more than a few ways then, the Chief Data Officer and the Chief Information Officer may be closer to the Chief Influence Officer role I presented in my book than the typical PR Director today. Ultimately of course it must be considered today as an interdisciplinary role, and an interdisciplinarity few individuals can claim.\nHow far would you say that the business of influence is important to the internal culture of an organisation? For brevity, let’s adopt the succinct definition of culture as: the way things are done around here. Existing culture then aids or impedes the willingness to sensitise everyone in the organisation to the Six Influence Flows and their subsequent facility to act on this information (to be influenced and to influence); and the relentless and complex influence flows impact culture of course. It’s all in the mix.\nThere does appear to be an organisational trend towards openness, transparency, and working out loud, if only to expose the corresponding data to other systems (people and IT) that might find it useful. An example. Yesterday, you may have not known of Bob in the Paris office working on the same stuff as you. Today, you might search to see if there is a Bob out there. Tomorrow, you and Bob are automagically connected. Yet if your culture remains wedded to some rigidly hierarchical command-and-control, fiefdom building, political crap, you and Bob may be frustrated from doing great work together.\nAnd what if Bob doesn’t work for your company? Perhaps he works for a supplier. Perhaps he’s a customer. The 21st Century organisation cannot be defined by its payroll, and the Chief Influence Officer (or equivalent) must work to make the organisation permeable. In fact this takes us into the domain of sustainability – the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment – but that’s for another day.\nPreviously, you have commented that if you are in business you are in the business of influence. Yet PR Directors do not always get a seat at the boardroom. What are your views on whether the boardroom pays sufficient attention to public relations? Disciplines and functions should serve strategy (defined as articulating where to play and how to win). Strategy should not serve disciplines or functions. In other words, I don’t think it matters one jot what functions have a seat at the boardroom. What matters is that the board strives to assemble and maintain an appropriate blend of disciplinary skills, knowledge and experience (and not take experience as a proxy for skills and knowledge).\nMoney, time, materials and influence are universal fundamentals of business. They all flow. And individuals with deep insight into how one or more of these flow and how such flows might be wielded for competitive advantage, to grow opportunities and attenuate risk, should be considered for the board. A paucity of PR Directors in the boardroom can only mean that too few have demonstrated such competence, and / or the business critical yet complex nature of influence flows is not yet well understood by the board for it to identify the need.\nHow has this been affected since social media changed the relationship between organisations and stakeholders? If I may, a quick extract from my Attenzi ebook:\nReputation management does not actually mean managing reputation, and brand management does not actually mean managing a brand. They mean actively attending to the business of influencing and being influenced such that the resultant beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are conducive to our achieving organizational objectives.\nMoreover, very few board directors these days fail to appreciate the importance of social media. The majority I have the opportunity to speak with however still consider social / digital to be a bolt-on rather than a build-in. As myopic as that might be, a bolt-on is a management function that requires no board room representation.\nWhat are your views on what the boardroom wants from its PR/comms teams? Is it entirely focussed on the bottom line or do boards pay enough attention to the more holistic view of reputation? How can comms/PR pros understand the needs of the board better? From observation alone, many (non-PR) board directors maintain an old school understanding of public relations – sustained by the PR profession’s continued old school practice of course – which does not help in this regard. Until an organisation undergoes an epiphany along the lines we’re talking about here, it’ll continue to apply 20th Century practice as it withers and dies. If you don’t mind, I’ll put this lot out of my mind as I answer your questions more fully.\nAs I noted in my book, Jay O’Connor (CIPR President 2010) stresses the role that public relations must play at board level, helping to explore, define, plan and execute strategy. She particularly underlines its role with respect to reputational risk and opportunity, and good governance.\nIt’s uncanny how closely the Institute of Directors’ articulation of the purpose of the board overlaps with the definition of public relations I offered earlier. The board’s key purpose “is to ensure the company’s prosperity by collectively directing the company’s affairs, while meeting the appropriate interests of its shareholders and relevant stakeholders”.\nSuch direction craves information to inform decision making (influence), demands sensitivity and responsiveness of the management (influence), and encompasses market intelligence and the needs of ‘relevant stakeholders’ (the Six Influence Flows).\nA focus on influence flows helps inform, qualify and quantify the PR profession’s contribution in a much more sophisticated and productive manner than the profession may be said to have achieved to date.\nMeasurement and evaluation capabilities largely suck today, and that’s why I developed a framework, The Influence Scorecard , under the auspices (if not yet endorsement) of the CIPR, the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications, and the Conclave, to tap into existing business performance management frameworks and bring influence strategy to life. I trust then that boards will recognise that this – or something very like it – is what the organisation needs and ask it of their PR teams.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/05/qa-cipr-influence-magazine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"CIPR Influence magazine\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/CIPR-Influence-magazine.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was interviewed by Rob Smith, Editor, \u003ca href=\"http://influence.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n. Published in \u003ca href=\"http://influence.cipr.co.uk/2016/05/11/pr-influence-q-philip-sheldrake/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwo\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"http://influence.cipr.co.uk/2016/05/18/directors-old-school-understanding-pr/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eparts\u003c/a\u003e\n, May 2016.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"what-does-influence-mean-to-the-public-relations-business-currently-is-it-more-important-since-the-rise-of-digital-or-has-it-always-been-at-the-heart-of-what-it-is-to-be-a-public-relations-professional\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Unfortunately, the English language also has us using the word ‘influence’ in terms of something someone might possess.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI always prefer to work with the first meaning here for two reasons: first, the changing of hearts, minds and deeds is the actual object of interest to public relations professionals (reciprocally of course, more on which later); second, we might quantify the former better than the latter, and indeed many of the better attempts to score influence as something someone might possess rely to a certain extent on that capacity being demonstrated (ie, the former again).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does this mean to PR practice right now? Well that depends on your flavour of practice, characterised rather usefully at this juncture by Andy Green as simply old school and new school.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Q\u0026A with CIPR Influence magazine"},{"content":"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/workfront-leap-may-2016 I\u0026rsquo;m in Orlando Florida this week with the Workfront team and their partners and customers for their annual Leap conference. It\u0026rsquo;s my privilege to participate in a panel session on the future of work, and to deliver a session with the more grounded title – making work suck less!\nAs you can see from the stack here, the first too common affront I identify and tackle is what I generally call the \u0026lsquo;X steps to heaven\u0026rsquo; crowd. Those authors and companies proffering clickbait that teases with some relatively short sequence of steps needed to take you from zero to hero – in this context, going from a dysfunctional to awesome organization.\nBullshit. Life is complex and society is complex and all organization is complex, and authors of this sort of crap are either ignorant at best or disingenuous at worst. Complexity is a natural product that cannot be simplified – we can only aspire in this digital age to navigate it more simply.\nI then go on to identify the lessons we might learn from Mother Nature, the necessity to sustain mutual value for all stakeholders, and some of the hazards we must avoid along the way, not least corporate surveillance.\nLast night we were at the Magic Kingdom, and this evening we\u0026rsquo;re dining at Epcot. Who said work has to suck?! :-)\nThanks for having me Workfront.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/05/workfront-and-the-future-of-work/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/workfront-leap-may-2016\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/workfront-leap-may-2016\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m in Orlando Florida this week with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.workfront.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWorkfront\u003c/a\u003e\n team and their partners and customers for their annual Leap conference. It\u0026rsquo;s my privilege to participate in a panel session on the future of work, and to deliver a session with the more grounded title – \u003cem\u003emaking work suck less!\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs you can see from the stack here, the first too common affront I identify and tackle is what I generally call the \u0026lsquo;\u003cem\u003eX steps to heaven\u003c/em\u003e\u0026rsquo; crowd. Those authors and companies proffering clickbait that teases with some relatively short sequence of steps needed to take you from zero to hero – in this context, going from a dysfunctional to awesome organization.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Workfront and the future of work"},{"content":" According to The Onion earlier this year:\nWarning of severe consequences if he didn’t see results, Pantheon Digital Consulting COO Daniel Abelson, 59, told employees Monday he wants a relaxed, friendly company culture implemented by the end of the week \u0026hellip;\nInteresting approach.\nOrganisational culture is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down. My favoured definition is simply – how things get done round here. And if you\u0026rsquo;re tempted by new forms of organisation that retire command and control and emphasise self-organisation, how on Earth do you get that process started?\nCan you use that command and control authority one last time to instruct people to dismantle command and control?\nAmazon Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, is famously a fan of one such self-organisation approach, Holacracy . Fast Company was one of many media to report Hseih\u0026rsquo;s ultimatum to employees in 2015:\n\u0026hellip; each employee will be offered at least 3 months severance (and \u0026hellip; reimbursement for benefits) if he/she feels that self-management, self-organization, and our Best Customers Strategy and strategy statements \u0026hellip; are not the right fit.\nIn short, this may be interpreted as (polite version) \u0026ldquo;fit in or go away\u0026rdquo;.\nThe problem is, best intentions accepted, this is hardly inclusive. It can hardly be said to recognise the benefits of or indeed need for diversity for sustainability in complex environments. And at minimum it conveys neither respect nor understanding for those who have effectively been \u0026lsquo;institutionalised\u0026rsquo; in traditional org structures for their entire working lives.\nMoreover, if Holacracy is an answer, it would be the first instance I know of in which a living system thrives from a proprietary trademarked code of operation. On the basis that it can’t be the answer, but may be adapted / forked in infinite ways, are we to suppose that the trademark owners lay claim to the kernel of the system, metaphorically speaking?\nI was challenged when I made this assertion on the Responsive Org Slack instance. My interlocutor appeared to be asserting that the collective is merely the collection of the atomistic agents, and individual agents select the structure; in this instance Holacracy. For many employees today, especially those in large firms, I\u0026rsquo;m afraid that is simply not how they feel.\nThis is related to the fundamental structure / agency question in sociology. A consensus is emerging (pun intended) amongst leading sociology theorists that we’re contemplating a complex system here within which the balance of power between the structure and the agent varies from one situation to the next, from one moment to the next.\nStructure frequently has a massive impact on the freedoms of the agents.\nI am therefore questioning whether we should really invoke proprietary code for the structural component of the complex system, especially as we know structure is damn resistant to individual agency once it’s established. And I\u0026rsquo;m questioning the encouragement of new organisational forms by command.\nThere is no simple prescription, but simple rationale might suggest avoiding instruction and deferring to leading by example. If your example demonstrates a new way for \u0026lsquo;getting things done round here\u0026rsquo;, you are leading a cultural transformation.\nI\u0026rsquo;m left concluding that the adoption of servant leadership (as described beautifully by Adam Grant in Give And Take ) is prerequisite to a transition to bottom-up organisational forms.\nImage source: sari_dennise , cc by 2.0 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/04/barking-top-down-command-bottom-up/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"dog barking\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/dog_barking.jpg\"\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://www.theonion.com/article/boss-wants-friendly-relaxed-company-culture-place--52229\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAccording to The Onion\u003c/a\u003e\n earlier this year:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWarning of severe consequences if he didn’t see results, Pantheon Digital Consulting COO Daniel Abelson, 59, told employees Monday he wants a relaxed, friendly company culture implemented by the end of the week \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInteresting approach.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrganisational culture is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down. My favoured definition is simply – how things get done round here. And if you\u0026rsquo;re tempted by new forms of organisation that retire command and control and emphasise self-organisation, how on Earth do you get that process started?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCan you use that command and control authority one last time to instruct people to dismantle command and control?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Barking a top-down command to be bottom-up"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;ve just bought an Onkyo TX-8150 network receiver. Lovely. Especially because it can drive two pairs of speakers, eats so-called hi-res music (24/192 with a 32/384 Hi-Grade DAC), and comes ready to play nice with the likes of Spotify, Airplay and Deezer.\nSpotify tarnished its reputation somewhat with its privacy cock-up last year, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet entertain hi-res. Apple\u0026rsquo;s Airplay looks neat but doesn\u0026rsquo;t do hi-res either, and totally ignores Android. Hmm. So let\u0026rsquo;s check out Deezer I thought to myself. A rare European Unicorn . And while it describes lossless CD quality as hi-res when that\u0026rsquo;s not really what the term means, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure my \u0026rsquo;listening environment\u0026rsquo; is that sensitive! Lossless CD quality will do me.\nBetter check out its app. Google Play points out that the Deezer app has access to a whole heap of stuff :\nIn-app purchases – Allows the user to make purchases from within this app Device \u0026amp; app history – Allows the app to view one or more of: information about activity on the device, which apps are running, browsing history and bookmarks Identity – Uses one or more of: accounts on the device, profile data Photos / Media / Files – Uses one or more of: files on the device such as images, videos or audio, the device\u0026rsquo;s external storage Wi-Fi connection information – Allows the app to view information about Wi-Fi networking, such as whether Wi-Fi is enabled and names of connected Wi-Fi devices Device ID \u0026amp; call information – Allows the app to determine the phone number and device IDs, whether a call is active and the remote number connected by a call Other – receive data from Internet; delete apps; turn device on or off All this just to stream some music!!\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30215\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1024\u0026rdquo;] My new network receiver[/caption]\nBut, as for any and all apps so described on Google Play, the terminology doesn\u0026rsquo;t convey the self-imposed limits. What do I mean by that?\nWell let\u0026rsquo;s say you ask your neighbour to feed your dog at 5pm and give him your door key. There is an implied understanding that with such a privilege he\u0026rsquo;ll let himself in and feed your dog. And then leave. He won\u0026rsquo;t make himself at home and watch a movie. He won\u0026rsquo;t take a shower. And he definitely won\u0026rsquo;t have a look through your drawers.\nNeighbours understand the neighbourly context. App developers may well not. So I have sought to find out what Deezer\u0026rsquo;s Android app actually does. I won\u0026rsquo;t catalogue the dozens of tweets or the half dozen or so emails. I will say that the Deezer team is responsive on Twitter but responsive is not a synonym for productive\u0026hellip; we\u0026rsquo;ve got nowhere I wanted to go since my first tweet seven weeks ago.\nTo demonstrate the lack of progress, I\u0026rsquo;ll continue my metaphoric story:\nMe: Hi. You need my key to feed the dog. Can I just check that you don\u0026rsquo;t intend to do anything else in the process?\nDeezer: Yes, we need your key to feed your dog.\nMe: Yes yes I know! But you\u0026rsquo;ll have my key! What else will you do with your unfettered access to my home? For example, you might decide to feed yourself too, or use my nail clippers [I was going to get more personal, but you get the idea\u0026hellip;]\nDeezer: Ah I see. Well, we have to have access to feed your dog.\nAgh!\nWithout wishing to belabour the point, but on the basis that the Deezer customer service team just doesn\u0026rsquo;t get it, I wanted to hear:\nDeezer: We both know we need your key to feed the dog. There isn\u0026rsquo;t really a lesser form of access that would serve the same purpose. But don\u0026rsquo;t worry, we intend to feed the dog immediately on arrival and do nothing further and just let ourselves out straight afterwards.\nBack in the app world, here\u0026rsquo;s an idea of what I need Deezer to tell me. And more to the point, if they can\u0026rsquo;t confirm this then Deezer makes money by surveilling its customers and pimping that data to whoever will buy it. (I might like lossless CD quality music streaming, but not that much!) Deezer, please tell me:\nThe app collects information about activity on the device and which apps are running only so that it can help itself optimise for better usage, and for no other reason, and this data does not leave the phone. For the avoidance of doubt, Deezer (the company, as opposed to the app) cannot determine what other apps you have installed and that might be running.\nThe app reports back “browsing history and bookmarks” that only relate to when you click on a Deezer link requiring a re-direct to the app. This applies to no domains we don\u0026rsquo;t own.\nThe app needs to know when a call is active to stop playback and, therefore, when to recommence. The app does not record the number of the connected call, and no call history is relayed to Deezer\u0026rsquo;s servers.\nAnd after all that\u0026rsquo;s said and done, I still can\u0026rsquo;t think of one possible reason why the company should want the app to report back the names of all my connected Wi-Fi devices. (Especially those nail clippers.) It\u0026rsquo;s none of their Deezing business.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2016/01/why-cant-deezer-answer-simple-questions-about-privacy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Deezer website screenshot\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Deezer-website-screenshot.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just bought an \u003ca href=\"http://www.uk.onkyo.com/en/products/tx-8150-126088.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOnkyo TX-8150\u003c/a\u003e\n network receiver. Lovely. Especially because it can drive two pairs of speakers, eats so-called \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-resolution_audio\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehi-res music\u003c/a\u003e\n (24/192 with a 32/384 Hi-Grade DAC), and comes ready to play nice with the likes of Spotify, Airplay and Deezer.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpotify tarnished its reputation somewhat with \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34016658\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eits privacy cock-up\u003c/a\u003e\n last year, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet entertain hi-res. Apple\u0026rsquo;s Airplay looks neat but doesn\u0026rsquo;t do hi-res either, and totally ignores Android. Hmm. So let\u0026rsquo;s check out \u003ca href=\"http://deezer.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDeezer\u003c/a\u003e\n I thought to myself. \u003ca href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/15/spotify-rival-deezer-to-raise-upwards-of-335m-from-french-public-listing/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eA rare\u003c/a\u003e\n European \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_%28finance%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eUnicorn\u003c/a\u003e\n. And while it describes lossless CD quality as hi-res when that\u0026rsquo;s not really what the term means, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure my \u0026rsquo;listening environment\u0026rsquo; is that sensitive! Lossless CD quality will do me.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why can't Deezer answer simple questions about privacy?"},{"content":"\nI was invited last week to talk about the future of manufacturing at an event run by the manufacturing practice of one of the big law firms. Here\u0026rsquo;s a whistle stop summary. It\u0026rsquo;s a mind-blowing vista.\nIntro On considering political, economic, social and technological factors, it\u0026rsquo;s unarguable that we\u0026rsquo;re contemplating major flux in manufacturing. As with any flux, today\u0026rsquo;s players will either win out or lose out, and clearly everyone in this room wishes to contribute to and participate in the winning side of things!\nWith that in mind, I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore some major themes:\nDehumanisation Dematerialisation Decentralisation Deindustrialisation That list sounds fairly destructive, yet I believe manufacturing is then transformed, manufacturing is vital, and manufacturing is more exciting than ever.\nDehumanisation It\u0026rsquo;s not easy to define what it means to be and to feel human, but it typically entails things such as being able to exercise critical thinking, autonomy, spontaneity, imagination, to participate in social groups and to feel a sense of self-esteem.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve transitioned, in good part at least, from the inhuman aspects of Taylorism – the discredited facets of so-called scientific management – to empowering cellular organisation. Goodbye time-and-motion; hello sociocratic circles .\nAnd those empowering approaches developed as part and parcel of the Toyota Production System and by other pioneering manufacturers are now infecting org design for all functions and disciplines across all variety of organisation. It\u0026rsquo;s integral to the management philosophy that appreciates decisions are perhaps best made by those closest to the situation, those most aware of the facts and the implications.\nAnd yet factory life / production / the supply chain is leading the way again, but this time returning slowly but surely to regard the human in mere automaton terms. We’re connecting the environment that surrounds them. We\u0026rsquo;re wielding information technologies to attenuate variation, to optimise, to increase responsiveness. To the advocates this is \u0026ldquo;smart manufacturing\u0026rdquo;. To the critics it’s workplace surveillance that disempowers employees, stripping away their autonomy.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re on the shopfloor with a heads-up display being fed instructions by a machine. You comply. In fact, to reach for another neoligism, you may have been Uberized .\nReportedly, a Fedex driver must explain every deviation he makes from the computer\u0026rsquo;s navigational instruction \u0026hellip; so much for the freedom of the open road! And yet vehicles will soon need no driver at all \u0026hellip;\nAdvanced robotics today is almost incomparable with the field of robotics at the turn of the century. The degree of awareness and autonomy that is now possible allows robots to work right alongside and with people in complex recognition, cognition and manipulation tasks. The self-driving vehicle is, of course, a robot. It might not be classed as intelligent per se, but smart enough to allow the passenger to kick back and do something more interesting instead. And of course today\u0026rsquo;s employed driver can be \u0026ldquo;redeployed\u0026rdquo; [air quotes to convey scepticism!]\nThink of the Amazon warehouse worker filling in until the robots are ready for the most advanced tasks. Think about the white collar analyst, now out-analyzed for mere pennies on the pound \u0026hellip;\nSuch artificial intelligence was once the domain of those with privileged access to incredible computing resources and pretty fancy software. Until this month that is when Google open sourced TensorFlow . That’s it. Help yourself! Things are changing so fast that I had to revisit the stuff I wanted to cover here to include such things playing out right now.\nAnd these things impact us all, not just those in manufacturing or logistics. When an outcome that impacts your life is the product of complex software we’ve entered the realm that author and academic Frank Pasquale labels the black box society . As one series of comedy sketches puts it:\nComputer says \u0026ldquo;No\u0026rdquo;.\nIt becomes humanly impossible to unpick the reasons, the rationale. This dehumanising trend in business has reached the point that warrants its own label, and quite aptly it\u0026rsquo;s Digital Taylorism.\nDematerialisation I\u0026rsquo;ve just discarded a CD player, a thousand CDs, and three iPods. I will never need anything like them again.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve just bought a new dishwasher. It will probably be the last one we buy. Next time we\u0026rsquo;ll be buying dishwashing. In providing this service the manufacturer is incentivised to extend the application of Reliability Centred Maintenance beyond the factory floor to its machines in our homes.\nThe so-called sharing economy is recognition that my street really only needs one lawnmower, one drill, one jet washer. Not only is that preferable in terms of money and finite resources, but sharing and favours and obligations to one another are recognised as a key component of healthy community.\nA study by the University of Texas estimates that 90% penetration of self-driving cars in America would be equivalent to a doubling of road capacity and would cut delays by 60% on motorways and 15% on suburban roads. A study of Singapore\u0026rsquo;s transportation needs concluded that the mobility needs of its entire population could be met by one third of the cars on the country\u0026rsquo;s roads today if these were self-driving taxis.\nLess stuff. Less infrastructure. Product-as-a-service is dematerialisation. It\u0026rsquo;s demassification. It\u0026rsquo;s decarbonisation.\nSuch product service systems are no longer a point of differentiation, they are a fundamental basis by which manufacturing remains relevant. It\u0026rsquo;s the interweaving of the physical and the informational, the atoms and the bits. We do more with less atoms, with less energy, with greater intelligence.\nDematerialisation is considered mission critical in sustainability terms, in terms of using our planet\u0026rsquo;s finite resources more parsimoniously, but the term sustainable has broader meaning, the perfect segue to \u0026hellip;.\nDecentralisation Given the growing appreciation of the nature of complexity and the complexity of nature, we know we’re in the domain of systems thinking and sustainability – the health and resilience of living systems including our planet, our societies, and our organisations, including our manufacturers and associated supply chains.\nDecentralisation enhances agility, resilience and self-healing. It\u0026rsquo;s why you don\u0026rsquo;t see Mother Nature centralising anything.\nNow manufacturing couldn’t cope with complexity in the mid-20th Century. The Toyota Production System pioneered a pull over a push system, making product more nimbly on demand rather than to fill some estimated future plan of what demand might be, but the chain of events was still rather Newtonian. Linear. Simple.\nNow, courtesy of information technologies – not least the Internet and the Web – organisations have the potential to navigate complexity, and part of that response is decentralisation.\nLast century we saw airlines such as Delta and logistics firms like Fedex pioneer the hub and spoke system. Computing played with the idea for a while, calling it a star network, before recognising the superiority of further decentralisation … what airlines now refer to as point to point. You prefer point to point right? Well in IT terms we call this predominantly distributed network the Internet, and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of a big thing!\nA decentralised and quite possibly a distributed architecture is the future of the manufacturing supply chain too as the sector is attracted to the improved responsiveness and resilience of the topology. Amazon excels at hub and spoke but is advancing beyond this rapidly as it seeks, effectively, to be pervasive. And for the ultimate distributed manufacture, I refer you to Thingiverse and YouMagine .\nThe edge in C20th manufacturing was efficiency. Now the resilient and responsive trumps the merely efficient .\nOf course I can\u0026rsquo;t talk to decentralisation without mentioning the blockchain. It even made the front cover of The Economist recently.\nUntil just a few years ago we could create an incorruptible centralised database and a corruptible decentralised database, but now we can have one incorruptible, globally distributed ledger.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s quite tricky to get your head round without diving into its cryptographic underpinnings and even The Economist headline, \u0026ldquo;The trust machine\u0026rdquo;, doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite get it right \u0026hellip; the blockchain actually renders trust trustless.\nIn fact the blockchain may erode the very transaction costs Coase originally identified to explain the very existence of the firm, but perhaps that’s a topic for another day .\nDeindustrialisation I use this term contentiously. I mean a decline in the pro rata output of manufacturing, but not necessarily a decline in its value when we take into account the stuff I\u0026rsquo;ve already covered. Whose value that is of course is up for grabs.\nInterestingly, as we transition from subtractive to additive production – the realm of 3D printing and the like – we find that complexity of and variation in design does not correspond with increased complexity and cost of manufacture. This severing of the two is simply unprecedented.\nAs we contemplate open design, open manufacture, distributed and local and personalised manufacture, and product service systems, we may witness massive fragmentation. Or perhaps Foxconn will be ubiquitous, informationally. Time will tell.\nHumanising As with all revolutions, this one is marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.\nOn one hand we might concern ourselves with sleepwalking into some dystopian extrapolation of digital Taylorism – as we appear to be doing right now in this country in terms of Orwellian state surveillance . But on the other hand, I hope in fact that we\u0026rsquo;ll co-design a brighter outcome.\nThree centuries ago the term manufacturing simply meant \u0026rsquo;to make by hand'.\nToday, manufacturing is understood as centralized, large scale production using machinery.\nTomorrow, manufacture might well encompass the distributed design, development, and governance of distributed systems for distributed value creation, to enhance human dignity and meet human needs and desires, to the mutual value of all stakeholders. Easier said than done perhaps, but a distinct possibility nevertheless.\nYet when I say tomorrow, I actually mean today. As cyberpunk novelist William Gibson points out, the future is already here, it\u0026rsquo;s just not yet evenly distributed. The advantage then goes to those who first grapple with such challenges and opportunities, to those who prepare to navigate the complexity.\nImage credit: modelling additive manufacture, by Siemens PLM Software, by-nd .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/11/on-the-future-of-manufacturing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"modelling additive manufacture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/modelling-additive-manufacture.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was invited last week to talk about the future of manufacturing at an event run by the manufacturing practice of one of the big law firms. Here\u0026rsquo;s a whistle stop summary. It\u0026rsquo;s a mind-blowing vista.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"intro\"\u003eIntro\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn considering political, economic, social and technological factors, it\u0026rsquo;s unarguable that we\u0026rsquo;re contemplating major flux in manufacturing. As with any flux, today\u0026rsquo;s players will either win out or lose out, and clearly everyone in this room wishes to contribute to and participate in the winning side of things!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith that in mind, I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore some major themes:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDehumanisation\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDematerialisation\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDecentralisation\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDeindustrialisation\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat list sounds fairly destructive, yet I believe manufacturing is then transformed, manufacturing is vital, and manufacturing is more exciting than ever.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On the future of manufacturing"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;ve just been pointed to a recent post by Tim Marklein on The Measurement Standard, A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications . I can\u0026rsquo;t endorse it as it stands, as I understand it, and this post explains why.\nFor a bit of background, this summary of the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps is based on the one in my book, The Business of Influence , and is one of my post popular webpages attracting thousands of visitors every month ;-) Do check it out if the Scorecard is new to you.\nHaving been frustrated by the very narrow practice of public relations, by the plain wrong approaches to alignment and performance measurement, and by the seeming isolation of the PR function from the rest of the business at a time when its best qualities are more vital than ever, I sought in 2009 to crystallise my ideas to help organisations transition to a more relevant and mutually valuable model. Knowing that organisational change is hard, I focused on the dominant way some of the world\u0026rsquo;s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to tap into the monster\u0026rsquo;s own strengths, jujitsu style .\nI called the resultant framework the Influence Scorecard , and I was delighted that Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned the foreword .\nPR measurement Towards the turn of the decade the PR profession, under the auspices of initiatives such as the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication and the Conclave, began in earnest to articulate what might constitute good performance measurement, leading to the Barcelona Principles and the social media metrics (SMM) standards . The Principles represented a considerable improvement on the prior state of affairs in measuring PR, but then one has to remember that the prior state (outside academe) was so miserable as to effectively constitute nothing worth talking about. The SMM standards represented a painstaking attempt to secure consensus on the meanings of some of the most widely used terms.\nFor my part, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t understand why PR needed to stand apart from the dominant approach to performance alignment and management adopted by the majority of functions one might find in a typical organisation. And yet it needed to be more than that because we are contemplating here a very essence of business that ranks up there with time, money, and materials – namely influence.\nThey all flow. They\u0026rsquo;re universally mission critical.\nIn this post from February 2013 you can see that I was still trying to influence the debate to adopt a model of influence flows and the corresponding Influence Scorecard. And then a few months later the WOMMA Influencer Guidebook 2013 came out, with my two penn\u0026rsquo;orth. And not long after that, the AMEC Madrid conference celebrated the SMM standards and I cajoled again, this time from a distance.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re now at the close of 2015 and Tim is presenting his Balanced Scorecard related ideas (although he uses the pronoun \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip; the Conclave, or the IPR Measurement Commission, or perhaps both?) So it should be constructive to compare and contrast.\nFundamentals Katie Delahaye Paine and I had a good chat in 2013 about some of her Scorecard related client work, predominantly with Canadian clients if memory serves, but other than that this is the first real interest I\u0026rsquo;ve seen from the PR community in the Balanced Scorecard since I started banging the drum six years ago! So that\u0026rsquo;s fantastic. And yet there are two fundamental differences between the Balanced Scorecard for Communications and the Influence Scorecard, as I explain here in this section. And I\u0026rsquo;ve summarised some other problems further down.\nFirst, having already tipped my hat to the Conclave\u0026rsquo;s success in securing consensus on definitions, it\u0026rsquo;s important to focus on the language here too. In considering a Balanced Scorecard for Communications, I note that \u0026ldquo;Communications\u0026rdquo; is only a subset of public relations, and public relations is only a subset of the domain of influence flows . Despite Tim\u0026rsquo;s post emphasising the multi-disciplinary, I can only then reach the following conclusion on the back of that observation, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure someone will jump in here if there\u0026rsquo;s a flaw in my logic\u0026hellip;\nA Balanced Scorecard for Communications seeks to support today\u0026rsquo;s typical functional structure where communications is undertaken by communicators (perhaps specialising according to some media taxonomy ), whereas the Influence Scorecard makes influence its object rather than the functional structure, recognising that:\ninfluence flows are a lifeblood of organisation – if you\u0026rsquo;re in business, you\u0026rsquo;re in the business of influence the org structure and professional disciplines should serve strategy rather than the other way around PR professionals must seek to facilitate everyone else\u0026rsquo;s facility to influence and be influenced appropriately rather than proxy for them . Second, and equally important, the Influence Scorecard serves the influence strategy :\ndescribes how an organization expects to influence and be influenced in ways that are wholly necessary and sufficient to the achievement of the influence objectives and successful execution of the overarching strategy; at once part of the overall organizational strategy (for what is an organizational strategy devoid of any aspect of influence?) and driven by it.\nEach overarching organizational objective may demand a subset of influence objectives wholly necessary and sufficient in influence terms to accomplish the overarching objective. The Six Influence Flows conveys the depth and breadth:\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29648\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;800\u0026rdquo;] The Six Influence Flows[/caption]\n1st flow – our influence with our stakeholders; 2nd flow – our stakeholders’ influence with each other in respect to us; 3rd flow – our stakeholders’ influence with us; 4th flow – our competitors’ influence with stakeholders; 5th flow – stakeholders’ influence with each other in respect to our competitors; 6th flow – stakeholders’ influence with our competition. (The numbers are just labels rather than any indication of relative importance.)\nA strength and a fatal weakness? It has not been uncommon for a reader of my book to ask whether I attempted too much in wrapping my arms around all influence flows rather than sticking with something more practical like a framework for a specific department; marketing, or PR, or customer service say. In other words, isn\u0026rsquo;t a Scorecard for Communications superior in that the context is more familiar, it deals with the world as we find it, and it can therefore be more readily understood and applied?\nYes, in that regard it is superior. However, that then is its fatal weakness.\nThe primary object here is not to find ways to make PR (or Communications) more measurable but to make the organisation more successful, and in organisational design we find that heterarchical topologies are increasingly superior to command-and-control hierarchies, and we find that emergent strategy is, by definition, more adaptive than the deliberate . The design of the 21st Century organisation is increasingly informed by natural living systems – distributed, complex, and responding to information flows (ie, influence flows) – rather than some relatively static construct readily comparable to those preceding it by four or five decades.\nIn short, should a Scorecard type approach lock-in today\u0026rsquo;s functional siloes, or help give the various disciplines permission to adapt organisationally and the relevant sensory feedback to do so appropriately? (See The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self if this assertion floats your boat. And \u0026ldquo;Cart and horse\u0026rdquo; below.)\nMore tactical questions Metric identification and definition Tim writes:\nWhat makes the Balanced Scorecard so valuable is the integration of metrics across channels and disciplines into a unified framework.\nTowards the end of the post, the reader is advised that plugging communications metrics into the Balanced Scorecard \u0026ldquo;enlivens them with organizational context and workflow.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is incorrect. The Balanced Scoreacard does not integrate or enliven metrics defined amongst the constituent parts of an organisation so you merely have them in one easy-to-use format. One might call that a dashboard. Rather, the Balanced Scorecard process designs metrics to secure organisational alignment amongst those parts. It\u0026rsquo;s a downward cascade not an upward aggregation. The context is designed-in not justified after the fact.\nCart and horse He continues:\nThis balanced view not only helps improve measurement and performance of critical functions – it also plays an important role in strategic planning, team alignment, insight generation, and value creation.\nThis emphasis is round the wrong way. The Balanced Scorecard\u0026rsquo;s primary role is strategy development and alignment for improved execution, which in turn requires improved measurement and performance of critical functions.\nFunctional departments be damned First, we defined four quadrants that align and adapt the original Balanced Scorecard framework to reflect a logical grouping of marketing and communications goals.\nTo my main point above, why marketing and communications? What about PR more broadly? What about customer service? Does public affairs or sales or events or anyone else for that matter get a look-in?\nAt a really tactical level for example, it\u0026rsquo;s increasingly considered best practice to encourage subject matter experts to enter into dialogue with the outside world directly \u0026hellip; so are they now part of the \u0026ldquo;communications\u0026rdquo; team? What about everyone in dialogue with / in relationship with everyone else?\nIncoherent quadrant Ultimately, we landed on four quadrants that have become relatively “stable” in our test product. The quadrants reflect a mix of process and outcome measures (vertical axis) mapped against tangible and intangible measures (horizontal axis) as follows\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30183\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;320\u0026rdquo;] The four quadrants of a new Balanced Scorecard for Communications[/caption]\nThe original genius of the Balanced Scorecard was to build-in an anticipated cause-and-effect between the non-financial leading indicators and the financial lagging-indicators. In other words, if we work now to max those non-financial measures, we should execute strategy better than we might have otherwise, which if we have the right strategy means we should be able to look back in a quarter and see that the £s / $s came good too, either in terms of profit (for for-profits) or in terms of maxing their contribution to the mission (for non-profits).\nThis quadrant obfuscates that causal chain. It obfuscates the so-called single-loop and double-loop feedback. And perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s more obfuscation \u0026hellip;\nAccording to the SMM standards:\n“Reach” is the total number of unique individuals who had the opportunity to see an item. Reach is typically a constructed metric that is based on the number of impressions, refined to eliminate the duplication of individuals who have had the opportunity to see the item through multiple media channels, or access points (e.g. laptops and hand-held devices) and to eliminate repeated serving of the item other than valid reproductions of that item across digital media).\nIn other words, reach is not a process. (It also appears to be a metric that suffers from some of the weaknesses that made AVE such a stupendiously stupid waste of time and money in terms of its \u0026ldquo;construction\u0026rdquo;, but that\u0026rsquo;s another issue.)\nRelevance on the other hand isn\u0026rsquo;t addressed by the SMM Standards at all.\nAnd finally, the quadrant confuses tangible and intangible, or at least applies them differently to Balanced Scorecard practitioners. For example, land and machinery are tangible, and intellectual property and reputation are intangible. How Reach – a constructed metric, a remnant from the 20th Century print and broadcast worlds, and one that attracted dubious claims even back then – is tangible, I don\u0026rsquo;t know.\nMaking friends and influencing people I did invite Tim to discuss the work he\u0026rsquo;s presented here a few months ago when I first heard it might be in the offing, but we never found the opportunity. It\u0026rsquo;s obvious to anyone reading this far (thank you!) that I think the current manifestation of A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications is flawed. And do you know what, that might not make one jot of difference! Or it might entice people to revisit The Business of Influence. Who knows?!\nBut I do know that Tim is one of the most thoughtful and diligent PR professionals I\u0026rsquo;ve ever had the opportunity to share time with, and the profession needs more people like him to kick the tyres. Really hard!\nFor my part, I\u0026rsquo;ve found new challenges as I expressed in my post following the PR Council\u0026rsquo;s conference in New York last month. Or perhaps, as the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary become increasingly relevant here and in all matters, I\u0026rsquo;ll continue to influence and to be influenced as I explore social business and org design, Web and Internet Science, and the hi:project.\nMay I ask if this exchange of blog posts has influenced you?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/11/new-balanced-scorecard-communications-critique/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Business-of-Influence.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just been pointed to a recent post by \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/tmarklein\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTim Marklein\u003c/a\u003e\n on The Measurement Standard, \u003ca href=\"http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/2015/11/a-new-balanced-scorecard-for-communications/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eA New Balanced Scorecard for Communications\u003c/a\u003e\n. I can\u0026rsquo;t endorse it as it stands, as I understand it, and this post explains why.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor a bit of background, this \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/balanced-scorecard/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esummary of the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps\u003c/a\u003e\n is based on the one in my book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/a\u003e\n, and is one of my post popular webpages attracting thousands of visitors every month ;-) Do check it out if the Scorecard is new to you.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving been frustrated by the very narrow practice of public relations, by the plain wrong approaches to alignment and performance measurement, and by the seeming isolation of the PR function from the rest of the business at a time when its best qualities are more vital than ever, I sought in 2009 to crystallise my ideas to help organisations transition to a more relevant and mutually valuable model. Knowing that organisational change is hard, I focused on the dominant way some of the world\u0026rsquo;s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/03/organizational-performance-private-conversation-public-now/\"\u003etap into the monster\u0026rsquo;s own strengths, jujitsu style\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI called the resultant framework the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/influence-scorecard/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I was delighted that Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/foreword-to-the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe foreword\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications\" – a critique"},{"content":"\nHaving co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that\u0026rsquo;s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I\u0026rsquo;ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn\u0026rsquo;t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying \u0026ldquo;that\u0026rsquo;s not PR!\u0026rdquo;\nIt does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.\n21st Century public relations isn\u0026rsquo;t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply \u0026ldquo;communications\u0026rdquo; come to that. It isn\u0026rsquo;t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn\u0026rsquo;t a side function and it\u0026rsquo;s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.\nModern PR must focus on reality not perceptions; not merely \u0026ldquo;managing reputation\u0026rdquo; but addressing the deep operational and cultural causes of reputation.\nModern PR can no longer be a profession that picks up those graduates who can\u0026rsquo;t really decide what else to do. It cannot provide refuge for the innumerate, for those averse to process, for those with little appreciation for the broader facets of business.\nThe profession of public relations entails the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill. The process is critical to growing and maintaining relevance, reputation and trust, and therefore public relations is central to setting and achieving organisational objectives.\nPlease do read that last paragraph again, but with this in mind \u0026hellip; influence is not the sole domain of the public relations team, but rather its effort is to facilitate everyone else\u0026rsquo;s facility to influence and be influenced appropriately.\nAs emergent strategy increasingly trumps the deliberate, as the more responsive organisation trounces the merely efficient, as more people appreciate that modern organisation isn\u0026rsquo;t defined by its payroll, the effectiveness with which influence flows between all those sharing your purpose is a critical factor for innovation, for sustainability, for organisational success.\nOn one hand you may consider my observations here arrogant. On the other, I hope you see I remain a fan of PR\u0026rsquo;s potential.\nThe PR Genome Project: Recoding Now With all that said, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t too concerned traveling to participate at the PR Council \u0026rsquo;s conference in New York last week; I had after all had the pleasure to geek out, for want of a better phrase, with the event\u0026rsquo;s designer and host some months earlier. Ogilvy Chairman Christopher Graves gets what I\u0026rsquo;m saying here. He\u0026rsquo;s worked it out – and quite possibly way before I knew anything at all about public relations myself.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_30166\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1024\u0026rdquo;] The view from the Rainbow Room, Rockefeller Plaza[/caption]\nChristopher curated a conference filled with insight and perspectives that should have every delegate leaving with a transformed understanding of their and their profession\u0026rsquo;s role, and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have been invited. I won\u0026rsquo;t precis the sessions here as this post on the PR Council blog does that admirably. Punning on the altitude at which the conference took place (on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Plaza), the post concludes:\nOnce you’ve experienced the heights of PR, things never look quite the same.\nI was particularly delighted by the contribution from Kristian Hammond, Chief Scientist at Narrative Science (see the video appended here). I introduced the concept of machined media at the CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, and Kristian clearly demonstrated that prime time for machined media has arrived. Four years have passed since that CIPR event and I still don\u0026rsquo;t know of one instance where a PR professional has published structured data to accompany \u0026rsquo;the story\u0026rsquo;. Please do comment here if you know of any examples \u0026hellip; there must be some!\nI wrote Attenzi – a social business story to make the broad and deep vista contemplated in good part by last week\u0026rsquo;s event more accessible, more compelling, more communicable, and not too infrequently I am then asked if I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with the rate at which the PR profession is changing; yet that question might come at the problem space and the opportunity from too oblique an angle.\nChange happens. The direction and rate of change in PR is as subject to competitive pressure as anything else. I believe the PR Genome conference nailed it – both the nature and unprecedented speed of change – but what sticks depends on what works. There will be evolution and revolution. There will be leaders and there will be followers. There will be those described as PR professionals and there will be others, and what works may or may not be referred to in future as PR, if only perhaps to disassociate, like me, future from past practice.\nhttps://youtu.be/Nfyn2PhA-ak ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/10/recoding-public-relations/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PR Genome conference New York 2015\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/PR-Genome-conference-New-York-2015.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that\u0026rsquo;s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I\u0026rsquo;ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn\u0026rsquo;t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying \u0026ldquo;that\u0026rsquo;s not PR!\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e21st Century public relations isn\u0026rsquo;t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply \u0026ldquo;communications\u0026rdquo; come to that. It isn\u0026rsquo;t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn\u0026rsquo;t a side function and it\u0026rsquo;s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Recoding public relations"},{"content":"\nYesterday, at Southampton University, my WAIS colleague Ian Brown challenged me to write a haiku to describe my research interests. Here\u0026rsquo;s my effort, the first time in a decade of blogging that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted poetry \u0026hellip; and quite possibly the last time too!\nwe in our biome add data and shake open an Internetome\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/10/a-haiku-for-the-prospects-of-the-sociotechnical/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"internetome\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/internetome.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYesterday, at Southampton University, my \u003ca href=\"http://www.wais.ecs.soton.ac.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWAIS\u003c/a\u003e\n colleague \u003ca href=\"http://webscience.me/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIan Brown\u003c/a\u003e\n challenged me to write a haiku to describe my research interests. Here\u0026rsquo;s my effort, the first time in a decade of blogging that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted poetry \u0026hellip; and quite possibly the last time too!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ewe in our biome add data and shake open an Internetome\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"A haiku for the prospects of the sociotechnical"},{"content":" First published to Gigaom Research .\nOur customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.\nThis is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front:\n… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.\nThis is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.\nSimply complex If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.)\nAs we are in the midst of this transition, Google’s report walks a line to make sense to those for whom the penny is yet to drop. On the one hand it recognizes that (too) many business leaders still regard digital transformation as not much more than the digitalization of the pre-digital. Absent an understanding of complexity and systems thinking, deliberate strategy formulation and mechanistic organizational alignment remain unchallenged dogma within an organization’s four walls. This then is a world in which one might consider a strategic investment (in technology for example) a potential cure-all. Or ‘cure-lots’ at least. The report’s conclusion is, in this context, spot on.\nAnd yet, on the other hand, the Google For Work team appreciates that work is collaboration. As Esko Kilpi puts it :\nThe basic unit of work is not an individual, but individuals in interaction.\nLaszlo Bock, Google’s SVP People Operations, asserts:\nIf you give people freedom, they will amaze you. All you need to do is give them a little infrastructure and a lot of room.\nBock notes that because constant innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, people who succeed in the company “tend to be those with a lot of soft skills: leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability, and loving to learn and re-learn.”\nIn groping then for a more emergent rather than deliberate understanding and approach you might say:\nOrganisational objectives are best met not by the optimisation of the technical system and the adaptation of a social system to it, but by the joint optimisation of the technical and social aspects, thus exploiting the adaptability and innovativeness of people in attaining goals instead of over-determining technically the manner in which these goals should be attained.\nAnd in fact Albert Cherns did say this , in 1976! The report’s conclusion may then be considered misleading when the context does not encompass what I like to refer to as the fabric.\nFabric … when asked to name the realistic measure that would have the biggest business impact on knowledge-sharing and collaboration, investment in relevant technology came out on top. It was named most frequently as the #1 measure for business impact, and also appeared in respondents’ lists of top three factors more than any other option.\nRespondents to Google’s survey identified the technical as #1 for business impact, yet that might be because it’s relatively new and shiny and looks like no more than a purchase order away. Adjusting behavioral norms and hierarchy may only be ranked as less important on the other hand (#’s 3, 4 and 5) because we’ve all seen how difficult transformation of these can be, and indeed the survey’s respondents identified the difficulty in changing working habits as the foremost challenge to creating a more collaborative culture.\nOrganization requires an organizational fabric for it to act coherently with due speed. It is the sociotechnical substrate that supports and nurtures a healthy living system. In transitioning from deliberate to the more emergent, from the Newtonian to the complex, from the 20th to 21st Century, we must lean on one last heuristic to ready ourselves for competing in rude chaos – beat your competitors in getting the sociotechnical working for you. So not the social or the tech, and not the social and the tech as if they’re separate components that just need to be introduced to each other, but the sociotechnical as one – the qualities that combine holistically to deliver such easy-to-say-hard-to-achieve aspirations as a great culture and productive collaboration.\nThe ingredients in such combination rarely adhere to some qualitative ranking.\nProcess is dead, long live process The report identifies four categories of organizational culture in decreasing technological maturity for want of a better turn of phrase, labelled pioneers (18%), believers (34%), agnostics (27%) and traditionalists (21%).\nI was attracted by the report authors’ observation that:\n‘Believers’ … put less emphasis on systems and processes, which could suggest that they consider these to be regressive and inhibitive.\nI have had conversations of late that support this interpretation. It appears that an aspiration for adaptability may tempt a disregard for process given its historical association with repeatability and efficiency at the expense of responsiveness , and yet such conclusion increases business risk and injures adaptability. Consider that adaptability works on two levels, agility (adaptable strategy) and flexibility (adaptable tactical execution). Maintaining relevant strategy – identifying where to play and how to win – is a disciplinary process, and equally the corresponding tactics and execution require constant improvement (kaizen in lean speak).\nIn short, the power of process is no longer in the fixed process but in fixing attention on its derivative so that change becomes routine . And this then neatly returns to my main thrust here. Change of any one or two things is unlikely to effect the desired improvement. It’s complex. An organization doesn’t so much exist as transmute, and many dials need to be twiddled and many things need to be sensed constantly by everyone involved to ensure that transmutation lives up to all stakeholders’ expectations.\nSimple, but not for much longer And as complexity has it, this works at many levels. This year’s Global Drucker Forum focuses on this topic at the organizational and societal levels and I’ve had the opportunity to contribute a pre-event post: The human web and sustainability . This is the mother of all “management” challenges, so one can appreciate why Google’s report defers to the simple.\nTo paraphrase its conclusion then and reading between the lines – if you haven’t already, work out how you want to work and procure some modern collaboration technology to support you working that way. And then it gets interesting.\nImages: Grabbed from the Google report in question .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/09/google-on-collaboration-a-new-study/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Google collaboration report June 2015\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Google-collaboration-report-June-2015.png\"\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://research.gigaom.com/2015/09/google-on-collaboration/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to Gigaom Research\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is \u003ca href=\"https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/learn-more/working-better-together.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehow Google introduces the findings of its recent survey\u003c/a\u003e\n of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (\u003ca href=\"https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/Collaboration%20Study%20-%20June%202015.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePDF of full report\u003c/a\u003e\n.) The primary conclusion is presented up front:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"simply-complex\"\u003eSimply complex\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity \u003cem\u003eand\u003c/em\u003e do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/12/deal-complication-complexity-chaos-youd-better-know-difference/\"\u003ecomplexity and complication\u003c/a\u003e\n are different things.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Google on collaboration – a new study"},{"content":"\nFirst published to Gigaom Research .\nCast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion.\nYou may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation.\nWe’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done.\nIt’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness.\nIt’s impossible to separate Work IT from the transformation of organizational design. Work IT supports emerging approaches to organization – sociocratic, holacratic, podular, wirearchical – over the traditional hierarchical command-and-control structures. And the advantages of such networked organization encourages innovation in and the adoption of Work IT. I consider sustainability to be the major driver.\nSustainability – the health and resilience of living systems including our societies and organizations – requires individual agency, diversity, and distributed networks to facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence. This then conveys some of the traits we will demand for the continued growth of Work IT, including openness and privacy, accessibility and digital inclusion.\nOpen and private Open society, open government, and open organization help create greater transparency and accountability, and yet concurrently concern for the privacy of personal data and information is growing. In the absence of self-regulation when it comes to the mass surveillance of our use of digital technologies, law-makers are stepping up to the mark. Non-compliance with the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation for example might incur penalty of 5% of global turnover. That focuses the mind.\nWork IT may excel at openness, but centralized Enterprise IT remains the stronghold for data security and compliance, impeding the growth of Work IT. This will only be addressed by some metadata mechanism to express the provenance and confidentiality of data such that it may flow where it will but not where it should not. And just as Work IT supports a distributed network of workers, this facility will in turn likely hang off the only known system for incorruptible, distributed database – the blockchain.\nAccessibility and digital inclusion We are all unique. We all have different digital, numerical, information and visual literacy. Millions of people have one or more disabilities, and millions more will become disabled with age, yet UI designers simply cannot cater to this variety.\nWe need all things digital to adapt to us, not as currently the other way round. Only when Work IT and the digital interactions with all variety of organizational stakeholder adopt a human interface might we have the chance to reap everyone’s full participation. In other words, bring-your-own-interface.\nSocial business With compliance built-in rather than bolted-on, and all things digital deigning to adapt to us, major frictions currently impeding the individual’s ability to seek, sense and share are eliminated, manifesting in organizational learning, collective intelligence and responsiveness.\nSocial business is about all stakeholders coming together to add mutual value faster than otherwise, with the help of social technologies, appropriately transformed culture, and a network orientation rather than command and control. It’s co-creation with customers, partners, suppliers, everyone, constantly striving to find the right combination to best pursue shared objectives, guided by shared values.\nSocial business is, by this definition, sustainable business, and such self-organization demands that Work IT enables the organized self . By this I mean software that represents us in finding opportunities to create mutual value with others, and then helps us realise that value.\nIn just a few decades then we’ll have moved from a hoped-for exceptional choice of laptop to fast-and-loose organization inviting you to bring-you-and-your-own-everything. Indeed, to you playing your part in spontaneous organization.\n[Image by SplitShire, Pixabay .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/08/work-it-bring-you-and-your-own-everything/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"your-own-everything\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/your-own-everything.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://research.gigaom.com/2015/08/work-it-bring-you-and-your-own-everything/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirst published to Gigaom Research\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Work IT: bring-you-and-your-own-everything"},{"content":" Updated 16th September, embedding the videos of the session below.\nThe Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org) was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report.\nThe Commission published a statement 15th April 2015 for the Global Conference on Cyberspace meeting in The Hague . It calls on the global community to build a new social compact between citizens and their elected representatives, the judiciary, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, business, civil society and the Internet technical community, with the goal of restoring trust and enhancing confidence in the Internet.\nI have been invited to discuss this statement with Dame Professor Wendy Hall and Sir David Omand at a Web Science Institute event this afternoon.\nThe core elements advocated in building the new social compact are:\nPrivacy and personal data protection as a fundamental human right The necessity and proportionality of surveillance Legal transparency and redress for unlawful surveillance Safeguarding online data and consumer awareness Big data and trust Strengthening private communications No back doors to private data Public awareness of good cyber-security practices Mutual assistance to curtail transborder cyber threats. Here is the brief slidestack framing my contribution today:\nVideos Dame Professor Wendy Hall introduces session (1min 32sec) Sir David Omand (12min 45sec) Me (9min 35sec) ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/06/toward-a-social-compact-for-digital-privacy-and-security/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"toward a social compact for digital privacy and security, Global Commission on Internet Governance\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/toward-a-social-compact.png\"\u003e Updated 16th September, embedding \u003ca href=\"#videos\"\u003ethe videos of the session\u003c/a\u003e\n below.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://www.ourinternet.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org)\u003c/a\u003e\n was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Toward a social compact for digital privacy and security"},{"content":"\nMy main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:\nGood business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.\nHe adds:\n\u0026hellip; No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.\nEli is referring here to the visceral difference between \u0026lsquo;doing\u0026rsquo; social (bolted on) and \u0026lsquo;being\u0026rsquo; social (built in), and you know which one you\u0026rsquo;re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?\nI sometimes define social business as maintaining relationships at scale, and not in the old CRM 2.0 way. In other words not in terms of \u0026lsquo;managing\u0026rsquo; the customer relationship like it\u0026rsquo;s some livestock that needs tending to, but in responding at a human level. Less parent-child and more adult-adult.\nWe can attempt this at scale now for one simple reason – the ready ability to harvest data and deal with it. (It also demands new approaches to organising ourselves , but this isn\u0026rsquo;t the post to go into that.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve witnessed a decade of incredible tech innovation in marketing, and to a lesser extent public relations, pivoting around the sophisticated real-time machination of data. Unfortunately, instead of aspiring to human relations at scale, practitioners have allowed this flood to undermine the professions\u0026rsquo; foundations and license to operate. There\u0026rsquo;s no denying that marketing technologists are responsible for constructing a hyper-surveillant society, a dystopian capability that increasingly makes people (aka \u0026ldquo;targets\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;users\u0026rdquo;) feel uneasy. Quite the opposite emotional response to that originally intended.\nAt least that appears to be the conclusion of the EU\u0026rsquo;s democratic representatives, and in response they are well on the way to ratifying the General Data Protection Regulation . It\u0026rsquo;s expected later this year and then comes into force across the EU\u0026rsquo;s 28 countries within two years.\nWhen you consider what technology was like in 1995, the last time equivalent law was updated in the UK, you can imagine there\u0026rsquo;s quite a gap to close. The legal requirements are considerably more demanding, apply to all organisations regardless of location should they wish to deal with any one of the 500+ million EU citizens, and comes with hefty fines for non-compliance currently expected to be up to 5% of global revenues.\nThis is going to be very disruptive.\nMarketing technology requires re-engineering and re-configuration. It needs privacy / data protection to be built-in not slapped on. (And the same for the corresponding human processes.)\nIt demands an organisation-wide coherent and cohesive data architecture and data governance. It will require a reappraisal of the way we measure outputs and outcomes .\nAnd lest anyone in PR still consider a data capability a nice-to-have, you should know those days are past. Your PR business, your PR capability, where it encompasses relationships with EU citizens, is now built on data or you have no PR capability at all.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s something further to think about. I have had many conversations with technology and consulting firms about the hi:project , an open non-profit at the heart of all this. And even the odd consumer goods company. Yet I\u0026rsquo;m awaiting my first chat with a marketing or PR firm. Unless this changes pretty soon, I can see a new breed of marketing and PR services provider emerging, and a whole breed acquired at best, dying at worst.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/05/marketing-and-pr-and-the-general-data-protection-regulation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"EU citizens\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/EU_citizens.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy main character in \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAttenzi – a social business story\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e, the CEO Eli Appel, \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/fifty-nine/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehas this to say\u003c/a\u003e\n over lunch with his chairman:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe adds:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026hellip; No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEli is referring here to the visceral difference between \u0026lsquo;doing\u0026rsquo; social (bolted on) and \u0026lsquo;being\u0026rsquo; social (built in), and you know which one you\u0026rsquo;re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation"},{"content":"\nThe third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:\nWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker\u0026rsquo;s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:\nwe may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it\n\u0026ldquo;satisfying all the stakeholders\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee “satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.\n[tweet tweet tweet ]\nGarbage Steve refers to \u0026ldquo;garbage can firms\u0026rdquo; in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? , an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained:\nthat pursuing multiple goals caused organizations to resemble “garbage cans” with three main characteristics. First “the organization operates on the basis of a variety of inconsistent and ill-defined preferences.” Second, the organization’s “own processes are not understood by its members.” Third, “the audiences and decision makers for any particular kind of decision change capriciously.”\nAs a result, “choices are made only when the shifting combinations of problems, solutions, and decision makers happen to make action possible.”\nStakeholder capitalism Steve equates my definition of the purpose of business with stakeholder capitalism, and in his article he warns of a \u0026ldquo;risk of a return to garbage can organizations\u0026rdquo;:\nWith its balancing of the interests of multiple stakeholders, stakeholder capitalism is hard to distinguish from managerial capitalism of the mid 20th Century. Balancing multiple interests may work in the context of a board of directors that has the time and expertise to spend days or weeks, say, on evaluating a single multi-billion decision on an acquisition.\nBut as a guiding principle for driving growth and innovation throughout a large organization, it’s impractical. It risks taking us back to the world of garbage can organizations \u0026hellip;\nIn this article (2003) by Professor H. Jeff Smith in the MIT Sloan Management Review, stakeholder theory is defined as:\nplacing a duty on managers to balance the shareholders’ financial interests against the interests of other stakeholders such as employees, customers and the local community, even if it reduces shareholder returns.\nIn Managing the Extended Enterprise: The New Stakeholder View (2002) Post, Preston and Sachs present:\na new \u0026ldquo;stakeholder view\u0026rdquo; of the firm that holds that stakeholder relationships are the ultimate sources of the firm\u0026rsquo;s wealth-creating capacity. According to this view, long-term business success requires a firm to develop and integrate relationships with its multiple stakeholders within a comprehensive management strategy.\nAnd by way of comparison to exemplify Steve\u0026rsquo;s historic observation, while US Secretary of Labor under Clinton, Robert Reich reported that in 1951 Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, proclaimed:\nThe job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups… stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.\nEmergence Neither of my previous posts mentions stakeholder capitalism (aka community capitalism) and for good reason I now realise – my head wasn\u0026rsquo;t in that space. I\u0026rsquo;m only working it through now because Steve is prodding me to do so. (Yet another +1 for \u0026lsquo;working out loud\u0026rsquo;.)\nIt looks like I\u0026rsquo;ve had a tendency, incorrectly, to think about stakeholder capitalism as deliberate (the typical top-down formulation of strategy). Just note the actors referenced in the four quotes above: board of directors, managers, the firm ie, its management, and once more management. Indeed Steve infers that this could be its only practical modus operandi.\nHowever, as my references to complexity in my previous posts betray, my thoughts are framed in terms of the artful blend of the deliberate and emergent , and weighted towards the emergent if only because I suspect most firms will need to spend more time towards that end of the spectrum. Emergent strategy (you might say bottom-up, responsive) is requisite for sustainable business. To influence better, be influenced better . Such adaptive capability may be considered a competitive advantage today; tomorrow it will be a qualifier.\n(Drucker recognised the need for adaptive strategy way back in 1969 in The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society.)\nSystems such as sociocracy and holacracy, and the responsive organisation manifesto, emphasise the why and who over the what and how, ie_:_\nRather than controlling through process and hierarchy, you achieve better results by inspiring and empowering people at the edges to pursue the work as they see fit – strategically, structurally, and tactically.\nOf course there are examples of stakeholder value companies that organize themselves this way. The benefit corporation (aka b-corp) has emerged in the US in recent years to enshrine a stakeholder value perspective in the directors\u0026rsquo; fiduciary duties no less, and Patagonia , renowned for its self-management principles, was one of the first to reincorporate as such.\nFor those not (yet) convinced of my definition of business purpose, you might at least agree that Patagonia exists to establish and drive mutual value.\nIntelligence I had a great boss out of university. As I retell in Attenzi , he really disliked any contentment with employees leaving their brains at the door only to pick them up on the way home, metaphorically speaking of course. He wasn\u0026rsquo;t having a go at the people, but rather any organization that accepted or indeed systematized this state of affairs. These people form vibrant local communities, towns and cities. They deal with deep emotional issues with friends and families, buy complex financial products and, in short, continuously balance everything life throws at them from one day to the next.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s in this light that I want to shrug off Steve\u0026rsquo;s insistence that we only need the customer-centric heuristic to guide our everyday actions at work lest (my words not his) we be too stupid to understand the balance of things. I\u0026rsquo;d rather sustain my faith that people can explore the options and make hard choices, and that the only organizational guidance we need is agreement on the values by which we operate, agreement on the organization\u0026rsquo;s purpose and organizing principles, and a systematic sensitivity to the impact of our behaviour, decisions and actions (see The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self ).\nEmerging organizing principles and the technological transformation of sensitivity are fundamental determinants in resigning Drucker\u0026rsquo;s definition of business purpose to history. And so is the humanization of work (in contrast to Steve\u0026rsquo;s argument that customer-centricity is the path to the humanization of work ) \u0026hellip;\nIntelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, including but far from limited to the acquisition and application of heuristics. And anything that purports to support the humanization of work must surely encompass the freedom to express one\u0026rsquo;s intelligence. The freedom to make hard choices.\nHard choices From How to make hard choices , a 2014 Ted Talk by Ruth Chang:\nImagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there’s always a best alternative. If there’s a best alternative, then that’s the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. \u0026hellip; A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons. \u0026hellip; (However) when alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we’re making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It’s here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself \u0026hellip;\nWhen we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. \u0026hellip; This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it’s not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it’s supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.\n\u0026hellip; Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition \u0026hellip; And that’s why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.\nI wonder if it isn\u0026rsquo;t too great a leap to presume that such freedom at work might correlate to greater employee engagement? And perhaps then better outcomes for all stakeholders including those precious customers?\nEmergent stakeholder theory Time, or more precisely the evolutionary process over time, will tell which definition of the purpose of business makes most sense this century.\nPrior to that conclusion, to subscribe to \u0026ldquo;Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation\u0026rdquo; one must also subscribe to emergent strategy and the superiority of new forms of organization over command-and-control hierarchy. Sociocratic. Holarchic. Connected. Responsive. Wirearchical. Perhaps, now Steve has forced me to clarify it, this purpose may be described as emergent stakeholder theory, both normatively and pragmatically distinct from deliberate stakeholder theory and, I hypothesize, naturally averse to garbage!\nTalking of nature, I\u0026rsquo;m very interested in understanding the similarities and dissimilarities between organization and natural ecosystems.\nIn all things of nature there is something of the marvellous. If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature\u0026rsquo;s way.\nAristotle knew this instinctively. We know it mathematically.\nCould customer-centricity be akin to ascribing the forest\u0026rsquo;s success to the success of one species of tree? \u0026hellip; plainly ridiculous. Yet at the same time, the forest does not set itself a purpose.\nOrganizations are dynamic not static. They don\u0026rsquo;t so much exist as transmute, continuously. Emergent stakeholder capitalism in practice might be explained by the same dynamics that finds self-interest in cooperative evolution , or you might invoke some Kantian theory of beneficent duty . Regardless, I suspect sustainability demands the collective intelligence integral to emergent stakeholder theory.\nIf you don\u0026rsquo;t subscribe to this work-in-progress rationale for emergent stakeholder theory then you\u0026rsquo;ll continue to be guided by the totem of customer-centricity and to the purpose of creating and keeping a customer. At least, that is, until each stakeholder in your business, and quite possibly the customers themselves, see something more attractive in the mutual value creation camp. As Jon Husband picks out in the comments to the first post in this little series, the crux of that matter comes down to nothing more intellectual than asking:\nAfter all, how long do you tend to participate in organization personally when the value you see is less than that you perceive elsewhere?\nThanks to Craig Hanna for his comments on the second of the posts in this series over on LinkedIn . I incorporated some material here from links he provided there.\nImage source: Mr.TinDC .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/05/talking-garbage-and-the-purpose-of-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"garbage\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/garbage_can.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/04/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-business-an-answer-post-drucker/\"\u003eWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/05/debating-the-purpose-of-business/\"\u003eDebating the purpose of business\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBusiness exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. \u003ca href=\"http://www.stevedenning.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSteve Denning\u003c/a\u003e\n challenged this statement, preferring Drucker\u0026rsquo;s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ewe may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;satisfying all the stakeholders\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2013/06/making-management-as-simple-as\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eMaking Management as Simple as Frisbee\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/597361384758841344\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etweet\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/597362842900267008\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etweet\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/597385555282939904\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etweet\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"garbage\"\u003eGarbage\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSteve refers to \u0026ldquo;garbage can firms\u0026rdquo; in his Forbes article, \u003ca href=\"http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/08/29/is-the-hegemony-of-shareholder-value-finally-ending/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eIs The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending?\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n, an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – \u003ca href=\"http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2392088?uid=3738032\u0026amp;uid=2\u0026amp;uid=4\u0026amp;sid=21106376261501\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCohen, March and Olsen\u003c/a\u003e\n – who in 1972 explained:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Talking garbage and the purpose of business"},{"content":"\nThe second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:\nWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Talking garbage and the purpose of business Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work , an argument founded on Drucker\u0026rsquo;s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.\nSteve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:\n[The] Problem with \u0026ldquo;establish and drive mutual value creation\u0026rdquo; is that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell me what anyone has to do.\nand then :\n\u0026ldquo;Delight customers\u0026rdquo; as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.\nand lastly :\nSince power has shifted from seller to buyer, \u0026ldquo;delighting customers\u0026rdquo; sets priorities right, for firm to survive\nI share Steve\u0026rsquo;s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale.\nNotably Steve doesn\u0026rsquo;t waste too many words taking down the false idol of shareholder value (I\u0026rsquo;m guessing elaboration on that topic would simply be preaching to the converted on the Drucker forum). He points out that playing to the motivations of one single stakeholder group – shareholders – is never going to be motivating for another stakeholder group – employees. And Steve is on the money in at least partially attributing a lack of trust and poor employee engagement to this dynamic.\nHe quotes Drucker (from Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Heinemann, 1973):\nProfits and share price increases are the result, not the goal of a firm’s activities.\nYet having concluded that crowning one particular stakeholder group was a mistake, we should question the simple crowning of another. In my presentation The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations (slide 23) I list these three heuristics all of which I consider fundamentally flawed in their isolating simplicity:\nthe customer is king it\u0026rsquo;s all about shareholder value our people are our greatest asset. It\u0026rsquo;s not unusual to hear any one CEO avow each of these. One could be critical; how can a leader confess to three number one priorities?! Yet I would rather CEOs subscribe to all three than just one if it means they appreciate each can only stand in balance with the others.\nThe problem with \u0026ldquo;establish and drive mutual value creation\u0026rdquo; is that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell me what anyone has to do.\nYes. That\u0026rsquo;s right. The system of organization, its constituent systems and the systems of which it is part, are complex and simple rules of thumb close down viable opportunities for appropriate adaptive response. The seed of an opportunity to establish mutual value may come from many directions and will likely be subject to many interplaying influences.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying that creating and keeping a customer isn\u0026rsquo;t relevant, of course it is. I am saying that finding other people to work with, with complementary knowledge and skills, is also relevant. Finding the right investors is relevant. Creating and growing sustainable organization (as in organizing) is relevant. Understanding and working with the needs and within the constraints of our planet is relevant. Identifying and forging relationships with other organizations for mutual value is relevant. And the balance and interplay of these relevances is undoubtedly complex.\nIn shaping a view of work based on Drucker\u0026rsquo;s assertion, Steve writes that:\n\u0026hellip; the Internet is now forcing change, by \u0026hellip; shifting power in the marketplace from seller to buyer. Customers, who have access to reliable information about the available choices and a capacity to interact with other customers, are now collectively in charge.\nYet isn\u0026rsquo;t it more accurate to talk about Internet access in general? Customer is but one role we play. Every other role involved in establishing and driving mutual value in the business context gets Internet access too!\nIn summary, my argument pivots on complexity. There can be no one guiding star for navigating any complex adaptive system. Complexity is a complicated mix of order and chaos, and only complexity can absorb complexity – simple heuristics cannot. The sooner we recognise the fact, the sooner we might begin to humanize business for everyone involved regardless of the role they happen to be playing.\nPhoto source .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/05/debating-the-purpose-of-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Hogwarts potions\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Hogwarts-potions.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/04/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-business-an-answer-post-drucker/\"\u003eWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/05/debating-the-purpose-of-business/\"\u003eDebating the purpose of business\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/05/talking-garbage-and-the-purpose-of-business/\"\u003eTalking garbage and the purpose of business\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.stevedenning.com/About/default.aspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSteve Denning\u003c/a\u003e\n published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, \u003ca href=\"http://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=817\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHow The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work\u003c/a\u003e\n, an argument founded on Drucker\u0026rsquo;s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSteve found my post on \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/04/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-business-an-answer-post-drucker/\"\u003ethe purpose of business post-Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n via a thread with \u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethmikkelsen\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKenneth Mikkelsen\u003c/a\u003e\n and tweeted his comments. His \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/594174987700936705\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efirst\u003c/a\u003e\n quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[The] Problem with \u0026ldquo;establish and drive mutual value creation\u0026rdquo; is that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell me what anyone has to do.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eand \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/594175614283808768\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethen\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Delight customers\u0026rdquo; as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eand \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/stevedenning/status/594175917943037952\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elastly\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince power has shifted from seller to buyer, \u0026ldquo;delighting customers\u0026rdquo; sets priorities right, for firm to survive\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI share Steve\u0026rsquo;s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Debating the purpose of business"},{"content":"\nThe first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:\nWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Talking garbage and the purpose of business Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.\nThe assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker\u0026rsquo;s heuristic.\nComplexity is a system in which there are multiple interactions between many different components. It bridges the gap between the individual and the collective, and exhibits emergent behaviour characterised by a complicated mix of order and chaos.\nUnderstanding of complexity remains nascent – too few recognise the complexity of nature let alone the nature of complexity. Understanding advanced with cybernetics research in the 1950s and Ashby ’s law best summarises the organizational transformation required today, variety absorbs variety, paraphrased by Malik in the 1980s as only complexity can absorb complexity.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve asserted previously in a post differentiating complexity and complication :\nOrganisations may gain advantage by reducing the complication over which they have domain – and perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s a happy medium to be found – but they cannot simplify complexity beyond this, for that is the product of nature. We can only seek ways to navigate it more simply and more nimbly.\nIn their 2014 book sub-titled How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated , Morieux and Tollman conclude:\nSome observers think increasing business complexity is the problem. We disagree. We believe that while complexity brings immense challenges, it also offers a tremendous opportunity for companies. Increasingly, the winners in today\u0026rsquo;s business environment are those companies that know how to leverage complexity and exploit it to creative advantage.\nI agree obviously, but agreement matters not. Business has no choice. Complexity is unavoidable. The winners will compete with the appropriate blend of human organization and technology, sensing and sense-making in real-time and responding with agility, elevating responsiveness in the scheme of things above the dedication to efficiency .\nWhat then is the purpose of business?\nBusiness exists to establish and drive mutual value creation.\nMutual, sustainable value is generated within this network, within this system, and no one individual or category of individuals can do it without others playing their part – the right mix of others at the right time. It’s a natural law. It’s all in the mix. Ignore this, or indeed attempt to act otherwise, and you wither – particularly when facing off competition that does get it.\n[Attenzi – a social business story .]\nNote that value is not restricted to the narrow monetary sense. One must \u0026lsquo;see\u0026rsquo; value from business however one perceives it, irrespective of one\u0026rsquo;s role and contribution.\nAll business is organization. Not all organization is business. As we continue to erode the frictions identified by Coase in explaining the very existence of the firm, it\u0026rsquo;s conceivable that the firm as we know it may become a minority form of organization.\nGiddens and Sutton adopt the working definition of organization as \u0026ldquo;a social group or collective that is internally structured to meet a social need or to pursue specific aims.\u0026rdquo; Might we also say then that organization exists to establish and drive mutual value creation, at least if it\u0026rsquo;s intent on sustainability. Perhaps sociologists already do \u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s still early days in my learning sociology.\nNevertheless, it is perhaps self-evident. After all, how long do you tend to participate in organization personally when the value you see is less than that you perceive elsewhere? And the rate of this self-organization can be expected to increase as those frictions decrease.\nImage source: Paternoster Square, by gren, public domain ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/04/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-business-an-answer-post-drucker/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Paternoster Square\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Paternoster_Square.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/04/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-business-an-answer-post-drucker/\"\u003eWhat, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/05/debating-the-purpose-of-business/\"\u003eDebating the purpose of business\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2015/05/talking-garbage-and-the-purpose-of-business/\"\u003eTalking garbage and the purpose of business\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.druckerinstitute.com/peter-druckers-life-and-legacy/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePeter Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker\u0026rsquo;s heuristic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker"},{"content":"[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .]\nIn an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex \u0026lsquo;Sandy\u0026rsquo; Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I\u0026rsquo;m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks :\nSocial physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.\nPentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society?\nSocial physics suggests that the first step is to focus on the flow of ideas rather than on the flow of wealth, since the flow of ideas is the source of both cultural norms and innovation. A focus on improving idea flow, rather than financial flows, will allow individuals to make better decisions and our society to develop more useful behavioral norms. A key insight from social physics is that it is critical that the flow and exchange of ideas be inclusive, because insufficiently diverse idea flow leads to rigid and insular societies, and insular communities often inflict terrible damage on weaker communities with whom they share resources.\nHaving written about influence flows in my 2011 book, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t agree more with this observation. I find myself wondering why then Pentland might resign himself to such a centralizing vista as a Google data bank? Is such continued centralization so unavoidable? Are banks in the monetary sense so successful, so resistant to decentralization , as to provide a valid model for data?\nApple\u0026rsquo;s news this month provides an interesting example for discussion.\nResearchKit Asked in the Guardian article whether Apple may be up for something similar, Pentland responds:\nApple is extraordinarily non-transparent and they would have potentially a lot of difficulty.\nEarlier this month, Apple announced ResearchKit :\nMedical researchers are doing some of the most important work in the world, and they’re committed to making life-changing discoveries that benefit us all. To help, we’ve created ResearchKit, an open source software framework that makes it easy for researchers and developers to create apps that could revolutionize medical studies, potentially transforming medicine forever.\nIn other words, Apple is transforming the iPhone and imminent Apple Watch into sources of real-time, continuous data streams for medical research. ResearchKit sits on the previously announced HealthKit :\nHealthKit allows apps that provide health and fitness services to share their data with the new Health app and with each other. A user’s health information is stored in a centralized and secure location and the user decides which data should be shared with your app.\n[fve]https://youtu.be/VyY2qPb6c0c[/fve]\nApple is then ticking some of those important boxes. User decides what? Tick. User decides who? Tick. Secured and hidden from Apple\u0026rsquo;s eyes and ears? Tick. Now let\u0026rsquo;s run it by the transdisciplinary perspectives of some hi:project members – in terms of quantified self, health data and the internet of things.\nQuantified Self (QS) Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser of London Quantified Self group :\nIt is indisputable that analysis of aggregate health data is beneficial. We could argue whether it is the most effective way of helping the individual – it may be that aggregation of individual insights [ie, post-analysis] would arrive at fundamental innovation in health and wellbeing faster, and therefore we need to provide individuals with the capabilities for uncovering such insights.\nAdriana proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”. When it comes to ResearchKit, she recognises that:\n\u0026hellip; in the absence of any clear progress in having access to sophisticated analysis at individual level, a well designed system for aggregating and analysing health data is potentially a Good Thing.\nShe defines \u0026lsquo;well designed\u0026rsquo;:\nMeeting the legal requirement of not using user data without consent. Not merely following the \u0026rsquo;letter of the law\u0026rsquo; of user consent and opt-in request but also the \u0026lsquo;spirit of the law\u0026rsquo; with transparent UI/UX making it obvious at each step what is being consented to. Going beyond the act of simply making the act of consent clear by providing a much fuller understanding by the user of what their data does or could reveal about them, who has or could have access to their data and the results of analysis, how such aggregation impacts their privacy and, for good measure, that anonymisation is an argument only used by people who merely pay lip service to privacy. No matter how beneficial Apple ResearchKit will turn out to be – and there\u0026rsquo;s little doubt that if it achieves half its expected potential it will be an improvement – the downside for people like me is that its success will crowd out alternative approaches to medical research and personal health data. The big clever algorithm in the sky will improve our collective understanding of disease and health and the benefits will trickle down to each individual. It will not help me frame my own questions to ask my own data and arrive at my own understanding of my own health and wellbeing. And that is the future I am hoping for.\nHealth data Adrian Gropper, CEO, HealthURL Consulting :\nWith the ResearchKit announcement, Apple said two things that no major company or institution in healthcare has ever said: (1) Apple will not see your data; and (2) ResearchKit is open source software. HealthKit already introduced the third key leg of the foundation by making Pairwise Pseudonymity the default.\nI wasn\u0026rsquo;t too fluent with pairwise pseudonymity, although I look forward to dropping it into polite conversation henceforth. A pairwise pseudonymous identifier (PPID) identifies an individual to a third party (known as the \u0026ldquo;relying party\u0026rdquo;) in a way that cannot be matched with the individual\u0026rsquo;s PPID used with another third party, all in the pursuit of avoiding de-anonymization .\nTogether, these three principles become the foundation for technology that moves beyond opaque and coercive concepts like \u0026ldquo;consent\u0026rdquo; to effective transparency and authorization by the individual subject. Consent \u0026hellip; is still an institutional tool aimed at justifying a priesthood or a brand.\nHowever:\nWe need a standards-based alternative to Apple\u0026rsquo;s walled garden where different communities of interest, be they patients or licensed clinicians, can set their own governance rules and certify their own open source apps. Individual doctors and patients must have the opportunity to choose apps and authorization standards at \u0026ldquo;the edge\u0026rdquo; of the network on a day-by-day basis.\nThis is what we\u0026rsquo;re doing in the OpenID HEART project. We are profiling the use of a personal authorization server [see UMA FAQ ] to provide limited and automated policy-based authorizations for clinical and research access to personal data wherever it sits. We take pairwise pseudonymity for granted as a means to reduce or even prevent hidden surveillance and aggregation. The charter is designed to make open source, and therefore fully owned, authorization servers first-class citizens next to institutional ones like Apple\u0026rsquo;s so the institutions have to compete for our trust without coercive consent policies.\nReaders familiar with the hi:project\u0026rsquo;s vision will appreciate immediately why the OpenID HEART project is an important partner.\nInternet of Things Rob van Kranenburg, Sociotal FP7 ICT Objective 1.4 IoT, and Founder of the Internet of Things Council :\nInternet of Things (IoT) is at essence the seamless flow between the:\nBAN – body area network eg, the ambient hearing aid, the smart t-shirt, Google Glass LAN – local area network eg, the smart meter as a home interface WAN – wide area network eg, telematics, intelligent transport systems, connected car VWAN – very wide area network eg, the smart city, e-gov services no longer tied to physical locations. Whoever ensures traceability, sustainability and security is able to offer the best possible feedback on physical and mental health, the best possible household decisions based on real time monitoring for resource allocation, the best possible decision-making based on real-time data and information from open sources, and the best possible alignments of local energy providers with the global potential of wider communities. That is what #IoT can be.\nThis corresponds to the hi:project\u0026rsquo;s submission to the UN\u0026rsquo;s Data Revolution Group in which we assert: \u0026ldquo;Personal data must be allowed to breathe for it to be of most value to the individual and society, and the corresponding parameters are best set by the individual in question with clear appreciation for the mutual value thus realised or suppressed.\u0026rdquo;\nRob concludes:\nGoogle is rolling out Glass and Lens , the Google Power meter and Nest , the car and automotive , open data initiatives, and cultural hegemony through google.org . These gateways, the platform and the \u0026lsquo;app’ or service store, should be in public hands.\nGiven Pentland\u0026rsquo;s comparison of Google\u0026rsquo;s and Apple\u0026rsquo;s openness earlier, you might wonder why Rob isn\u0026rsquo;t apparently \u0026lsquo;getting\u0026rsquo; open. I needn\u0026rsquo;t explain here however as this post does the job perfectly: Apple Research Kit is Open Source But Is It “Open”? On the road to decentralization The sentiment of this post is simple – there is centralized privacy, empowerment and autonomy, and then there\u0026rsquo;s decentralized privacy, empowerment and autonomy. Both improve on the status quo, but we must regard the former as simply a signpost pointing towards the latter. We must not be complacent and settle for the centralized version. Critically, the hi:project helps for-profit entities, at least those not benefiting from centralization today, take a lead with us in establishing decentralized privacy, empowerment and autonomy to mutual advantage.\nEvgeny Morozov is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. In a recent article, When apps are driven by the market, there’s only one winner. It’s not you … he asserts:\nIt could be that the worst excesses of capitalism were manageable, at least on a psychic level, precisely because we could occasionally shelter ourselves in various hermetic zones that did not bend to the logic of supply and demand. These zones, impervious to the rhythms of globalisation, reassured us that a personal autonomy outside the market bubble was a feasible objective.\nIt seems to me that Morozov may share Pentland\u0026rsquo;s emphasis of network of exchanges between people over market competition. He continues:\nAt a time when values such as solidarity, fairness and diversity are under constant attack, the ability to incorporate more information into our decision-making is only hastening their demise. Ignorance can, in fact, be bliss – especially if what awaits us on the side of knowledge is the imperative to become more efficient, competitive and profitable. In the absence of other radical projects to challenge the status quo, ignorance – or, rather, the informed refusal to know – can be a powerful antidote to the efforts to reduce everything to a knowable price whose very existence already formats citizens into consumers.\nPerhaps the hi:project vision is just such a radical project, although I hesitate to posit the idea in response to a critic of technological solutionism!\nWith decentralization we move from deliberate big data to emergent masses of small data. We move from surveillance to socioveillance . We move forwards (or is it backwards?) from the consumer, from the user, to the human.\nImage source: Apple press info ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/04/different-kinds-of-privacy-empowerment-and-autonomy-centralized-versus-decentralized/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"qs-watch\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/qs-watch.png\"\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/2015/03/different-kinds-of-privacy-empowerment-and-autonomy-centralized-versus-decentralized/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally posted to the hi:project blog\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/mar/25/google-sandy-pentland-separate-organisation-data\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ean article in the Guardian last week\u003c/a\u003e\n, Professor Alex \u0026lsquo;Sandy\u0026rsquo; Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I\u0026rsquo;m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/2014/02/tech-shouldnt-built-free-markets-needs-based-exchanges/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehis fluency in the power of decentralized networks\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePentland continues under the heading: \u003cem\u003eHow can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society?\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Different kinds of privacy, empowerment and autonomy – centralized versus decentralized"},{"content":"\nI have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening\u0026rsquo;s London meeting of the Change Management Institute .\nI\u0026rsquo;m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa .\nThe image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine? Here\u0026rsquo;s my stack:\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/03/technology-trends-relevant-to-change-management/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"when change becomes routine – PostShift\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/change-routine-postshift.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening\u0026rsquo;s London meeting of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.change-management-institute.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eChange Management Institute\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m keeping most excellent company alongside \u003ca href=\"http://uk.linkedin.com/in/carollewandowska/en\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKarolina Lewandowska\u003c/a\u003e\n, Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/faithforster\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFaith Forster\u003c/a\u003e\n, Founder and CEO \u003ca href=\"http://pinipa.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePinipa\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – \u003ca href=\"http://postshift.com/the-quantified-organisation-can-change-become-routine/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Quantified Organisation: can change become routine?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Technology trends relevant to change management"},{"content":"\nThe diagram here portrays where I\u0026rsquo;m going with this post, so let\u0026rsquo;s dive in.\nThe quantified self The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as \u0026ldquo;a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person\u0026rsquo;s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).\u0026rdquo;\nAnd it doesn\u0026rsquo;t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we\u0026rsquo;re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it\u0026rsquo;s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :\nWe can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.\nThe quantified organization Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on \u0026lsquo;quantified organization\u0026rsquo; :\n\u0026hellip; a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.\nAnne McCrossan coined the term at a social business event convened by Will McInnes, February 2012 – at least I can find no earlier use.\nMost recently, a company called Sierra Cedar is viewing the term through the lens of HR , perhaps better serving their own marketing communications than the potential of the concept more broadly:\n\u0026hellip; we determined that a Quantified Organization would be one that invests in HR technologies, processes, and practices that enable it to improve workforce operations and achieve organizational goals. Through HR practices and technology adoption, Quantified Organizations support an environment of data-driven decision making.\nBusiness performance management (BPM) Of course, data-informed management is hardly a new idea.\nManagement accounting emerged during the first half of the 20th Century, and an emphasis on non-fiscal metrics was cemented with the arrival of the Balanced Scorecard in the early-90s. The approach advocates a diligent cascade of mission, strategy and tactics to achieve defined strategic outcomes. It requires the design of the right balance of appropriate metrics to guide performance and secures organisational alignment in conjunction with the associated Strategy Maps.\nThat organizational alignment isn\u0026rsquo;t a once-off activity. Kaplan and Norton insist :\nThe alignment process, much like budgeting, should be part of the annual governance cycle.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s this corpus of work that informs one of my favourite BPM maxims:\nMeasure what you should, not what you can.\nTo my mind, these two assertions are a good starting point for considering how the quantified organization is set apart from BPM. QO might represent evolutionary progress, yet I suspect the two will thrive together.\nFirstly, anyone aspiring to develop a responsive organization will shudder at the idea that alignment is an annual process – such a drumbeat lost its relevance with the passing of agrarian society. The responsive organization is a quantified organization and it\u0026rsquo;s real-time.\nIn The Business of Influence I present an augmentation of the Balanced Scorecard I label the Influence Scorecard , aspiring to leverage today\u0026rsquo;s centralized structures and BPM capabilities to embed performance management as sensory feedback throughout the organization, to prompt and qualify transformation. I explore sensory feedback further in Attenzi :\nDistilling a well-rounded picture of things from an email inbox is near impossible. \u0026hellip; it’s quite possible that people in large organizations are numbed to what’s happening, to what’s changing, to what’s working and what isn’t.\nModern measurement and analytics serves effectively as a form of real-time sensory feedback, digitally reconnecting the individual to the day-to-day realities.\nIn other words we\u0026rsquo;re shifting the carrot-and-stick manifestations of BPM where KPIs are presented to you, to the facility for individuals and teams to surface their own understanding of their role and the value they can and do contribute. Not so much performance management in the old simple counting sense, but in the full biomimetic sense .\nOne might say this is a situation in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker” (see QS above).\nMeasurement and sensing And that brings us to that maxim about measuring only what you should. Measurement and sensing are different. Measurement is an action – intentional, purposive, subjectively meaningful. Sensing is behavioural – automatic and reflexive.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s worth remembering that the Balanced Scorecard emerged in an age where the prefix \u0026ldquo;electronic\u0026rdquo; distinguished the mainframe-powered from the analogue. Data paucity was the norm and the pursuit of data collection to live up to the expectations of the Scorecard was not inexpensive. By contrast, the quantified organization swims in data.\nThe exaflood (ready availability of exabytes of data) is frequently referenced yet I always try to lend such change visceral context if only because the shift is so inordinate it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to under-estimate. How about this from Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz describing just the first weekend\u0026rsquo;s sales of iPhone 6:\niPhone launch weekend: Apple sold 25x more CPU transistors than were in all the PCs on Earth in 1995.\nMore than mere phones, smartphones are incredibly powerful, multi-sensory, networked devices. They are your exobrain and exo-peripheral nervous system .\nSensing does not substitute for measurement, rather we can consider measurement as the emphasis of some of the information derived from all that sensed data in the process of sense-making. The emphases may be deliberate and emergent .\nMy thinking hadn\u0026rsquo;t got this far in 2010 when I was writing The Business of Influence but I attended to the biological metaphor in Attenzi and now consider this part and parcel of the Influence Scorecard:\nWe’re biological creatures at one level, and social creatures at another level, a higher level. People have an innate affinity for the layer that’s higher up in the stack if you like because that’s where we live, that’s where identity and relationships and empathy breathe. We’re biological creatures, for sure, but we live, think and behave social. We feel it. We’re social creatures and we’re striving for social business.\nSo, just as it is for humans, we’ve begun to think of business as biological at one level and social at another. \u0026hellip; No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network. The social human is literally powered by the biological human. The true social business is powered by similar capabilities, capabilities that are clearly lacking in the typical organization today, no matter how much they recite a social mantra.\nSome things are easier to quantify than others By definition, quantified organization encompasses a sociological dimension not immediately relevant to quantified self. How might a group of people organized around a common purpose treat such quantification? How might they respond collectively? How will different people respond differently? What are the opportunities and challenges of such radical visibility?\nA London-based company called Quantified Organisation provides dashboards to help transform quantities into actionable information yet it appears they neglect the soft stuff, the cultural, the sociological:\nIf you can\u0026rsquo;t measure it, then it\u0026rsquo;s not important.\nThis is evidently wrong. Some of the most important dimensions of organizational life, not least a conducive culture, and communication and influence , are notoriously tricky to quantify. Yet the company isn\u0026rsquo;t the only one to neglect the sociological in obsessing with oodles of data. PwC Strategy\u0026amp; published a white paper January 2015 on a concept they call the Quantified Core .\nIt takes time to integrate data into an organization this way, and there are no shortcuts. But when you cross that tipping point, and data consistently and automatically influences operations and growth strategy, you become a quantified core enterprise.\nThere are hints they may be moving in the direction of influence flows , but at the same time it\u0026rsquo;s not clear why they alighted on the word \u0026lsquo;core\u0026rsquo; – to my mind it seems at odds with the distributed and decentralized nature of the responsive and quantified organization. The paper stresses \u0026ldquo;five mutually reinforcing attributes\u0026rdquo;:\nA catalog of data and applications Open knowledge sharing Cross-functional proficiency A growth-oriented CDO Semi-centralized funding. Only the second touches sparingly on the cultural facet of organization, and I find little reminiscent of responsiveness. Perhaps this then qualifies the moniker \u0026lsquo;core\u0026rsquo;, acknowledging their limited purview, but I struggle to reconcile the massive potential in 2015 of \u0026lsquo;quantified\u0026rsquo; with such narrow focus.\nOrganization ≠ the firm In everyday use, in the English language at least, it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to consider \u0026ldquo;organization\u0026rdquo; a synonym for \u0026ldquo;the firm\u0026rdquo;. All firms are organizations but the reverse doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold. I almost always invoke \u0026ldquo;organization\u0026rdquo; to mean a group of people organized around a common purpose, and this includes the quantified organization.\nIn terms of plural quantified selves then, the Artefact Group published the idea of The Quantified Us March 2014:\nWe are excited about the idea of the ‘Quantified Us,’ a term we use at Artefact which describes the important space between Big and Small data, and between the Quantified Self and crowd. The Quantified Us is based on a select group of people who share relevant characteristics and behaviors. This group may be centered on similar goals, health conditions, biometrics, personal qualities, environmental factors, or even similarity of emerging data patterns. When the members of a group with such similarities decide to participate in collective pooling their self-tracked data, the data-driven insights and recommendations that result take on an added meaning, impact, and personal relevance.\nThis is very close if not identical to the quantified organization if you interpret the motivations listed by Artefact here as the purpose around which the group forms.\nThe organized self To repeat myself from a recent post , social business is about all variety of stakeholders coming together to add mutual value faster than otherwise, with the help of social technologies, appropriately transformed culture, and a network orientation rather than command and control. It\u0026rsquo;s co-creation with customers, partners, suppliers, everyone, constantly striving to find the right combination to best pursue shared objectives, guided by shared values.\nSelf-organization is a process where some form of global order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between the components of an initially disordered system. The organized self is the technological augmentation to help achieve this in any and all organizations. It entails software representing us in finding opportunities to create mutual value with others, and helping to realise that value; a human- rather than company-centric perspective.\nBYOD (bring your own device) is already an established trend\u0026hellip; I simply extend that to include the digital interface one has onto / into organization.\nSuch potential appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilization are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And it appeals to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy. (The Future of Organization .)\nThe ramifications begin to blur the definitions of employee and \u0026rsquo;the firm\u0026rsquo;. Indeed, anyone who continues to view the firm as simply the sum of its payroll already operates in today\u0026rsquo;s world with yesterday\u0026rsquo;s blinkers. The organized self aims to do for organizing what social media has achieved for communications – eliminate friction and encourage heterarchy. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s a logical endpoint of the current vista of social business / future of work / responsive org.\nMelding quantification, self and org The hi:project is a multi-faceted project seeking to address some of the biggest challenges of our use today and tomorrow of the Internet and Web including privacy, digital inclusion and accessibility, decentralization, and the inculcation of a citizen-centric Internet of Things. It sits at the heart of quantification, self and org.\nAdriana Lukas:\nThe focus on empowering the individual, decentralisation and openness gives me hope that the hi:project will go some way towards redressing the current imbalance of power between individuals and organisations. And as a result benefit both.\nLee Bryant:\nWe are on the cusp of an exciting wave of practical decentralisation of data and the experiences that bring it to life, and this means control of the interface is moving away from organisations and towards the individual. The hi:project is a visionary and delightfully ambitious attempt to accelerate this and give us all more control over our living data, so we support it and hope it succeeds.\nIf this is the sort of thing that floats your boat, you can join the open, distributed and decentralized organization right now, and the Web Science Trust is hosting a webinar on the hi:project 4th March 2015 if you fancy tuning in.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/02/the-quantified-self-the-quantified-organization-and-the-organized-self/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"quantified org self\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/quantified-org-self.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe diagram here portrays where I\u0026rsquo;m going with this post, so let\u0026rsquo;s dive in.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-quantified-self\"\u003eThe quantified self\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe current \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWikipedia entry for quantified self\u003c/a\u003e\n (QS) describes it as \u0026ldquo;a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person\u0026rsquo;s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd it doesn\u0026rsquo;t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major \u003ca href=\"http://quantifiedself.com/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQS community\u003c/a\u003e\n puts it, we\u0026rsquo;re looking at \u003cem\u003eself knowledge through numbers\u003c/em\u003e. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at \u003ca href=\"http://www.meetup.com/LondonQS/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLondon Quantified Self Group\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/fg5rPkHTrCI\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eproselytizes\u003c/a\u003e\n self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat\u0026rsquo;s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it\u0026rsquo;s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2011/04/02/a-sense-of-bewronging/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eriffing off Doc Searls\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-quantified-organization\"\u003eThe quantified organization\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes \u003ca href=\"http://postshift.com/the-quantified-organisation-can-change-become-routine/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etheir take on \u0026lsquo;quantified organization\u0026rsquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026hellip; a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self"},{"content":"\nI have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: Social Business Design magazine – Purpose \u0026amp; policy, openness \u0026amp; agility, structure \u0026amp; culture, communication \u0026amp; trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise.\nTrips off the tongue.\nThe service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche \u0026lsquo;publication\u0026rsquo;, attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers.\nI first posted about this sort of stuff ten years ago , and posted my likes and dislikes of Flipboard a year ago , so I\u0026rsquo;ve given this some thought. And Flipboard \u0026hellip;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s over.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not me. It\u0026rsquo;s you.\nI enjoy sharing, but sharing is insufficient. You need to understand that curation is about community and shared knowledge. Yet there is no community.\nWho are these followers and viewers? I\u0026rsquo;ve no idea\u0026hellip; it seems I must carry on my altruistic curation absent social feedback. Can we comment on what we find? No. We can share and discuss the curated content with our other communities on other social platforms, but not with this specific group of people coalesced around Social Business Design Magazine. Quite weird. Makes Flipboard start to look like a step worth skipping.\nBut what about Flipboard as knowledge repository? Perhaps each of us can enjoy the utility of my Flipboard magazine in isolation.\nBut alas, no. For those unfamiliar with Flipboard you may find this quite odd, but there is no way to search back through the corpus I\u0026rsquo;ve assembled here. Zero. It really is incredibly frustrating. And whether intentional or otherwise, I can find no way to export the collection to a service or format that makes it searchable.\nHow odd to be told there are no results for \u0026ldquo;socioveillance\u0026rdquo; when I know for definite that this content is flipped to my Flipboard magazine.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s it, we\u0026rsquo;re done. This is the last item of content I will curate to my Flipboard magazine. Just to let followers know. Because I\u0026rsquo;m sociable like that.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/02/why-ive-decided-to-stop-curating-a-flipboard-magazine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"goodbye flipboard magazine\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/goodbye-flipboard-magazine.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://flipboard.com/@sheldrake/social-business-design-d8a2etm5y\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Business Design magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n – Purpose \u0026amp; policy, openness \u0026amp; agility, structure \u0026amp; culture, communication \u0026amp; trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTrips off the tongue.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche \u0026lsquo;publication\u0026rsquo;, attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why I've decided to stop curating a Flipboard magazine"},{"content":" I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to the hi:project ? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I\u0026rsquo;m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related.\nThe \u0026lsquo;HI\u0026rsquo; of the hi:project stands for human interface. It\u0026rsquo;s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here\u0026rsquo;s how I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to explain it of late \u0026hellip;\nWhen we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That\u0026rsquo;s how we ended up sticking an \u0026rsquo;e\u0026rsquo; in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders.\nYet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It\u0026rsquo;s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips.\nIn the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface.\nThe hi:project moves the interface between you and the machine away from the machine, through those eager intermediaries, all the way to you. Yes, instead of having to adapt to each and every interface, each and every machine / service now effectively adapts to you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll grant you the vision is ambitious, yet it demands no new tech. We have all the ingredients we need to cook this up together today, and there are some serious motivations beyond the mere \u0026lsquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if\u0026rsquo;. In fact we think it helps address some of the most pressing challenges facing our use of the interwebs and its future manifestations, including those raised just this past week at Davos (reports in Techcrunch and the FT for example).\nAs you might imagine, a lot of time is invested in considering the interface between companies (more specifically their machines) and their customers, and that relationship is pivotal to the mechanism by which I think we can get this ball rolling. Yet to return to the question I set out to answer here, the HI impacts all manner of relationships we have with each other and with organisations (combinations of others).\nThe hi:project aspires to make the interface that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;perfectly yours\u0026rsquo;. For every facet of every life. Customer. Employee. Citizen. Patient. Student. Etc.\nSocial business is about all variety of stakeholders coming together to add mutual value faster than otherwise, with the help of social technologies, appropriately transformed culture, and a network orientation rather than command and control. It\u0026rsquo;s co-creation with customers, partners, suppliers, everyone, constantly striving to find the right combination to best pursue shared objectives, guided by shared values.\nI have referred to the tech augmentation to achieve this the \u0026lsquo;Organized Self \u0026rsquo;, a human- rather than company-centric perspective.\nMore prosaically, BYOD (bring your own device) is already an established trend\u0026hellip; I simply extend that to include the digital interface one has onto / into organisation. The ramifications begin to blur the definition of employee and \u0026rsquo;the firm\u0026rsquo;, but that will do for now. I hope I\u0026rsquo;ve answered the question.\nFortunately, and indeed most reassuringly, I\u0026rsquo;m far from alone. Jon Husband gets it: \u0026ldquo;A new chapter of the internet’s impact on human society \u0026rdquo;. And as you can see from the lead image here, so does Dan Pontefract :-)\nhttp://www.danpontefract.com/the-book/ ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2015/01/the-hiproject-social-business-and-flat-army/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Dan Pontefract Flat Army and the hi:project\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Dan-Pontefract-Flat-Army-and-the-hi-project.png\"\u003e I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe hi:project\u003c/a\u003e\n? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I\u0026rsquo;m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u0026lsquo;HI\u0026rsquo; of the hi:project stands for human interface. It\u0026rsquo;s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here\u0026rsquo;s how I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to explain it of late \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That\u0026rsquo;s how we ended up sticking an \u0026rsquo;e\u0026rsquo; in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It\u0026rsquo;s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The hi:project, social business and Flat Army"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;m at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at the British Academy in London today, courtesy of Kongress Media and Agile Elephant . In conversation with Lee Bryant , Matt Partovi , David Terrar , Damian Corbet , Céline Schillinger , Johan Lange , Janet Parkinson and Anne McCrossan , a common theme is emerging – we need such events as this, and the deep and wide potential of Enterprise 2.0, to extend beyond the inevitable echo chamber of today\u0026rsquo;s eager community.\nWith this in mind, I have penned an open letter to Paul Polman and everyone with an interest in Unilever \u0026rsquo;s success, if only because I love the company\u0026rsquo;s vision, believe it is important in our world, and feel that the stuff we champion in the e2.0 / socbiz / futureofwork communities will be critical in its pursuit.\nThe letter is embedded below and it\u0026rsquo;s also available as a PDF: Open letter to Paul Polman, Unilever .\n[Photo credit: British Academy Facebook page .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/11/an-open-letter-to-paul-polman-unilever-from-enterprise-2-0-summit-london/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Enterprise 2 Summit - British Academy London\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Enterprise-2-Summit-British-Academy-London.png\" title=\"Enterprise 2 Summit - British Academy London\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.e20summit.com/london/conference.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEnterprise 2.0 Summit\u003c/a\u003e\n at the British Academy in London today, courtesy of \u003ca href=\"http://www.kongressmedia.de/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKongress Media\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.theagileelephant.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAgile Elephant\u003c/a\u003e\n. In conversation with \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/leebryant\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLee Bryant\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/matthewpartovi\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMatt Partovi\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/dt\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Terrar\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/damiancorbet\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDamian Corbet\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/CelineSchill\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCéline Schillinger\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/JohanLange\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJohan Lange\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/JanetParkinson\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJanet Parkinson\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Annemcx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAnne McCrossan\u003c/a\u003e\n, a common theme is emerging – we need such events as this, and the deep and wide potential of Enterprise 2.0, to extend beyond the inevitable echo chamber of today\u0026rsquo;s eager community.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An open letter to Paul Polman, Unilever – from Enterprise 2.0 Summit, London"},{"content":"\nI was a victim of McVeillance in June this year. I was walking around a shopping mall under systematic surveillance – CCTV everywhere – when I was accosted by security upon taking out my own camera to photograph the mall. (FYI, the mall itself was the subject of my photography and not its customers per se.)\nProfessor Steve Mann coined the expression McVeillance after he was manhandled out of a McDonalds in Paris where he was eating with his family in 2012 for no other reason than for wearing a computer vision system. McDonalds was watching him. He was watching McDonalds. And \u0026rsquo;they\u0026rsquo; didn\u0026rsquo;t like it.\nI wasn\u0026rsquo;t ejected from the mall as I was actually undertaking a project for the mall\u0026rsquo;s owners, unbeknownst to the security personnel. I was escorted to the security office for appropriate clearance – an act which, per Mann\u0026rsquo;s definitions, officially made me a surveiller.\nThe word surveillance originates from French, from sur- ‘over’ + veiller ‘watch’ (from Latin vigilare ‘keep watch’). It invokes an authoritative orientation where one in authority, metaphorically if not physically above, watches those below. Mann had previously coined the word sousveillance . The French for \u0026lsquo;below\u0026rsquo; is sous, hence the neologism for watching the watchers.\nIn this 2013 paper, Mir Adnan Ali and Mann argue the societal value of sousveillance – The inevitability of the transition from a surveillance-society to a veillance-society: Moral and economic grounding for sousveillance (PDF) .\nIt\u0026rsquo;s with this authority oriented perspective in mind that Mann developed the eight veillances of the veillance compass:\nSocioveillance I published The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations in May this year. I was familiar with sousveillance (although not McVeillance), so referred to it on coining the word socioveillance (slide 48, text reproduced below):\nOn the previous slide in the stack I describe self-organization as a process where some form of global order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between the components of an initially disordered system, and the \u0026ldquo;organized self\u0026rdquo; as being equipped with an organization agent – software representing us in finding opportunities to create mutual value with others, and helping to realise that value.\nSocioveillance then is a component of organized-self. It\u0026rsquo;s a personal and private service monitoring our interactions with our socios – friends and colleagues with whom we seek to create mutual value. And perhaps those one or two steps removed.\nI first came across the veillance compass in an article on the H+ Magazine website earlier this month – Sousveillance and Surveillance: What kind of future do we want? The article references the paper referred to above here and its emphasis on authority-related definitions of surveillance and sousveillance. I added a comment, from which:\nI’m not comfortable considering socioveillance as falling in any one of these quadrants per se, and I think this is related to the authority-based definitions. I can’t think of socioveillance in the context of functional structures / traditional hierarchy, but only in terms of decentralized and distributed authority. More sociocratic I guess.\nCoveillance Now \u0026lsquo;celebrities\u0026rsquo; in my world don\u0026rsquo;t look like footballers, actors or singers. Rather, they might look like this:\n[Wearcompevolution2 , by AngelineStewart, CC BY-SA 3.0.]\nThis compilation of photos of Professor Steve Mann clearly portrays his role in the evolution of wearables , and the reason he has had my attention over the years. I can\u0026rsquo;t find a photo showing exactly what he was wearing in the McDonalds incident, but I understand it was more like the eyewear shown on the right than perhaps the first or third photo here :-)\nI\u0026rsquo;m already feeling uncomfortable with my use of the word celebrity, but anyway \u0026hellip;\nImagine my geeky delight then when the next comment in the thread at H+ Magazine was from the man himself.\nSome years ago we defined a concept we called Sociveillance, or Coveillance (Side-to-side companion veillance, as when two equals watch each other). More recently we’re exploring the concept of Veillance, i.e. beyond the 20th Century “us-versus them” model of Surveillance, Sousveillance, and Sociveillance (Coveillance). Using the theory of economics in the context of a moral framework, we argue that Veillance will become balanced and this change will be inevitable.\nI can find no results for \u0026ldquo;sociveillance\u0026rdquo; with Google or Bing so I\u0026rsquo;m treating it as a synonym for coveillance. Mann pointed me to this 2003 paper introducing coveillance – Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments (PDF) , from which:\nThis condition, where peers can see both the recording and the presentation of the images, is neither \u0026ldquo;surveillance\u0026rdquo; nor \u0026ldquo;sousveillance.\u0026rdquo; We term such observation that is side-to-side \u0026ldquo;coveillance,\u0026rdquo; an example of which could include one citizen watching another.\nAs the veillance compass has one axis for surveillance and the other for sousveillance, coveillance doesn\u0026rsquo;t feature. From the paper\u0026rsquo;s conclusion:\nOrganizational personnel responsible for surveillance generally do not accept sousveillance from the \u0026ldquo;ordinary people\u0026rdquo; performers, even when data displays reveal what the sousveillers are recording. The only instances of acceptance are \u0026hellip; when surveiller and sousveiller can find common ground in both doing \u0026ldquo;coveillance\u0026rdquo; work for symmetrically distant organizations.\nFurther:\nIn such a coveillance society, the actions of all may, in theory, be observable and accountable to all. The issue, however, is not about how much surveillance and sousveillance is present in a situation, but how it generates an awareness of the disempowering nature of surveillance, its overwhelming presence in western societies, and the complacency of all participants towards this presence.\nCoveillance and socioveillance Are there differences between coveillance and socioveillance, and if so, what might they be?\nI think they are different, and here\u0026rsquo;s my first stab at a compare and contrast, and like all first stabs will likely be subject to revision based on feedback and the passing of time to let it seep through the grey stuff.\nCoveillance Socioveillance Domain Society at large – citizen to citizen, organization to organization One\u0026rsquo;s socios – friends and colleagues, and perhaps those one or two steps removed, with whom one might create mutual value Equivalence Veillance equivalence – finding \u0026ldquo;common ground\u0026rdquo; with equivalent veillance powers Value equivalence – in pursuit of mutual understanding, mutual influence and mutual value, irrespective of veillance equivalence Openness Open; seeking to \u0026lsquo;cancel out\u0026rsquo; privacy concerns Negotiating data exchange with others’ socioveillance capabilities according to our respective privacy policies to enrich our mutual understanding within comfortable boundaries (ie, the individual has sole domain over these settings) Object The \u0026ldquo;disempowering nature of surveillance\u0026rdquo; Self-organization and the effectiveness / usefulness of heterarchical (or non-hierarchical in the command-and-control sense) organization Senses Audio and visual Any source of data and information As we noted above, veillance is about watching. The Oxford English defines surveillance in terms of observation. However, given that ones ears are usually directed towards the focus of ones eyes, watching has for some centuries encompassed listening too (although please note I\u0026rsquo;m no etymologist). It\u0026rsquo;s easy to picture a movie set in the pre-digital age in which the surveiller – hero or villain – pins a drinking glass to the wall in the next room with his ear, or tunes into signals transmitted from the miniature mic and radio disguised as a flower.\nIn the digital age, observation extends beyond what one may perceive with retina and eardrum. And it\u0026rsquo;s for this reason that I feel the word socioveillance, with its facility to digest all variety of data and information, doesn\u0026rsquo;t abuse the idea of veillance.\nSocial business As for the prefix \u0026ldquo;socio\u0026rdquo;, this shares its roots with sociology – of or relating to society and its organization. And socioveillance then fits perfectly into the aspirations for social business when defined with the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nData revolution I\u0026rsquo;ll finish this post with a brief extract from the open letter I wrote to the United Nations Data Revolution Group earlier this month on behalf of the hi:project.\nAligning with some of the work pursued by you and your team Professor Pentland at MIT Center for Collective Intelligence , our vision moves beyond the parent-child dynamic of surveillance and sousveillance towards the adult-adult interaction we label socioveillance. Such facility is critical if we are to scale up human relationships to correspond with every other facet of organization scaled up during the 20th Century, if we are to encourage or at least accommodate emergence of self-organization, of leaner and more responsive organization.\n[Main photo Bill Ebbesen CC BY 3.0 ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/10/mcveillance-coveillance-and-socioveillance-in-the-context-of-social-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Photographic lenses\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Photographic_lenses_front_view.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was a victim of McVeillance in June this year. I was walking around a shopping mall under systematic surveillance – CCTV everywhere – when I was accosted by security upon taking out my own camera to photograph the mall. (FYI, the mall itself was the subject of my photography and not its customers per se.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eProfessor Steve Mann\u003c/a\u003e\n coined the expression \u003cem\u003eMcVeillance\u003c/em\u003e after he was manhandled out of a McDonalds in Paris where he was eating with his family in 2012 for no other reason than for wearing a computer vision system. McDonalds was watching him. He was watching McDonalds. And \u0026rsquo;they\u0026rsquo; didn\u0026rsquo;t like it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI wasn\u0026rsquo;t ejected from the mall as I was actually undertaking a project for the mall\u0026rsquo;s owners, unbeknownst to the security personnel. I was escorted to the security office for appropriate clearance – an act which, per Mann\u0026rsquo;s definitions, officially made me a surveiller.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe word \u003cem\u003esurveillance\u003c/em\u003e originates from French, from sur- ‘over’ + veiller ‘watch’ (from Latin vigilare ‘keep watch’). It invokes an authoritative orientation where one in authority, metaphorically if not physically above, watches those below. Mann had previously coined the word \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003esousveillance\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n. The French for \u0026lsquo;below\u0026rsquo; is sous, hence the neologism for watching the watchers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"McVeillance, coveillance, and socioveillance in the context of social business"},{"content":"In my last post on the topic of AMEC and measurement , I noted:\nAMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not \u0026ldquo;of Media\u0026rdquo;\nI have taken that as the theme for my contribution to AMEC Measurement Week 2014, which kicks off Monday. Dr. Jon White is another influence who, in a recent exchange, pointed out that the problems of measurement in public relations are largely the result of the approach taken to management in public relations work.\nThis topic was one of the motivations for my writing The Business of Influence , although I can assure you Dr. White and others understood the problem way before me. I hope that the recommendations in the book contribute in some small way to putting this right.\nFor today and for Measurement Week, here are a dozen slides in substitute for the book.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/09/influence-measurement-contribution-amec-measurement-week-2014/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/06/measuring-communications-reconciling-models-amsterdam/\" title=\"Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam\"\u003emy last post on the topic of AMEC and measurement\u003c/a\u003e\n, I noted:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not \u0026ldquo;of Media\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have taken that as the theme for my contribution to AMEC Measurement Week 2014, which kicks off Monday. \u003ca href=\"http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/jon-white/0/3b0/b36\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDr. Jon White\u003c/a\u003e\n is another influence who, in a recent exchange, pointed out that the problems of measurement in public relations are largely the result of the approach taken to management in public relations work.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence measurement – a contribution to AMEC Measurement Week 2014"},{"content":" The hi:project launches today. It\u0026rsquo;s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who\u0026rsquo;s monitoring our every action.\nI believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization\u0026rsquo;s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nAre we really going to answer this question satisfactorily by having everyone interface with the digital world similarly? By having them come to each machine in turn than have the machines come to them? I think not.\nIntroducing the hi:project. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll join in .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/09/introducing-hiproject/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"hi-project blog post header\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/hi-project-blog-post-header.png\"\u003e The \u003ca href=\"http://hi-project.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehi:project\u003c/a\u003e\n launches today. It\u0026rsquo;s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who\u0026rsquo;s monitoring our every action.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization\u0026rsquo;s success. The creation of \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/03/social-business-mutuality-stack/\" title=\"The social business mutuality stack\"\u003emutual value\u003c/a\u003e\n begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/seventy-two/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAttenzi - a social business story\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Introducing the hi:project"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;ve had a number of questions thrown at me by students in their dissertation deliberations these past weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post them all here as there is overlap as you can imagine, but this one complements nicely the Q\u0026amp;A with Phillip Casey (and here ) at Newcastle University.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29777\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;150\u0026rdquo;] Silvana Paules[/caption]\nSilvana Paules is a post-graduate student undertaking a Masters in Strategic Management of Public Relations at the Higher School of Social Communication , Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa . (I took the main photo here on a trip to the Instituto Politécnico in 2011.)\nHere are the answers I offered to some of her questions, and I start with a relevant extract from Chapter 10 of The Business of Influence .\nThe Chief Influence Officer (CInflO) The incumbent [of this role] is charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organizational discipline – charged with executing the Influence Scorecard . They will be keen to network with peers in other organizations, to share best practice, to identify, refine and codify proven techniques, and to flag up unseen or unanticipated flaws in the processes described in this book [and others].\nIn my opinion, the role of Chief Influence Officer will be regarded as being on a par with the COO, as CEO-in-waiting.\nIdeally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations – just the kind of trajectory frequently mapped out for ‘future leader’ types. They will probably have more experience in one or more of these over others of course, but will set out as a matter of urgency to orient themselves in the areas of the organization with which they have least experience, working hard to establish a thorough and lasting rapport with functional heads and all stakeholder groups. They will excel at interpersonal communication, inspire confidence and a can-do attitude, and know instinctively when to crack resistance one-on-one and when to draft in support from the CEO.\nGiven the not inconsiderable change management, collaboration and coordination challenges, boards will look in-house for candidates with extant strong organization-wide interpersonal relationships and a reputation for making change happen from both the hard and the soft side of things. Appropriate candidates will recognize that the task is not achievable alone, particularly without unanimous and unequivocal board support – which they will be intent on working hard to secure, if not already manifest by his or her appointment.\nThe candidates will be highly numerate, probably having taken a statistics or research methodologies component to their university degree.\nThey will be ‘digitally native’. They will be curious and indefatigable by nature, and able to identify and exploit opportunities as rapidly as they identify and learn from failure.\nThey will be comfortable living simultaneously in both the extreme, unrelenting real-time, and the future two to four quarters hence.\n[\u0026hellip;] They will particularly relish the harsh, unflattering light thrown on previously opaque and unconnected aspects of the organization, and the boardroom accountability this allows them to enjoy and demands they live up to.\nThe Chief Influence Officer role requires ambidexterity.\nOn the left-brain side of things, the Chief Influence Officers get a distinct buzz from the numbers and the process of getting the numbers, and from learning from the numbers and putting that learning to productive use. They feel instant affinity with the thrust of this book: the recognition that things aren’t working quite like they should right now; the imperative to integrate influence into business performance management ; the opportunity to pare back the historic layers of structure, culture and processes, and build out anew; and to take command of the opportunities. They excel at both the analysis of complex situations and the synthesis of new processes.\nOn the right-brain side of things, they maintain a visceral sense of the human: for emotion expressed and contained; for the needs and desires of all stakeholder groups; for the creatively outstanding; and for the intangible interplay of brand values and associations. They have empathy for the organization as a living, breathing entity, in continual interaction and tension with its environs. They fully appreciate the change they are about to embark upon, how best to work with the CEO and other C-level colleagues, and how to communicate the transformation to their own team and wider organization and win their support. They will recognize why it’s important to invest time ensuring that everyone appreciates their new or revised role and the refocused structure and influence culture around them.\nWhile the requirement for deft change management skills is most obviously required of the first incumbents in order to make the transition to the Influence Scorecard, such skills remain key to subsequent incumbents, given their insight into the influence flows. There’s less advantage in hyper-sensitizing the organization to its stakeholder relationships and the Six Influence Flows if the person at the centre of such operations cannot help to define the reflex – the responses the organization must explore, design and execute.\nThey will be skilled lateral thinkers, never afraid to ask ‘stupid’ questions.\nAs few candidates will bear such equilibrium of mind and capability, the majority of candidates will have a tendency towards the left-brain talents, selecting their team to counterbalance accordingly. I find it difficult to envisage the opposite working, especially if the bias away from left-brain talents is such that it impairs the incumbent’s proficiency in systematically and scientifically transforming the organization’s approach to influence. Perhaps a Chief Influence Officer with a right-brain tendency could be a suitable successor to the first left-brain tendency incumbent.\nThe influence professional The influence professional works under the CInflO and, as you’d expect, doesn’t quite have the breadth or depth of management or leadership qualities held by the CInflO. They may have jumped over to the influence discipline from marketing or PR or customer service, or perhaps they studied the Influence Scorecard at college should faculty thread it into syllabi in the years ahead.\nAn influence professional may be responsible for working with particular aspects of the business, such as operations or customer service or HR or analytics, ensuring strategic alignment, identifying and exploring opportunities for improvement, driving performance against the metrics, and helping the organization to transition its culture for influence success. As we discussed earlier, the team of influence professionals will attend to the roles mapped out [by others] for the Chief Customer Officer and the Chief Culture Officer.\nThe influence professional is an astute student of the big trends we covered earlier, and those of equivalent import in the unknown future, seeking to understand how they affect their organization’s marketplace and how the organization might rise to the challenges and pursue the opportunities.\nSilvana: What has changed in the practice of PR the last few years? Why this change? During the 80s and 90s PR practice had largely narrowed its scope to media and analyst relations, and focused on the publicity model (\u0026lsquo;getting the message out\u0026rsquo; without much concern for \u0026lsquo;getting the message in\u0026rsquo;). In recent times, social media has disintermediated relationships allowing, perhaps demanding, PR practitioners at least listen to the end-customer if not engage them directly. The focus remains predominantly publicity oriented however, and focused on the customer / prospective customer over other stakeholder groups. (Many of those who focus on employees – Internal Comms practitioners – don\u0026rsquo;t consider themselves to be practising public relations so narrow have working definitions become.)\nWhat is the influence of \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; in these changes? Digital media has enabled the disintermediation referenced above. It has allowed people to aggregate to common purpose, common love or indeed shared dislike, irrespective of time zone or geography. This has lent the \u0026rsquo;little\u0026rsquo; customer and the \u0026rsquo;little\u0026rsquo; citizen a new relevance and potency in the collective in their relations with Big Co. and Big Gov. and with each other.\nWhat has changed in the relationship between the organization and the public? The collective exerts a louder voice. Events that impact reputation, negatively and positively, spread faster and wider. And perhaps, just perhaps, organizations are re-learning that the organization is just a sum of the people that wish to come together to common purpose to create mutual value, and desire and mutual value demands a foundation of mutual understanding (ie, the public relations excellence model).\nOpenness and transparency mark the difference between the organizational approach to PR last century and this. I like to say that if \u0026lsquo;perception is reality\u0026rsquo; was the axiom of 20th Century practice, we must now consider \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo;.\nKnowing that PR may have a strategic, tactical or technician role, can we consider that the \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; and digital PR are part of the same or different realities? Reality is digital. All things digital now interweave with the analogue world from which we took metaphors to understand this emerging digital thing in the first place. We had connected more \u0026rsquo;things\u0026rsquo; to the Internet than people in 2008, and by 2020 we expect the best part of 8 billion people and 50 to 100 billion things. There really isn\u0026rsquo;t any such thing as \u0026lsquo;digital PR\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;online PR\u0026rsquo; any more.\nDespite the lazy inclination to talk about earned media being the domain of PR and paid media the domain of the advertising people, no thoughtful definition of PR makes this delineation, including the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s or my own . Influence does not respect the difference between earned and paid; it flows where it will.\nMore and more, online is a reality of PR, how do you think that the market has adapted to this? Very slowly.\nIf you consider the Internet is now 45 years old and the Web 25 (they\u0026rsquo;re different things ), that blogging started in the 90s and Facebook in 2005, and that the iPhone launched in 2007 and Android 2008, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t until 2010 that our own Chartered Institute here in the UK finally assembled a social media panel to discuss the ramifications at length and develop thought leadership – the moment I finally decided to join. Yet beyond the basics such as identifying high profile bloggers, most PR practitioners continued to focus on \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; media relations, meaning that the CIPR was actually ahead of the curve.\nPR practice has had so much success sticking to old ways that it\u0026rsquo;s only in the past four or five years that it\u0026rsquo;s had to get its skates on, prompted in particular by the encroachment of other professions on practice that should have been PR\u0026rsquo;s own (digital / content marketers and SEO practitioners for example).\nWhat are the key characteristics and skills of the PR professional profile? And what changes has he been facing? This depends on (1) how you define PR, and (2) the context of a specific role.\nIn Chapter 10 of my book, The Business of Influence , I describe roles provisionally labelled Chief Influence Officer and the Influence Professional (included above ). I used these titles because it was unclear to me then whether today\u0026rsquo;s public relations practitioners would step up to the respective role descriptions, in which case my labels would prove merely temporary, or not, leaving PR to dwell in its simple tactical mechanics while others took up the wider and deeper roles described.\nCan we say that the definition in practice is beginning to move away from a sole focus on media relations and beginning to recognise the urgency and opportunity to effect symmetrical communications with all stakeholder groups? Perhaps. There are signs, but for every one worth celebrating there are ten to bemoan (and I mean this in business value terms, not simply academic normative thinking.)\nWhat are the functions that the PR professionals should perform? Again, this depends on how you define PR, and the context. Not to repeat myself, the functions are wider and deeper than dominant practice today, and require greater numerical and analytical capability than I see demonstrated in typical practice today.\nDone well, public relations should be the foundation of social business . It should provide the connective fabric that binds other professions. So, for example, while I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t expect the PR practitioner to write code, to understand the deep details of search algorithms, to crunch big data, to produce high quality video content, etc. I would expect them to know what this entails, how to interact with those that do it for a living, to know what\u0026rsquo;s possible, adjudge the results and help bring it all together.\nShould the PR strategy be designed in an integrated or specialized way? What changes does the immediacy of online bring to strategic planning? I work to the definition of strategy – knowing where to play and how to win. Too often I see planning confused for strategy. Planning is working out how to execute strategy.\nStrategy development used to be deliberate – undertaken internally by people considered of appropriate seniority and experience. This must be tempered now by the immediacy of and the intelligence accrued through real-time symmetrical communication. I consider it part of the PR role to help establish the organization\u0026rsquo;s strategy through this emergent process , and not just strategy within PR\u0026rsquo;s immediate (traditional) domain.\nSo in answer to your question, it plays to both the specialism of the profession as I define it and to the integrative aspirations of the newly nimble, responsive and learning organization.\nIt is difficult to think and develop integrated strategies? Business is complex. Business is highly competitive. So yes, working out where to play and how to win and then executing fast, is difficult.\nHow is monitoring and evaluation approached in the new ecosystem? Mature measurement and evaluation in PR remains the rare exception. This is a big topic, so I\u0026rsquo;ll point you to a recent post for starters if I may.\nHow do you deal with the challenges, risks and opportunities that emerge from the proximity relationship between organizations and the public? Without a doubt in my mind, the proximity represents the most wonderful opportunity to create better organizations – better at creating sustainable mutual value for all stakeholders. Given some of the challenges mankind faces today, this is the most fabulous gift at just the right time.\nFortunately, one of the characteristics of freer and faster moving markets is that only the most adaptable survive let alone thrive. So, those that work out how to take advantage of this opportunity to become responsive will make it, and those that do not will die. Either way, we\u0026rsquo;re left with better organizations.\nYour question is too deep and broad to be answered succinctly here, but I will say that organizations that still regard proximity as a risk in some way haven\u0026rsquo;t yet got their heads round it, and that inability in fact is their greatest risk, not the proximity itself. Once they have, they can work with companies like my own to reconsider culture, structure, policies and process.\nThe future of the profession: where we are going? This is an exciting time for the public relations profession, although as my co-authors of PR Redefined will concur, it remains unclear if the entire profession will move in this direction, whether a new profession will emerge alongside, or whether we\u0026rsquo;ll witness a bifurcation. Robert Phillips, Head of Chambers at Jericho Chambers and former President and CEO Edelman EMEA, considers it impossible to recover the reputation of PR, and calls the new vista Public Leadership (Trust Me, PR is Dead ).\nWhichever, I know where I\u0026rsquo;m going :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/08/pr-changing-whos-going-to-do-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Padrão dos Descobrimentos, Tagus River, Lisbon\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Padra%CC%83o_dos_Descobrimentos.jpg\"\u003e I\u0026rsquo;ve had a number of questions thrown at me by students in their dissertation deliberations these past weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post them all here as there is overlap as you can imagine, but this one complements nicely \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/07/brand-pr-non-profits-responsiveness-qa-phillip-casey/\" title=\"Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q\u0026amp;A by Phillip Casey\"\u003ethe Q\u0026amp;A with Phillip Casey\u003c/a\u003e\n (and \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/08/questions-influence-size-complexity/\" title=\"More questions of influence – size and complexity\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n) at Newcastle University.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29777\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;150\u0026rdquo;]\u003cimg alt=\"Silvana Paules\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/silvana_paules.jpg\"\u003e Silvana Paules[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://pt.linkedin.com/in/silvanapaules/en\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSilvana Paules\u003c/a\u003e\n is a post-graduate student undertaking a Masters in Strategic Management of Public Relations at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.escs.ipl.pt/en/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHigher School of Social Communication\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.ipl.pt/en\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInstituto Politécnico de Lisboa\u003c/a\u003e\n. (I took the main photo here on a trip to the Instituto Politécnico in 2011.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere are the answers I offered to some of her questions, and I start with a relevant extract from Chapter 10 of \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-chief-influence-officer-cinflo\"\u003eThe Chief Influence Officer (CInflO)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe incumbent [of this role] is charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organizational discipline – charged with executing the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/influence-scorecard/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n. They will be keen to network with peers in other organizations, to share best practice, to identify, refine and codify proven techniques, and to flag up unseen or unanticipated flaws in the processes described in this book [and others].\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn my opinion, the role of Chief Influence Officer will be regarded as being on a par with the COO, as CEO-in-waiting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/the_business_of_influence_3d-200x300.png\"\u003eIdeally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations – just the kind of trajectory frequently mapped out for ‘future leader’ types. They will probably have more experience in one or more of these over others of course, but will set out as a matter of urgency to orient themselves in the areas of the organization with which they have least experience, working hard to establish a thorough and lasting rapport with functional heads and all stakeholder groups. They will excel at interpersonal communication, inspire confidence and a can-do attitude, and know instinctively when to crack resistance one-on-one and when to draft in support from the CEO.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGiven the not inconsiderable change management, collaboration and coordination challenges, boards will look in-house for candidates with extant strong organization-wide interpersonal relationships and a reputation for making change happen from both the hard and the soft side of things. Appropriate candidates will recognize that the task is not achievable alone, particularly without unanimous and unequivocal board support – which they will be intent on working hard to secure, if not already manifest by his or her appointment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe candidates will be highly numerate, probably having taken a statistics or research methodologies component to their university degree.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey will be ‘digitally native’. They will be curious and indefatigable by nature, and able to identify and exploit opportunities as rapidly as they identify and learn from failure.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey will be comfortable living simultaneously in both the extreme, unrelenting real-time, and the future two to four quarters hence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\u0026hellip;] They will particularly relish the harsh, unflattering light thrown on previously opaque and unconnected aspects of the organization, and the boardroom accountability this allows them to enjoy and demands they live up to.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How is PR changing and who's going to do it?"},{"content":" Phillip Casey, post-graduate student at Newcastle University, follows up our earlier Q\u0026amp;A with a couple more questions.\nIs influence harder to manage as an organisation grows in size? As before, beware the idea that influence can be managed per se. I\u0026rsquo;ll assume you\u0026rsquo;re referring to the considered design and monitoring of process, culture and operations more widely, to increase the likelihood that stakeholders are influenced and appropriate reciprocation is encouraged, in ways more conducive than otherwise to the organization achieving its goals and living up to its purpose.\nComplexity of the influence system does tend to increase with organization size from my observations, and possibly by definition. But I\u0026rsquo;d caveat that by asserting that such observation should demand a response in organization design terms.\nFor example, for this and related sociological reasons, some champion the idea that teams should not exceed 150 or say 200 people in size, and when they do a bifurcation is in order so that teams can continue to operate at a human scale. Such a size hovers around a quantity known as Dunbar\u0026rsquo;s number, and it\u0026rsquo;s not yet clear whether new technologies / media might allow humans to coalesce effectively at a number greater than this pre-digital statistic. I\u0026rsquo;m hopeful that it does. One definition of social business I like to use is mutually valuable relationships at scale, implying we can still ensure what you might call a human response, as opposed to the dehumanizing \u0026ldquo;computer says no\u0026rdquo; variety for example.\nAnd when I say teams I mean cross-disciplinary autonomous teams, what some might refer to as a strategic business unit, rather than say a marketing department or a sales department for example.\nDo you think similar types of organisation have overlapping influence flows? Organization is a system of systems and a system within systems. And influence is like water, it flows where it will. So yes, overlapping, underlapping, crosslapping, everywhichwaylapping!\nNote: the Six Influence Flows is a mental check-list, a challenge and a reminder. It\u0026rsquo;s not a systems diagram.\n[Image by Martin Latter, BY-SA .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/08/questions-influence-size-complexity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/martinlatter/5576004597/ BY-SA\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/by_martin_latter.jpg\"\u003e Phillip Casey, post-graduate student at Newcastle University, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/07/brand-pr-non-profits-responsiveness-qa-phillip-casey/\" title=\"Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q\u0026amp;A by Phillip Casey\"\u003efollows up our earlier Q\u0026amp;A\u003c/a\u003e\n with a couple more questions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"is-influence-harder-to-manage-as-an-organisation-grows-in-size\"\u003eIs influence harder to manage as an organisation grows in size?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs before, beware the idea that influence can be managed per se. I\u0026rsquo;ll assume you\u0026rsquo;re referring to the considered design and monitoring of process, culture and operations more widely, to increase the likelihood that stakeholders are influenced and appropriate reciprocation is encouraged, in ways more conducive than otherwise to the organization achieving its goals and living up to its purpose.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eComplexity of the influence system does tend to increase with organization size from my observations, and possibly by definition. But I\u0026rsquo;d caveat that by asserting that such observation should demand a response in organization design terms.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"More questions of influence – size and complexity"},{"content":"You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done.\nIn the 20th Century, the marketing department did marketing, the PR people did PR, and no job title included the word influence. To this day, no role or team or department in the typical organization incorporates the word, which is why I pivot my client workshops around the topic of influencing and being influenced – not only does it address the actual thing we\u0026rsquo;re all interested in, it helps lower ego defence and removes functional blinkers.\nOnly very recently are organisations looking up from the typically too-narrow focus of PR, which for some reason appears to have restricted itself to media and analyst relations of recent times, and looking away from the pay-to-spray-and-pray domain traditionally occupied by the bods in advertising, to investigate the effectiveness of so-called influencer marketing.\nWhile this is just a sub-domain itself of the deeper and wider influence system, I thought, given this trend, you might find the following 30 seconds of video interesting. It documents the efforts Adobe Systems went to towards the end of the 1980s to get its Illustrator software accepted.\nWe called it influencing the influencers.\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxESbKORdc0#t=4m08s ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/08/called-influencing-influencers-adobe-late-80s/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Adobe influencing the influencers\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Adobe-influencing-the-influencers.png\"\u003eYou have been influenced when you think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the 20th Century, the marketing department did marketing, the PR people did PR, and no job title included the word \u003cem\u003einfluence\u003c/em\u003e. To this day, no role or team or department in the typical organization incorporates the word, which is why I pivot my client workshops around the topic of influencing and being influenced – not only does it address the actual thing we\u0026rsquo;re all interested in, it helps lower ego defence and removes functional blinkers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"We called it influencing the influencers.\" Adobe. Late-80s."},{"content":" The CIPR is in the process of updating its research, measurement and evaluation guidelines (PDF) . The current edition is dated March 2011 and harks back to when I used to chair the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s measurement deliberations; the current initiative is being led by Matt McKay and Martin Turner .\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a short but important extract from the current guidance:\nEvery organisation should have a mission (why we exist), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there / achieve the objectives). Given that measurement isn\u0026rsquo;t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool in itself, a powerful way to align each employee’s day-to-day activities with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly.\nPeople perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.\nAnd as each marketplace is unique and as your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s simply unprofessional to have no research, measurement and evaluation capability, and yet early forays can prove, well, next to useless too. Take for example the number of times I\u0026rsquo;ve seen tool selection dictate metrics rather than strategically defined metrics dictate the tools. Fortunately however, while a top notch approach will take some time and effort to develop it\u0026rsquo;s not too difficult to get things rolling properly.\nFrom Chapter 5 of The Business of Influence :\nI find myself repeating one criticism too frequently: ‘measurement because we can, not because we should’. This chapter is about aspiring to measure only what we should.\nI was never satisfied with common PR measurement approaches, or indeed with many other approaches to marketing measurement. They too often appear vague. Measurement and evaluation come across too frequently as more about post-rationalizing our decisions to pursue particular strategies and campaigns or proving to our clients that they should continue to retain us, than about seeking to secure an objective organizational learning opportunity.\nTake the traditional reliance of the PR profession on advertising value equivalence (AVE); a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.\n\u0026hellip; even if best practice doesn’t turn out to be as simple or even as generic as AVE (and it doesn’t), we will at last have something of true value and practical insight to bring to the board table rather than a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain.\nThe whole chapter is available freely (PDF) if you\u0026rsquo;d like to see where I go from here, including a critique of increasingly common \u0026lsquo;influencer\u0026rsquo; approaches. You may also like my presentation: What, exactly, is the value of social? If you\u0026rsquo;d like to contribute to the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s work this second half of 2014 please do get in touch with Matt or Martin. Regardless, I think they\u0026rsquo;ll be reaching out to every CIPR member in the not too distant.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/learning-measure-measuring-learn/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PR measurement and evaluation\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/PR-measurement-and-evaluation.png\"\u003e The \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n is in the process of updating its \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/Final_Social_Media_Measurement_Guidance%20_March_2011.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eresearch, measurement and evaluation guidelines (PDF)\u003c/a\u003e\n. The current edition is dated March 2011 and harks back to when I used to chair the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s measurement deliberations; the current initiative is being led by \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/prmattmckay\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMatt McKay\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/martinmturner\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMartin Turner\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s a short but important extract from the current guidance:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery organisation should have a mission (why we exist), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there / achieve the objectives). Given that measurement isn\u0026rsquo;t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool in itself, a powerful way to align each employee’s day-to-day activities with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd as each marketplace is unique and as your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"Learning to measure and measuring to learn"},{"content":" Having put my two penn\u0026rsquo;orth out there over the years I\u0026rsquo;m occasionally approached by students at this dissertation time of year. This week, Phillip Casey and I struck up conversation on Twitter. Phillip is a post-graduate student undertaking the MA in Media and Public Relations at Newcastle University (pictured) and his dissertation is titled Brand Image: PR in the UK non-profit healthcare sector.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29730\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;150\u0026rdquo;] Phillip Casey[/caption]\nI enjoyed responding to Phillip\u0026rsquo;s questions, so, with his permission, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d make our Q\u0026amp;A public here. (It migrated to email in case you were wondering about a 140 character count.)\nWhere a reference consists of just a page number, it refers to The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age .\n1) Is a strong brand image important for a non-profit organisation? Why? A brand used to convey ownership of livestock. Then it was an \u0026ldquo;our name\u0026rsquo;s on it\u0026rdquo; quality assurance. This century, with product quality (defined as fitness-for-purpose) increasingly a given, a brand represents a nexus of values. If our values align with a brand, then I\u0026rsquo;m part of that brand. If they don\u0026rsquo;t, I look to take my time, attention and money elsewhere. [Attenzi ]\nOrganisations need to communicate their purpose and values in order to attract and assemble the right mix of people and resources to live up to its mission and pursue its vision. So brand, defined like this, lies at the heart of things.\n2) What role does influence play in establishing brand image? Why? You have been influenced when you do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done or think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought. [p18]\nWhat is the intended outcome of your marketing and PR campaigns, and the design of your organization overall, if it’s not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you’d like, and to be sensitive to how they’d like you to think and behave? [Influence – request for comments .]\nThis reciprocation has the individual\u0026rsquo;s view of the brand in constant flux – your regard for Oxfam for example is layered up over time.\n3) Is PR the most effective channel for managing influence? Why? This question cannot be answered without defining PR. I\u0026rsquo;ll use my own here:\nThe planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill.\nHmmm, so by that definition your question answers itself.\nBut while we\u0026rsquo;re on the topic of definitions\u0026hellip; to manage (verb): to be in charge of; administer and regulate; maintain control.\nTherefore, as influence is an input to and output of a complex adaptive system , you cannot aspire to \u0026ldquo;manage it\u0026rdquo;. You can only hope to work hard to align ones own behaviours and communication\u0026hellip;\nNot that we use the terms in our framework here, but reputation management does not actually mean managing reputation, and brand management does not actually mean managing a brand. They mean actively attending to the business of influencing and being influenced such that the resultant beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are conducive to our achieving organizational objectives. [p28]\nAnother way of answering the question is to define PR as media / journalist relations, or as publicity and spin, in which case the answer to your question is a resounding no.\n4) Should non-profits manage their PR / influence in a different way to a for-profit organisation? Why? Firstly, beware slashing PR and influence together. As before, it depends on your working definition of public relations. Moreover, from my experience, when most people briefly consider the act of influencing they typically think of themselves / the organisation influencing others rather than the reciprocal or indeed other influence flows between other entities that may be of interest.\nIn answer to the question, no. Both non-profit and for-profit exist for purposes that can be expressed in non-financial ways. (For-profits should know what they want to do, the consequence of which is profit, and those that articulate their existence in no other terms than making money may find themselves a bit rudderless.) [Attenzi .]\nThis idea of purpose is closely linked to our reference to values above, and in many ways for-profits are now taking a leaf out of the non-profit playbook here.\nIf you are concluding \u0026lsquo;yes\u0026rsquo; to this question, you might be viewing for-profit public relations through the lens of current dominant practice – more publicity model than Grunig\u0026rsquo;s 4th – and non-profit as being more authentic.\n** Over-used word alert ** so quick definition: authenticity refers to having the quality of an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.\nAnother polemic worth thinking about – reality is (increasingly) perception.\nYou can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone. [Future of Organization .]\nIn other words, forging authentic approaches to understanding how influence goes around comes around and to guiding ones own behaviours and communication is increasingly critical to all organisations.\n5) Do charities now face extra difficulties due to New Media and the Six Influence Flows? Why? [caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29648\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;401\u0026rdquo;] The Six Influence Flows[/caption]\nAll organisations now face new opportunities to develop mutual understanding, to inculcate mutual influence and create mutual value. [Social business mutuality stack .]\nDifficulties are only manifest / perceived in transition from the old model (opacity, spin, narrow focus) to the new (transparency, openness, authenticity, broad focus – see next Q.)\n6) Do the Six Influence Flows provide any opportunities for an organisation? Why? The Six Influence Flows hints at new possibilities. For the first time all organisations can maintain an eye on the wider network of influence, systematically, which, if they close the loop by developing the organisation\u0026rsquo;s learning capabilities, can only bode well in terms of maintaining and growing relevance amongst its stakeholders. [Doing the triple loop .]\nFor now, as we transition, exploiting these new possibilities provides competitive advantage, but in the not-too-distant such things will need to be everyday practice.\n7) Do you feel that all Six Influence Flows are equal priorities for a non-profit organisation? Which ones are and why? Oh crumbs, this one is a tricky one to answer in a few sentences. Let me think how to sum this up\u0026hellip;\nOK. It\u0026rsquo;s all about context. It\u0026rsquo;s all about the state of the wider system in which the system of organisation functions. Some days / years, it might be fairly simple with one day very much like the last. Sometimes it can be quite complicated. And then, what most senior management teams fear most or perhaps even fail to understand, sometimes things can be complex / turbulent. [The difference between complicated and complex .]\nThis impacts the balance of deliberate strategy (that which we divine in advance; the dominant and too often sole form of strategy formulation today) and emergent strategy (sensitising an organisation to its ecosystem and improving its facility to adapt to change in near real-time). And this impacts the relative balance of importance of various influence flows from one moment to the next.\nErr, hope that\u0026rsquo;s clearer than plain old mud.\nSome further clarification. The Six Influence Flows is a prompt, a check-list, perhaps a provocation. It is not a taxonomy. And the numbering does not convey relative importance; they\u0026rsquo;re just labels.\n8) Do you think Social Media is now a necessity for organisations? Why? We don\u0026rsquo;t have media for media\u0026rsquo;s sake, but to communicate. And we don\u0026rsquo;t communicate for communication\u0026rsquo;s sake, but to influence and be influenced. [Attenzi .]\nWhen a particular media plays its part in influence, it cannot be ignored. Social media cannot be ignored now by any organisation.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an example. There\u0026rsquo;s an organisation employing \u0026gt;1000 people. It makes a specialist product with only 3 buyers in the world. I was asked how on Earth social media was going to help in this instance. I believe the individual asking was confusing marketing and PR.\nI pointed out that the buyers are influenced in many directions; are you saying they\u0026rsquo;re immune to influence via social media? (Specifically the 2nd and 4th flows.) Moreover, the buyers aren\u0026rsquo;t the only stakeholders of course. I asked how important it is to find and retain the right employees, the right suppliers and partners. How important it is to play your part in your local community, environment, etc.\nSo short answer: Yes. Social media is now a permanent feature of our societal fabric, of the public sphere.\n9) What tactic would you consider as the most effective method of influencing stakeholders? Why? A tactic is an action that\u0026rsquo;s part of a wider plan. The plan explains how the strategy is to be executed. The strategy determines where we\u0026rsquo;re going to play and how we\u0026rsquo;re going to win. Your use of \u0026ldquo;effective\u0026rdquo; implies we have articulated what success looks like, so we\u0026rsquo;d have measurement to ascertain if the plan is working, and whether the strategy remains the right one.\nIf your organization is unique, with a unique position in a unique market, with unique mission and vision, and uniquely tailored strategies demanding a unique mix of tactics, is it too great a leap of faith to expect the (optimal) blend of communications to be unique and for communications performance measurement to therefore require a unique and tailored blend of metrics? [Attenzi .]\nThe question then is akin to asking which car is best?\nDepends.\nInterestingly, influencing is complex and \u0026lsquo;common sense\u0026rsquo; in this area doesn\u0026rsquo;t always appreciate the fact. \u0026ldquo;Influentials don\u0026rsquo;t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.\u0026rdquo; [Duncan Watts, see next link.] Perhaps a trend\u0026rsquo;s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend – not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. [Is the Tipping Point toast? , Fast Company, February 2008.]\n10) Do you think emotive content and celebrity endorsements could be effective ways of influencing stakeholders? Why? We are social and emotional animals. Economists have undertaken a volte-face in recent times from considering the rational individual to the irrational (ie, where emotion isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily subjugated by logic). Emotions are squarely in the mix of influence going round coming round.\nRe. celebrity:\n\u0026ldquo;Look, I’m not saying that some people won’t be tipped over the TV purchasing edge by what’s-his-name, his mile-wide smile and trademark wink. Acknowledging complexity does not rule out this outcome. Acknowledging complexity however will likely attribute such celebrity endorsement a considerably lower value in the mix of things than it appears to command today.” [Attenzi .]\n11) What advice would you give to a charity that would help ensure its survival? Firstly, while somewhat counter to traditional thinking I know, why should an organisation necessarily seek to survive? What if its dissolution is compatible with its values, perhaps because the resources it has shepherded might be more effective (in terms of its purpose) deployed quite differently?\nBut looking at the question more traditionally:\nIt is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. [Things Darwin didn\u0026rsquo;t say .]\nTo survive, the modern organisation must be adaptive – that means both flexible (changing tactics as required) and agile (changing strategy as required). This responsiveness can only be developed by improving the organisation\u0026rsquo;s facility to tune into those influence flows, its ability to learn, and its facility to evolve its culture and structure and processes and products etc. to best meet the new reality.\n[Photo credit: Andrew Curtis, Share Alike, Wikimedia Commons .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/brand-pr-non-profits-responsiveness-qa-phillip-casey/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Armstrong Building, Newcastle University\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/1024px-Armstrong_Building_Newcastle_University_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_1761955.jpg\"\u003e Having put my two penn\u0026rsquo;orth out there over the years I\u0026rsquo;m occasionally approached by students at this dissertation time of year. This week, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/Phillip_Casey\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhillip Casey\u003c/a\u003e\n and I struck up conversation on Twitter. Phillip is a post-graduate student undertaking \u003ca href=\"http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/degree/media-public-relations\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe MA in Media and Public Relations\u003c/a\u003e\n at \u003ca href=\"http://www.ncl.ac.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNewcastle University\u003c/a\u003e\n (pictured) and his dissertation is titled \u003cem\u003eBrand Image: PR in the UK non-profit healthcare sector\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29730\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;150\u0026rdquo;]\u003cimg alt=\"Phillip Casey\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/PhillipCasey-150x150.jpg\"\u003e Phillip Casey[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI enjoyed responding to Phillip\u0026rsquo;s questions, so, with his permission, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d make our Q\u0026amp;A public here. (It migrated to email in case you were wondering about a 140 character count.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere a reference consists of just a page number, it refers to \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"1-is-a-strong-brand-image-important-for-a-non-profit-organisation-why\"\u003e1) Is a strong brand image important for a non-profit organisation? Why?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA brand used to convey ownership of livestock. Then it was an \u0026ldquo;our name\u0026rsquo;s on it\u0026rdquo; quality assurance. This century, with product quality (defined as fitness-for-purpose) increasingly a given, a brand represents a nexus of values. If our values align with a brand, then I\u0026rsquo;m part of that brand. If they don\u0026rsquo;t, I look to take my time, attention and money elsewhere. [\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/thirty-five/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAttenzi\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrganisations need to communicate their purpose and values in order to attract and assemble the right mix of people and resources to live up to its mission and pursue its vision. So brand, defined like this, lies at the heart of things.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Brand, PR, non-profits, and responsiveness – Q\u0026A by Phillip Casey"},{"content":"\nBitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency with the highest capitalization. As you can see from this screenshot from the \u0026ldquo;block reader\u0026rdquo; blockr , the capitalization at the time of writing is over eight billion dollars. According to citations of an IMF report on Wikipedia, that places it just above Moldova \u0026rsquo;s GDP.\nThis post isn\u0026rsquo;t about bitcoin but the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin. (The community prefers to capitalize the word when referring to the system, and lower case when referring to the currency.) This post doesn\u0026rsquo;t explain Bitcoin or the blockchain in detail – I recommend this series of presentations courtesy of the Khan Academy for those who want to learn more – but rather it\u0026rsquo;s about the technology\u0026rsquo;s wider application and its emergence and growth beyond the early adopters.\nGet this into your block So why am I interested in Bitcoin specifically, and its blockchain foundation more broadly? What does this have to do with social business ?\nWe are contemplating blockchain platforms to enable decentralized consensus in the not too distant future, allowing us to codify, decentralize, secure and trade many things that historically have demanded some centralized facility. This is akin to the bitcoin currency functioning without the need for a central bank, and the vista includes voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowd funding, organizational governance, intellectual property, contracts and agreements of most kinds. The landscape even extends to so-called smart property with appropriate hardware integration.\nSometimes I wish I was more of a wordsmith, but this word will have to suffice – wowzers!\nSomething in the ether Not wishing to delineate necessarily between social business and the wider societal impacts I just listed there, but you\u0026rsquo;ll have noted reference to organizational governance. In my presentation The Future of Organization in May this year, I included a blockchain-powered vision I call Bread incorporated . The accompanying Slideshare has accrued over 5000 views since I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to say.\nMy claims for Bread include:\nThis middleware company provides the bridge from today’s corporate, commercial and legal environment to a new organizational ecosystem.\n\u0026hellip; This approach aims to do for organizing what social media has achieved for communications – eliminate friction and encourage heterarchy.\n\u0026hellip; a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization.\nOn the back of the presentation I was delighted to be contacted by the Ethereum team – building \u0026ldquo;a revolutionary new platform for decentralized applications\u0026rdquo; – to join its conversation about how best to govern its own non-profit organization and subsequently extend similar facility to future customers. It\u0026rsquo;s incredibly exciting, although I can\u0026rsquo;t help think the platform must migrate away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, but that\u0026rsquo;s too technical for this post. Rather, I want to contrast Bread\u0026rsquo;s relative pragmatism with the purists that might pepper the Ethereum community.\nFirst up, relative is definitely the right word here. Anyone reviewing the broad scope of Bread incorporated might think I\u0026rsquo;ve been breathing too much of the ether, but reading between the lines it\u0026rsquo;s apparent that the purists might question my pragmatic desire to connect the future blockchain-powered platform to today\u0026rsquo;s societal infrastructure with this middleware called Bread. \u0026ldquo;Why should we?\u0026rdquo; they might ask. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re building a new reality, not an augmentation of today\u0026rsquo;s. We don\u0026rsquo;t need to drag ourselves down by anchoring it to the reality we\u0026rsquo;re seeking to replace.\u0026rdquo;\nSo why the pragmatism? Well, I know there will be good sociological reason, but you\u0026rsquo;ll have to forgive me while I continue my continuous professional development on that front. I\u0026rsquo;m diving into my Giddens but haven\u0026rsquo;t yet got beyond doggie paddle. Until then, all I have is my reasonably well-developed systems understanding. But no, hang on, it looks like real life has just come to my rescue.\nLicense to operate Just last week, New York State issued proposed bitcoin regulations , a so-called BitLicense.\nNow back in the day when I ran a company called Nochex (then the UK equivalent of PayPal prior to PayPal trading in anything but US dollars) I was called upon by HM Treasury to advise on anti-money laundering legislation prompted by 9/11. The current form of these deliberations is the European e-Money Directive and the requirement to \u0026lsquo;know-your-customer\u0026rsquo; is at the heart of the matter. It\u0026rsquo;s also at the heart of the proposed BitLicense, and one might conclude carries significantly more importance in terms of money laundering and associated criminal activity than the State\u0026rsquo;s concurrent antipathy towards the sharing economy . The latter may be described as Ludditic. The former pragmatic.\nI consider this intervention the first of many.\nI can only conclude, as before, that projects such as Ethereum will be shaped by idealists but executed by realists. It\u0026rsquo;s still wowzers though!\nComing to a market near you In the sharing economy, AirBnB \u0026ldquo;will soon surpass the InterContinental Hotels Group and Hilton Worldwide as the world\u0026rsquo;s largest hotel chain \u0026rdquo;. Incorruptible decentralization upsets many more market dynamics. Do get in touch if you\u0026rsquo;d like to explore the ramifications for yours sooner than later.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/blockchain-coming-way/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Bitcoin index 21 July 2014\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Screen-Shot-2014-07-21-at-13.21.31.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency with the highest capitalization. As you can see from this screenshot from the \u0026ldquo;block reader\u0026rdquo; \u003ca href=\"http://btc.blockr.io/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eblockr\u003c/a\u003e\n, the capitalization at the time of writing is over eight billion dollars. According to citations of an IMF report on Wikipedia, that places it just above \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMoldova\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s GDP.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post isn\u0026rsquo;t about bitcoin but the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin. (The community prefers to capitalize the word when referring to the system, and lower case when referring to the currency.) This post doesn\u0026rsquo;t explain Bitcoin or the blockchain in detail – I recommend \u003ca href=\"https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethis series of presentations courtesy of the Khan Academy\u003c/a\u003e\n for those who want to learn more – but rather it\u0026rsquo;s about the technology\u0026rsquo;s wider application and its emergence and growth beyond the early adopters.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"get-this-into-your-block\"\u003eGet this into your block\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo why am I interested in Bitcoin specifically, and its blockchain foundation more broadly? What does this have to do with \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/09/3m-thinktank-conference-getting-social-business/\" title=\"3M ThinkTANK conference – getting down to social business\"\u003esocial business\u003c/a\u003e\n?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are contemplating blockchain platforms to enable decentralized consensus in the not too distant future, allowing us to codify, decentralize, secure and trade many things that historically have demanded some centralized facility. This is akin to the bitcoin currency functioning without the need for a central bank, and the vista includes voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowd funding, organizational governance, intellectual property, contracts and agreements of most kinds. The landscape even extends to so-called \u003ca href=\"https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esmart property\u003c/a\u003e\n with appropriate hardware integration.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes I wish I was more of a wordsmith, but this word will have to suffice – wowzers!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The blockchain is coming your way"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it\u0026rsquo;s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.\nDefining deliberate and emergent strategy The deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R\u0026amp;D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.\nEmergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It\u0026rsquo;s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we\u0026rsquo;re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.\nAmong other things, Stowe Boyd\u0026rsquo;s Manifesto for a New Way of Work asserts that the deliberate approach to strategy must give way to the emergent:\nthe nature of strategy changes in a time of great change, when the future is difficult to foresee; the role of leadership changes with it, as well; instead of concocting a strategic vision and pushing it out to the organization through cultural and managerial channels (the deliberate style of strategy) leadership must shift to distributed, action-based strategic learning about what is actually happening in the market: emergent strategy; this, as Henry Mintzberg observed, does not mean chaos, but unintended order.\nObviously, this is right up my street. I titled my 2011 book The Business of Influence on the basis that no organization is an island. It\u0026rsquo;s a system of systems and a system within systems in continuous flux with continuous influence flowing all which ways, and any approach to strategy that ignores this fundamental is fit for no market but cloud cuckoo land.\nFurther, as I argued here in January :\nWe cannot simplify complexity (as opposed to complication ), for it is a natural product, but we can learn to navigate it more simply. Until now, we have effectively had to ignore it because we simply did not have the information technologies and capacity for data collection. Rather, we had to rely on management rules-of-thumb, maxims that endured when considered to be right more often than wrong. Maxims may well have sufficed when that\u0026rsquo;s all the competition had too.\nEither / or I began curating a Flipboard magazine on the broad topic of social business (as in \u0026lsquo;being\u0026rsquo; social rather than \u0026lsquo;doing\u0026rsquo; social) towards the end of last year, and I chose to christen it Social Business Design magazine in the hope the title encompassed a blend of the deliberate and the emergent. (More on \u0026ldquo;Design\u0026rdquo; later.) I have curated quite a few articles on deliberate / emergent including Professor Roger Martin\u0026rsquo;s HBR article \u0026ldquo;Adaptive strategy is a cop-out \u0026rdquo; and Greg Satell\u0026rsquo;s direct response in the same publication \u0026ldquo;The Only Viable Strategy is Adaption \u0026rdquo;.\nSuch contributions appear to be of the either/or ilk, for sincere reason or the more polemical. Undoubtedly, in my opinion, adaption and responsiveness are awesome qualities, but rudderless responsiveness is just that. Rudderless. For me then this isn\u0026rsquo;t really an either/or question.\nAs I noted in my post about Stowe\u0026rsquo;s manifesto, my Attenzi story portrays how the team moves towards real-time sensory feedback in an organization-as-organism / business-as-biology metaphor. They begin to invest in planning for the execution of influence strategy rather than the mindless execution of plans, increasingly poised to respond to opportunity and threat, eager to learn and improve their learning capabilities.\nAnother curated article, this time by Prucia Buscell at the Plexus Institute , interprets a study under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and this Stanford Social Innovation Review article :\nWhile complex systems are unpredictable \u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;sources of energy or convergence within the systems, known as attractors, can be observed and influenced.\u0026rdquo; In social systems, attractors can be people, ideas, resources or events that lead a system to move toward, or away from, a goal.\nBefore we get too hypnotized then by the emergence of unintended order, we must remind ourselves that while chaos does indeed yield to emergent order, emergent order also yields to chaos. That\u0026rsquo;s complexity. For the more mathematically inclined reader, this paper argues that we might undertake short-term predictions of the future evolution of complex adaptive systems and, effectively, nudge them away from undesirable states – very appropriate in our context here.\nBut such interpretation and application implies of course that the organization articulates what the goal is, what is undesirable and by corollary what is desirable, and for me then this must be in the context of values and purpose and the organization\u0026rsquo;s deliberations on where to play and how to win.\nAn artful blend The successful organization blends the deliberate and emergent artfully in designing strategy and execution in the pursuit of mutual value creation. The reference to artful is not accidental; as fascinating and as powerful as the science of big data and big analytics might be, there remains a visceral reliance on human smarts and intuition here, on the essence that still separates humans from the algorithm. The question then is: how is the appropriate position on that continuum of purely deliberate to purely emergent best established at any given time?\nI suspect the answer lies in our growing understanding of complexity science. I work with the definition that complexity is a system with a seemingly random mix of chaos and order – reflected in the majority of the stuff I read on the matter. If we can instrument organization and its influence flows, if we can take its pulse and other vital signs continuously, then we might be able to have a good guess as to where we are in the chaos-order oscillations (that may vary for different facets of the organization), which might then guide us in moving up and down that deliberate-emergent strategy continuum. And as \u0026ldquo;essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful \u0026rdquo;, this model will inform the art of the blend rather than substitute for it.\nI see this blend in Dee Hock\u0026rsquo;s Chaordic Organization . While Hock is regarded as an early champion of emergence in organization, the chaordic design process and its manifestations in real life blend the emergent and the deliberate. (Note to self: find out why that is exactly.)\nWhile now is not the time to explore chaordic organization in more detail, readers who don\u0026rsquo;t know about it will appreciate the definition of chaord:\n1: any autocatalytic, self-regulating, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2: an entity whose behavior exhibits patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by the behavior of its parts. 3: the fundamental organizing principle of nature and evolution.\nWe can also see the blend, or at least a typology of different contexts and the facility to move between them, in the Cynefin framework . In The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world (PDF) , Kurtz and Snowden explain its application:\n[It] originated in the practice of knowledge management as a means of distinguishing between formal and informal communities, and as a means of talking about the interaction of both with structured processes and uncertain conditions. It has now outgrown its application in knowledge management, having been in use by our group for several years in consultancy and action research in knowledge management, strategy, management, training, cultural change, policy-making, product development, market creation, and branding. We are now beginning to apply it to the areas of leadership, customer relationship management, and supply chain management\u0026hellip;\nI was confused by the framework at first because it works from different definitions for complexity, chaos, complicated and disorder to those with which I\u0026rsquo;m more familiar; that\u0026rsquo;s not a criticism but reflective of the nascency of this stuff. Language emerges. Once I\u0026rsquo;d made that adjustment in my head this sense-making framework makes sense to me.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll return to both Chaordic and Cynefin in future posts.\nOn the question of design The topic of deliberate / emergent came up from a different perspective in a recent workshop. The topic was design and it was argued that the title of my Flipboard magazine, Social Business Design, conveys a deliberate rather than emergent outlook by, well, design. We established that this perception was formed from a different understanding of the process of design. It appears that some interpret the design process as entailing a \u0026lsquo;creative type\u0026rsquo; who, by some innate quirk, can lean heavily on instinct and deep inspirational powers to do the designy thing.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29705\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;1024\u0026rdquo;] Legal design jam at Stanford October 2013 01 [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Legal_design_jam_at_Stanford_October_2013_01.jpg][/caption]Actually, now I\u0026rsquo;ve written that, is this the type of mystical regard those masses lower in the typical corporate hierarchy must sustain for those C-title types as they deliberate and formulate, plot and plan? How do they know the right things to do?! Oh wise ones. Until witnessing the inevitable strategic missteps of course.\nBut back to design \u0026hellip;\nEngineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.\nThis second sentence is one of the most famous definitions of design, by Herbert Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969). As an engineer myself, I can safely say I have never designed in isolation from other engineers and non-engineers, and I love Simon\u0026rsquo;s reference to and reverence for \u0026ldquo;everyone\u0026rdquo;. It definitely plays to emergent approaches to strategy just as \u0026ldquo;preferred\u0026rdquo; conveys that the future has been deliberated.\nIn searching for a definition of design that addresses aspects of sensitivity more urgently I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered a recent masters dissertation by Dianne Hardin under the direction of Professor Craig Vogel that I wish I\u0026rsquo;d had to hand during the workshop – The Innovation Imperative: Not Without Design .\nHardin:\nIndividuals, and therefore organizations, possess different functional abilities to connect with other people – to care – and to leverage the elements of good design. This is where design excels, and I argue, it is the core of a design-driven organization; the ability to use a range of qualitative and quantitative empathy to listen in order to understand and articulate cultural change(s) and personal value(s) that inspires new idea(s) and insights.\n\u0026hellip; From these ideas emerges a model that seeks to create a framework for evaluating the design sensibility of an organization – The Sempathy Continuum Model.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29689\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;872\u0026rdquo;] The Sempathy Continuum Model, Diane Hardin, 2014[/caption]\nThe emphasis on caring, on understanding, plays nicely into my social business mutuality stack .\nFor our context here, I like where Hardin takes us:\nAs a noun, design is defined as the role of change agent in organizations, groups and societies, constantly observing and recognizing trends that are influencing changes in cultural belief systems, and positively influencing a cultural reallocation of resources to create new connections with people and solve whole problems to produce new artifacts or systems that generate economic value.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;d want to delete Hardin\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;economic\u0026rdquo; qualifier of value, I\u0026rsquo;m confident this summation of the design process and Simon\u0026rsquo;s reference to some future preferred state encompass both the deliberate and the emergent.\nIn conclusion then, I believe deliberate and emergent strategy approaches must be blended together, by design.\nFurther reading \u0026ldquo;Deliberate and emergent strategies may be conceived as two ends of a continuum along which real-world strategies lie.\u0026rdquo; From Of strategies, deliberate and emergent , Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, Strategic Management Journal, Vol 6 Issue 3, 1985.\nPorter or Mintzberg: Whose View of Strategy Is the Most Relevant Today? , Associate Professor Karl Moore, Forbes, March 2011.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/deliberate-emergent-design/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"crab sand\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/crab_sand.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it\u0026rsquo;s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"defining-deliberate-and-emergent-strategy\"\u003eDefining deliberate and emergent strategy\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R\u0026amp;D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEmergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It\u0026rsquo;s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we\u0026rsquo;re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Deliberate and emergent, by design"},{"content":"The controversy Uber is causing right now prompted me to delve into the archives. Way back. Back to March 2000 when I was pitching a proposition called Peoplestaxi to the likes of 3i and Avis. It got selected for First Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Wireless Matchmaking\u0026rdquo; events too. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick extract:\nPeoplestaxi leverages the latest technologies and customer-centric e-business philosophy to deliver the ubiquitous, convenient and intelligent taxi management service for business and consumers.\n\u0026hellip; Bookings are accurate and quality is assured. Punctuality, customer relationship management, personal safety, event critical booking, full account management, multi-payment methods and community grouping are all delivered automatically, seamlessly and brilliantly.\n\u0026hellip; As Peoplestaxi restructures the taxi market, existing taxi firms will have to affiliate, find some niche or eventually die.\nI\u0026rsquo;m chuffed that I managed to reference the future collaborative / sharing economy in there – \u0026ldquo;community grouping\u0026rdquo; – but perhaps that last sentence was the choicest bit of crystal ball gazing.\nSo how come this didn\u0026rsquo;t become Uber? In short order:\nSmartphones hadn\u0026rsquo;t been invented GPS units still cost a thousand US Oh, and the dotcom bubble burst just then, spectacularly. I learned that the first aren\u0026rsquo;t always first. The timing of disruption is a function of the disruption.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/taxi-hailing-ride-far-future/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"yellow cab new york\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/yellowcab.jpg\"\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/upshot/uber-lyft-and-a-road-map-for-reinventing-the-ride.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003econtroversy\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.uber.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eUber\u003c/a\u003e\n is causing right now prompted me to delve into the archives. Way back. Back to March 2000 when I was pitching a proposition called Peoplestaxi to the likes of 3i and Avis. It got selected for First Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Wireless Matchmaking\u0026rdquo; events too. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick extract:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeoplestaxi leverages the latest technologies and customer-centric e-business philosophy to deliver the ubiquitous, convenient and intelligent taxi management service for business and consumers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Taxi! Hailing a ride, but not too far into the future"},{"content":"\nThe Internet has transformed the world. Period. I think it\u0026rsquo;s important then to help everyone understand what it is exactly. I\u0026rsquo;m not talking degree-level understanding of computer networking, but a feel for the kind of thing going on \u0026lsquo;under the hood\u0026rsquo;.\nThis post explains the new numbering system for the Internet – fundamental for the continued health and prosperity of the Internet this century – and does so without the reader needing any prior technical understanding. There\u0026rsquo;s an executive summary if you only have two minutes. And then more detail if you fancy. It describes what your organization needs to be doing and why.\nMost of the post is based on a document I wrote under the auspices of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS ).\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s get stuck in. Firstly, allow me to differentiate between two terms too often and erroneously used interchangeably.\nThe Internet and the World Wide Web are different things The Internet emerged in the concluding months of the 1960s. The World Wide Web on the other hand, like many other protocols, \u0026lsquo;runs\u0026rsquo; on top of the Internet, and first twinkled in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.\nYour smartphone connects to the Internet via 3G or 4G or Wi-Fi. When your apps need to exchange data with the world (to get a weather forecast or report your location for example), they do so over the Internet without need for the Web. When you open your smartphone\u0026rsquo;s browser (Firefox, Chrome, or Safari for example), you are now browsing the Web – reading and interacting with websites.\nConfusingly, the default browser on Samsung smartphones is accessed by clicking an app icon labelled \u0026ldquo;Internet\u0026rdquo;. C\u0026rsquo;est la vie.\n(Another quick point – most apps today are what we call native apps. A new breed, pioneered by the most excellent team at FT Labs , are called Web apps. They look and behave like \u0026rsquo;normal\u0026rsquo; native apps, but are in fact built with Web technology for all the good reasons that make the Web awesome in the first place.)\nThe executive summary What\u0026rsquo;s the problem? The world needs to transition to a new Internet Protocol because the current one is running out of steam.\nThe Internet equivalent of a telephone number is known as an Internet Protocol address, or IP address for short. Just as you need someone’s telephone number to call him or her, network technology needs an address when instructed to dispatch a packet of data from one computer to another.\nToday, the Internet mostly uses IP version 4 (IPv4) but this has now reached the limits of its capacity. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the last IPv4 address to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) in February 2011, and they too have now effectively exhausted their supply.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the answer? Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation protocol that provides vastly expanded address space, allowing the Internet to grow to many billions of times its current size.\nEvery organisation must consider the need to transition to IPv6 and decide what action it needs to take. Fortunately, having been defined towards the end of the 1990s, IPv6 is a well understood and low risk protocol.\nWhat should you do? If you have a senior, non-technical position in your organisation, you should raise this matter with your management team, and at your next operations meeting with your technical team or provider. If you have a technical role, then you should be running or planning to run both IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently until IPv4 is retired.\nAdvantages of making your organisation visible over IPv6 include:\n• Make yourself accessible to those customers and other stakeholders using IPv6 • Integrate your adoption of IPv6 into your existing investment and renewal programme to minimise long-term costs • Guarantee your ability to grow in the future; and • Demonstrate that you are a forward-looking organisation, planning for the future.\nOutside of work, as individual Internet users, we don\u0026rsquo;t need to do anything. Your broadband provider and mobile operator will be looking after this for you.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the executive summary done. I throw some more light on the topic now, and you\u0026rsquo;ll even learn how many atoms there are in the human body!\nHappy Birthday, 45 this year! The Internet community celebrates the network’s 45th birthday October 2014. Time for a mid-life crisis you might ask? Not here. Usage statistics (PDF) estimate nearly 3 billion people will have Internet access at the end of this year. We’re growing the Internet infrastructure continuously to meet demand and we\u0026rsquo;re doing more and more with it. In business. In government. In life.\nThe massive explosion of devices we’re connecting to the Internet is at the crux of this issue here. The age of the smartphone really dawned in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone, and mobile Internet connectivity is now growing faster than broadband. And the Internet of Things entails the connection of tens of billions of \u0026rsquo;things\u0026rsquo; by the close of this decade, as this entertaining video from Cisco portrays.\nhttp://youtu.be/Kt5VulFqBm4 How can I reach you? The Internet isn’t the first network to grow beyond expectations. Remember the “Big Number ” marketing campaign in the UK in 2000? It communicated the change of telephone numbers in several major cities, driven by the need to provide more numbers.\nYou need someone’s number to call him or her. You need a physical address to tell the cab driver where to take you. Similarly, when instructed to dispatch a packet of data from one computer (or “thing”) to another, the communications technology that routes the network traffic needs an address.\nThe Internet equivalent of a telephone number is known as an Internet Protocol address, or IP address for short, and the most widely deployed version of the Internet Protocol accommodates 4.3 billion addresses. This version is known as version 4, or IPv4 for short, and has been applied since the early 1980s.\nSo you can see where this is going. We’ve run out of addresses.\nAs the legendary ZX Spectrum hit UK shops in 1982, the Internet Systems Consortium notes that there were just 235 Internet hosts. Before the World Wide Web, before computers arrived in the workplace let alone homes, and a long time before mobile phones, Google, Skype, Facebook or anything involving “things”, 4.3 billion sounded quite a lot. But it doesn’t any more. And in fact demand has exceeded supply.\nThat is why a new protocol, IPv6, was developed. Just like IPv4, IPv6 is free. But there is a snag; IPv6 and IPv4 are not immediately interoperable.\nHow does IPv6 compare to IPv4? In terms of the number of addresses, rather than prefixing a digit or two to the IPv4 addresses as we’ve done for telephone numbers in the past, IPv6 actually has addresses four times the length of IPv4. That means IPv6 has approximately 3.4 x 1038 addresses, or to be precise:\n340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.\nWhereas there are more people alive today than there are IPv4 addresses, IPv6 has more than enough to address every single atom in every single human of a global population of ten billion four times! ((7 x 1027) x 1010 x 4) = 2.8 x 1038.\nWhat does all this mean for you? The Internet does not stop working when we exhaust unallocated IPv4 addresses. Your own network carries on working, and the networks of your customers, suppliers and partners keep humming. Indeed, the Millennium Bug, so-called Y2K, was far more exciting from a doomsday perspective!\nBut your organisation and your technical team cannot ignore IPv6. It may be hard to see why given the paragraph above and the other priorities competing for your time and resources, but despite the absence of an equivalent to British Telecom deciding when to switch off the old numbers, there are some serious issues at play here. There are motivations to adopt IPv6 based on avoiding disadvantage, and motivations based on IPv6’s technical advantages.\nAvoid disadvantage The critical questions you and your colleagues need to answer are:\nWould we like external systems running IPv6 to see us, to be able to address us just as they can today over IPv4? Would we like our partners, suppliers and customers to be able to work with us over IPv6? To email us over IPv6? To view our website over IPv6? To access our Web services (as appropriate) over IPv6?\nAssuming that some of our employees will want to interact with our systems from their own devices, would we like to facilitate these over IPv6? Or more simply, would we like to avoid any disadvantage of effectively shutting the door on anyone looking for us, looking to work with us, over IPv6?\nSome people might assert that there’s no need to bother with IPv6 whilst everyone continues to have IPv4 capability. But that’s a little like saying why bother with IPv4 when people can telephone or write to us? IPv6 is here, now. It is unavoidable and there are no excuses (see “What’s NAT? ” below). IPv6 will replace IPv4 in the long-term. Do you really want your organisation to respond blankly in the interim, to have no response at all, to anyone looking for you over IPv6?\nYour technical team and service providers will place devices at your gateways to do the translation, and they will make sure your website is hosted in a manner that allows it to be served over IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 addresses are free, and you only need translation servers at your gateways, so this is a low cost project.\nThe IT technical community describes the facility to work over both IPv4 and IPv6 as \u0026ldquo;dual stacked\u0026rdquo;. You will now appear dual stacked to the rest of the world even though your internal networks remain IPv4.\nCompetitive advantage To repeat the point, making yourself visible over IPv6 avoids the disadvantage that some of your customers might not be able to see you in the future. But given that the transition is inevitable in the longer term, perhaps you should consider grasping a competitive advantage by running your internal networks with IPv6 sooner rather than later? What are those advantages?\nObviously, if you are in the technical services industry yourself, then dual stacking all your systems sooner than later means you’ll be able to differentiate from your also-ran competitors. You will be perceived as more capable and diligent. You will be able to respond more quickly to future invitations to tender that demand IPv6 capability; no last minute rush to qualify, consuming time and effort that should instead be focused on converting the business. Moreover, imagine the confidence you can project to potential clients when you can draw on case studies to show what you can do.\nBut what about those outside the technical services industry? Moving your internal network to IPv6 does have a number of operational advantages. Here are two.\nFirstly, let’s assume that you and your colleagues are quite typical in your increasing adoption of high definition video during the course of your work, such as video services, self-teaching and distance learning modules, event streaming, webcasting for internal communications, video calling and conferencing. Perhaps you use telepresence, or you might be considering it. Maybe you\u0026rsquo;re already thinking about getting people together with Oculus Rift in future.\nYou won’t be surprised to hear that this trend is placing an increasingly heavy burden on your network. IPv6 can come to your rescue here as it operates with higher network efficiency and can deliver superior quality of service by effectively prioritising network traffic associated with real-time multimedia. In technical terms, IPv6 makes it possible to achieve enhanced frame and transmission rates and bandwidth usage. This is just one reason for example that China opted to run some audio-visual aspects of the 2008 Olympics network with IPv6.\nSecondly, you may like to know that IPv6 has a more unified security framework. So if the most robust security is top of your list of concerns, you should investigate this benefit of IPv6 too.\nAt the very least, and to minimise or indeed eliminate any cost overhead of adopting IPv6, you should make sure your organisation’s future procurement of hardware, operating systems and applications mandates IPv6 capability. For example, it is not generally advised to attempt the transition with Microsoft Windows XP, but Microsoft Windows 7 is ready out of the box, as are Apple’s Mac OS X and some Linux distributions. Your organisation will then, through the natural replenishment cycle, become IPv6 ready.\nNext steps to IPv6 Above all, you must ensure that your organisation is aware of this issue and has undertaken a planning assessment of the steps you will need to take to make your organisation visible over IPv6, and the corresponding time scale.\nTo keep you up to date on IPv6 news, the RIPE NCC (disclosure: a client of mine in times past) maintains a news page at its IPv6 Act Now website.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll finish here by addressing (no pun intended) two related matters. Domain names and network address translation.\nSo where do domain names come in? IP addresses aren’t immediately memorable, particularly the much lengthier IPv6 ones. So whilst computers love numbers, humans prefer names. For example, which of these would you rather work with personally?\nhttp://www.ripe.net (the domain name)\nOr http://193.0.19.25 (the IPv4 address)\nOr http://2001:610:240:11::c100:1319 (the IPv6 address)\nThis is somewhat akin to storing friends’ telephone numbers under their name in your mobile phone, but there is a difference. Whereas you have to update a friend’s record in your contacts list manually should they change their number, owners of domain names manage the association of the domain names with IP addresses themselves.\nWhen you use a domain name, for example in your browser or in an email address, the name is looked up in the domain name system to find the IP address required to route your query to the right place, and this is all invisible to the typical Internet user.\nWhat’s NAT? NAT stands for Network Address Translation, and the sole purpose for raising it here is that it is the main excuse people use for not doing anything about IPv6. The easiest way to explain NAT is by metaphor to the way your organisation manages physical post.\nYou and all your colleagues in your physical office building share the same address as far as the outside world is concerned and the sender cannot instruct a postal service to deliver directly into your hands. Yet each of you has an unique address as far as your organisation is concerned, be that a desk or a so-called pigeonhole, at which your mail arrives courtesy of another system, your internal post system.\nMany organisations’ IT networks operate similarly. Each device (eg, server, PC, IP telephone) is given an unique address, known only to your internal network, and your communication with the outside world is routed via a gateway, the equivalent of the post room. It’s the gateway’s address that you can publish to the world.\nSo it is easy to picture a situation where an organisation employing thousands of people needs only have a handful of IPv4 addresses in much the same way they may only have a handful of buildings.\nBut unfortunately this approach means that direct end-to-end communication is impossible, requiring as it does an interim translation. This is problematic for some applications and services, although NAT’s interim step is often regarded as helpful in securing an IPv4 network. This does not mean non-NAT IPv6 is less secure however, as IPv6 provides for end-to-end addressability without requiring end-to-end connectivity.\nAs future IP addresses will be used to address the billions of devices and other things outside corporate walls, and there are technical advantages to the associated service providers in avoiding the intermediary step of NAT in such instances, IPv6 is coming regardless of your organisation’s perspective on the matter. Whether you have NAT or no NAT.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/07/important-internet-changing-new-protocol/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"strips of light\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/stripsoflight.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Internet has transformed the world. Period. I think it\u0026rsquo;s important then to help everyone understand what it is exactly. I\u0026rsquo;m not talking degree-level understanding of computer networking, but a feel for the kind of thing going on \u0026lsquo;under the hood\u0026rsquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post explains the new numbering system for the Internet – fundamental for the continued health and prosperity of the Internet this century – and does so without the reader needing any prior technical understanding. There\u0026rsquo;s an executive summary if you only have two minutes. And then more detail if you fancy. It describes what your organization needs to be doing and why.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost of the post is based on a document I wrote under the auspices of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (\u003ca href=\"http://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-business-innovation-skills\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBIS\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo let\u0026rsquo;s get stuck in. Firstly, allow me to differentiate between two terms too often and erroneously used interchangeably.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-internet-and-the-world-wide-web-are-different-things\"\u003eThe Internet and the World Wide Web are different things\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Internet emerged in the concluding months of the 1960s. The World Wide Web on the other hand, like many other protocols, \u0026lsquo;runs\u0026rsquo; on top of the Internet, and first twinkled in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Important – the Internet is changing to a new protocol"},{"content":" The AMEC International Summit on Measurement played out in Amsterdam last week, and I tuned in from afar. On 18th June 2013 I published my thoughts on last year\u0026rsquo;s events in Madrid , and I\u0026rsquo;ll do the same now exactly one year on. Gladly. Gladly because I love the direction the AMEC community is going.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t intend to repeat any of the substance and lengthy and valuable commentary to my post last year – which I just enjoyed rereading, thank you. But I have taken the opportunity to append here the Slideshare that accompanied my assertions and that has accrued over three thousand views would you believe.\nPerhaps one of my responses to the comments on last year\u0026rsquo;s post is worth noting quickly, a response to Don Bartholomew:\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think of myself as a member of the measurement industry for the simple reason that I\u0026rsquo;m not! Rather, my company is a management consultancy helping organisations benefit from social media and related technologies. Our purview is very much about business performance, about organisational alignment for brilliant execution.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not about media I believe the focus on outcomes in recent years is getting people to look up from media. AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not \u0026ldquo;of Media\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;d go further than that. Here are some of my core assertions of recent years:\nFrom Attenzi – a social business story :\nWe don\u0026rsquo;t have media for media\u0026rsquo;s sake but to communicate. And we don\u0026rsquo;t communicate for communication\u0026rsquo;s sake but to influence and to be influenced.\nFrom The Business of Influence :\nYou have been influenced when you think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done.\nFrom Attenzi – a social business story :\nThere’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do.\nFrom Influence – request for comments :\nWhat is the intended outcome of your marketing and PR campaigns, and the design of your organization overall, if it’s not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you’d like, and to be sensitive to how they’d like you to think and behave?\nFrom The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity , The Guardian, 15th Feb 2012:\nRight now, we have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behavior, so how then can we pretend to score an individual’s likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with apparent Newtonian simplicity? We’ve barely even attempted to correlate proxies for influence, assuming that universal correlates even exist.\nIt is about your organization As you can see, I believe understanding how hearts, minds and behaviours are changed is central to the success of your organization – it may in fact be the very definition of organization. And it is the primary object of people working in marketing and PR – the likely functional roles of people reading this particular post. Moreover, as the Six Influence Flows portray, this requires a wider and deeper domain of understanding and context than simply seeking to measure and evaluate your \u0026ldquo;campaigns\u0026rdquo;.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29648\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;500\u0026rdquo;] The Six Influence Flows[/caption]\nA revised and enhanced AMEC social media measurement framework Just prior to the summit, Don Bartholomew wrote about the updated AMEC social media measurement framework that Richard Bagnall then presented in Amsterdam. I commented a couple of days later, and I\u0026rsquo;ll make the same observations here.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29646\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;490\u0026rdquo;] AMEC social media measurement model[/caption]\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_29643\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;490\u0026rdquo;] AMEC social media measurement framework[/caption]\nExposure, engagement and advocacy are all part and parcel of influence flow, as are non-communications activities such as delivering a great product and service, or indeed being a considerate employer and customer, and the influence system (the flows of influence) contributes to the bottom line business impact.\nIt’s this complicated cause-and-effect that led me to propose the Influence Scorecard in augmenting the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches to business performance management, and I noted several references throughout Don\u0026rsquo;s post that indicate a trend towards this philosophy. Notably:\nThe cascade down from overarching business objectives The reliance on the selection of non-fiscal leading indicators The cross-departmental program elements – resonant of the emphasis the Balanced Scorecard and related Strategy Maps place on identifying the organizational, human and informational assets in which to invest to help align the org structure and processes Reference to the measurement story – Kaplan and Norton assert that an acid test of a good Balanced Scorecard is that it should ‘tell the story of the business unit’s strategy’. Measure AND evaluate Fish and chips. Laurel and Hardy. Park and ride. Some things just go together so naturally we consider them one, but measurement and evaluation are different things, as I explain on the first page of Chapter 6 of The Business of Influence by reference to their respective dictionary definitions:\nEvaluation – the making of a judgement about the amount, number, or value of something.\nMeasurement – the action of measuring something; ascertaining the size, amount, or degree of something by using an instrument or device; assessing the importance, effect, or value of something.\n\u0026hellip; it appears that ‘evaluation’ doesn’t really add any meaning that ‘measurement’ doesn’t convey alone. Rather than consider it redundant however, I like to think that ‘evaluation’ takes the qualitative role, leaving ‘measurement’ to focus on the quantitative aspects. Measurement and evaluation – quantitative and qualitative.\nProfessor Jim Macnamara PhD, Professor of Public Communication, University of Technology, Sydney, presented new thinking (PDF) at the International Summit in Amsterdam, and this includes a similar observation, specifically regarding the problems of conducting measurement and evaluation concurrently:\nFirst, evaluation conducted at this point is based on a narrow and limited range of data. Evaluation fused on to or conducted concurrently with measurement is focussed exclusively on metrics collected in the measurement processes undertaken by the organization – what is referred to as endogenous data (inside data). It does not consider other information that might be available and useful, referred to as exogenous data\u0026hellip;\nSecond, and even more fundamentally, while they are related, measurement and evaluation are two quite different processes. Measurement is the taking of measures such as counting items, collecting ratings on a scale, or recording comments in interviews, and analyzing these. Measurement involves two key stages – data collection and data analysis.\nProf Macnamara insists that measurement should collect qualitative data as well as quantitative data, so different semantics to my conclusion, but to identical effect I believe.\nThe MAIE model Further, Prof Macnamara proceeds to champion the \u0026ldquo;forward looking\u0026rdquo;, marrying directly in my opinion with the leading indicators of the Influence Scorecard . In fact, I find it difficult to identify any significant differences between his MAIE (measurement, analysis, insights, evaluation) model and the Influence Scorecard, although I would add that the Scorecard, by augmenting business performance management approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard , goes further by being ready-made to plug into the wider organizational context. This is critical as more organizations appreciate that the structure of the 20th Century organization – with the dominant functional silos we still see manifest today – is no longer fit for the 21st.\nEveryone is in communications. Everyone is in the business of influence.\nI wholeheartedly recommend you read A New Paradigm and Model for Measurement and Evaluation (PDF), not just because it corroborates my outlook, but because it isn\u0026rsquo;t informed by my outlook (my work isn\u0026rsquo;t referenced). This means it includes slightly different ways of justifying similar things, of describing a similar view of the world. Therefore, I too will be doing my best to learn more about it.\nConnecting models and sense making The buzz around Prof Macnamara\u0026rsquo;s contribution betrayed a general feeling that MAIE is an alternative lens on our problem space here to the AMEC social media measurement framework. However, in hoping to show here the commonalities between each and the Influence Scorecard, I hope I\u0026rsquo;ve shown that they aren\u0026rsquo;t irreconcilable at all. I also hope I\u0026rsquo;ve encouraged those who share our fascination for this area to pick up a copy of The Business of Influence :-)\nIn Attenzi – a social business story , I was able to reframe subtly the context in which business performance management is viewed. While I have never considered it the sole domain of the command-and-control organizational hierarchy, far from it in fact, some do. I was able then to present the measurement and evaluation process discussed here as sense making, as a critical sensitizing feedback loop in the continuous evolution of the organization, as supportive of emergent strategy in striving for greater organizational adaptability than traditional deliberate strategy approaches allow.\nIf this presses your buttons, you might like this conversation between Adam Pisoni, Stowe Boyd and me , and indeed my recent video presentation, The Future of Organization . For now, I said up top that I\u0026rsquo;d conclude with this slidestack, so here it is:\nhttp://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/the-value-of-social [iamsterdam Photo by Neil Thompson , CC BY-SA.]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/06/measuring-communications-reconciling-models-amsterdam/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"iamsterdam\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/iamsterdam.png\"\u003e The \u003ca href=\"http://amecorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n International Summit on Measurement played out in Amsterdam last week, and I tuned in from afar. On 18th June 2013 I published \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/06/social-media-measurement-after-madrid/\" title=\"Social media measurement, after Madrid\"\u003emy thoughts on last year\u0026rsquo;s events in Madrid\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I\u0026rsquo;ll do the same now exactly one year on. Gladly. Gladly because I love the direction the AMEC community is going.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t intend to repeat any of the substance and lengthy and valuable commentary to my post last year – which I just enjoyed rereading, thank you. But I have taken the opportunity to append here the Slideshare that accompanied my assertions and that has accrued over three thousand views would you believe.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePerhaps one of my responses to the comments on last year\u0026rsquo;s post is worth noting quickly, a response to Don Bartholomew:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t think of myself as a member of the measurement industry for the simple reason that I\u0026rsquo;m not! Rather, my company is a management consultancy helping organisations benefit from social media and related technologies. Our purview is very much about business performance, about organisational alignment for brilliant execution.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"its-not-about-media\"\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s not about media\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI believe the focus on outcomes in recent years is getting people to look up from media. AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not \u0026ldquo;of Media\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;d go further than that. Here are some of my core assertions of recent years:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam"},{"content":"Inspired by the analogy of organization-as-software, and indeed the reality of organization-as-software , what might it look like to take a manifesto about software and digital networks and apply it to human networks and organization?\nIn my recent presentation, The Future of Organization , I took the majority of the Mozilla manifesto and replaced references to the Internet with references to organization. I liked the result so much I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it separately here for ease of reference.\nI will just add the qualifier regarding the word organization, specifically that I don\u0026rsquo;t use it with simply the body corporate in mind.\nThe Mozilla Manifesto, amplified Organization is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.\nOrganization must enrich the lives of individual human beings.\nIndividuals’ security and privacy in organizations are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.\nIndividuals must have the ability to shape the organization and their own experiences in the organization.\nThe effectiveness of the organization as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.\nFree and open source software promotes the development of organizations as a public resource.\nTransparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.\nA balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.\nMagnifying the public benefit aspects of organizations is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.\nThe Mozilla Manifesto can be found here . If you like it, do consider making Firefox your default browser: \u0026ldquo;Committed to you, your privacy and an open Web.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/06/mozilla-manifesto-amplified-internet-organization/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Mozilla manifesto amplified\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Mozilla-manifesto-_-amplified.png\"\u003eInspired by the analogy of organization-as-software, and indeed \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/06/organization-is-software/\" title=\"Organization is software\"\u003ethe reality of organization-as-software\u003c/a\u003e\n, what might it look like to take a manifesto about software and digital networks and apply it to human networks and organization?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn my recent presentation, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/05/future-organization-video-presentation-major-themes-new-provocations/\" title=\"The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations\"\u003eThe Future of Organization\u003c/a\u003e\n, I took the majority of the Mozilla manifesto and replaced references to the Internet with references to organization. I liked the result so much I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it separately here for ease of reference.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Mozilla Manifesto amplified, from Internet to organization"},{"content":" This post is about an exciting vista for organization, one that may sound unhuman on the face of it but which, in contrast, I think could serve human dignity very well.\nI first presented it in my Future of Organization video May 23rd, a presentation that appears to have been well received (and the accompanying Slideshare accrued over 2000 views in the week). Given the variety and perceptiveness of the comments the video garnered I\u0026rsquo;m particularly pleased to have excused the presentation up front as being far from comprehensive. Pete Burden picked up on building inclusiveness and sustainability, and humanity, pointing me to this webpage on concious business . And soulfulness was at the heart of a similar exchange with Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations . (I consequently elevated the book to the top of my to-read pile and at page 36 I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it very much so far.)\nMr. Wirearchy himself, Jon Husband , was good enough to \u0026rsquo;tweet out\u0026rsquo; (appended here). And my dear friend Gabbi Cahane wondered what balance of my living in the future and living in the present might be best for business. Hmm, good point :-)\nIn this post, I\u0026rsquo;m referring to what I\u0026rsquo;ve named Bread incorporated – a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. Here\u0026rsquo;s the slide in question and the transcript:\nIt shows the application of a corporate as middleware, a term borrowed from IT meaning a bridge between the operating system and the application layer. This middleware company provides the bridge from today’s corporate, commercial and legal environment to a new organizational ecosystem.\nThe word company has its origins in the Late Latin, companio, meaning \u0026ldquo;companion, one who eats bread with you”. So I call the middleware company Bread incorporated. Subsidiaries are required as physical location cannot be ignored.\nAnyone can join the company as companions – a term usefully void of existing legal meaning – defining and declaring their license of participation. Companions coalesce by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value – powered by the organization agents of the Organized Self.\nCompanion groups are the closest equivalent in this system to today’s companies and while not strictly necessary in the long-run provide some atavistic comfort, particularly during migration. They may endure if specific groups of individuals decide they can add and derive more value presenting themselves as a band than as individuals. And sometimes people just love sticking together, right?\nParticipation by established corporate entities is essential, and they can do so via the companion API, a proxy for the corporate in this ecosystem.\nThis approach aims to do for organizing what social media has achieved for communications – eliminate friction and encourage heterarchy. So how is this system frictionless?\nFriction The friction today is not knowing what. The friction is not knowing who. The friction is transaction costs; the marketing and tendering and deal making and legal and management process. The friction is non-interoperable collaborative tools and services. The friction is not learning consistently enough or fast enough. In fact, I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to work with a client where time spent on value-adding activity in the office comes close to that for the non-value-adding, and that\u0026rsquo;s just a view through the performance-oriented management-by-objectives lens, what Frederic Laloux calls Achievement Orange.\nBeyond organization as we know it today According to my dictionary, transhumanism is defined as:\nThe belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, esp. by means of science and technology.\nI mention that here because I believe we have the potential to do something very similar for organization, for the cooperative relationships between individuals. I\u0026rsquo;d call it transorganizationism if it wasn\u0026rsquo;t so ugly looking a word – unsurprisingly, there\u0026rsquo;s no reference to anyone having typed that combination of letters together on the public web before, but at least now if others have similar ideas they might find this post.\nThe idea might be defined as organization that works better when we consider organization is software.\nThe phrase \u0026ldquo;organization is software\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean using software or software-as-a-service like we do today to manage and track and automate process, to number crunch, to communicate, to collaborate, to analyse, to synthesize, to design, to innovate, to sell. It means organization as humans and software in cooperation. It means software and humans as mutual entities of cooperation, symbiotic, making cooperation deeper, broader, more adaptive, more enduring, more useful, more fulfilling, more valuable, more aware, more human – all the outcomes I envisage by \u0026ldquo;works better\u0026rdquo;.\nIn the presentation I describe the Organized Self as being:\nEquipped with an ‘organization agent’ – software representing us in finding opportunities to create mutual value with others, and helping to realise that value.\nIn the transcript you\u0026rsquo;ll see I used the term \u0026ldquo;powered by\u0026rdquo; to describe the relationship between organization agents and us humans. Perhaps \u0026ldquo;powered by\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;equipped\u0026rdquo; fall short of the idea I\u0026rsquo;m trying to convey, and my only excuse is the old one of trying to describe a new model with the lexicon of the old model.\nWhen a high profile individual entreats \u0026ldquo;speak to my agent\u0026rdquo;, the human agent is part and parcel of the organization at hand. I consider that analogous.\nBy the way, I distinguish between cooperation and collaboration. Collaboration is working together to common purpose. Cooperation is working towards common ends based on common values. (I think I picked this up from Stowe Boyd although somewhat ironically Google and I aren\u0026rsquo;t getting along today and I can\u0026rsquo;t find a source. –– Update, it was Stowe, who references this source .) You can tell I\u0026rsquo;m \u0026lsquo;working out loud here\u0026rsquo; – a euphemism for presenting half-baked ideas – when you wonder, if software is a symbiotic equal in organization, in cooperation, does that therefore mean it is authored with values?\nSocioveillance surmounts surveillance I introduced the neologism socioveillance :\nA component of Organized Self. A personal and private service monitoring our interactions with our socios. Negotiates data exchange with others’ service according to our respective privacy policies to enrich our mutual understanding within comfortable boundaries.\nThis contrasts with the dominant thinking of organization software, one invoking the idea of an omnipresent oracle that may be quizzed by those with appropriate skills and access rights – the point of difference I identify between sociometrics and socioveillance. Just this past weekend, Harold Jarche picked this up in a recent ZDnet article by Dion Hinchcliffe in which Dion asserts:\nThe real play is the ability to peer deeply using machine learning into this collective intelligence to make better decisions based on ground truth that comes from what the organization as a whole actually knows. Essentially, it\u0026rsquo;s applying IBM\u0026rsquo;s Watson-style machine learning to the full collaborative output of your organization.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s subtle I grant you, but the bias is there. Or perhaps Dion means every single participant in the organization having a Watson log-in. Nevertheless, such power contradicts one of the manifesto assertions made towards the end of my video, a manifesto created by expanding the Mozilla manifesto from its subject of the Internet to that of organization:\nIndividuals’ security and privacy in organizations are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.\nMarket Allow me to qualify my use of market in describing Bread incorporated – \u0026ldquo;a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization.\u0026rdquo; Obviously, the word immediately conveys buyers and sellers coming together to transact, but I\u0026rsquo;m not thinking solely in terms of money. I\u0026rsquo;m also including time and attention and inspiration and those rewards sitting higher up in Maslow\u0026rsquo;s hierarchy in this exchange.\nThe cryptographic awesome sauce If you\u0026rsquo;ve viewed my presentation you\u0026rsquo;ll know I refer to the mathematics and software underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin in the construction of Bread incorporated, of this organization as software. I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked to expand on this and I\u0026rsquo;ll attempt that in a future post.\nFor now, I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with Jon\u0026rsquo;s tweet, which conveniently embeds the YouTube version of the presentation.\nhttp://twitter.com/jonhusband/status/471490467172196353 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/06/organization-is-software/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Angkor Thom, Cambodia\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/AngkorThom.jpg\"\u003e This post is about an exciting vista for organization, one that may sound unhuman on the face of it but which, in contrast, I think could serve human dignity very well.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI first presented it in my \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/05/future-organization-video-presentation-major-themes-new-provocations/\" title=\"The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eFuture of Organization\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n video May 23rd, a presentation that appears to have been well received (and \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/the-future-of-organization\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe accompanying Slideshare\u003c/a\u003e\n accrued over 2000 views in the week). Given the variety and perceptiveness of the comments the video garnered I\u0026rsquo;m particularly pleased to have excused the presentation up front as being far from comprehensive. \u003ca href=\"http://www.consciousbusinesspeople.com/core-team/core-team/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePete Burden\u003c/a\u003e\n picked up on building inclusiveness and sustainability, and humanity, pointing me to \u003ca href=\"http://www.amed.org.uk/page/welcome-to-e-o-p-spring-2014\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethis webpage on concious business\u003c/a\u003e\n. And soulfulness was at the heart of a similar exchange with Frederic Laloux, author of \u003ca href=\"http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eReinventing Organizations\u003c/a\u003e\n. (I consequently elevated the book to the top of my to-read pile and at page 36 I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it very much so far.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMr. Wirearchy himself, \u003ca href=\"http://wirearchy.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJon Husband\u003c/a\u003e\n, was good enough to \u0026rsquo;tweet out\u0026rsquo; (appended here). And my dear friend \u003ca href=\"http://cahane.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGabbi Cahane\u003c/a\u003e\n wondered what balance of my living in the future and living in the present might be best for business. Hmm, good point :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this post, I\u0026rsquo;m referring to what I\u0026rsquo;ve named \u003cem\u003eBread incorporated\u003c/em\u003e – a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. Here\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/the-future-of-organization/71\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe slide\u003c/a\u003e\n in question and the transcript:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Organization is software"},{"content":" Today, Google has published a webpage with a form allowing anyone in Europe to ask that personal data be removed from search results. This follows the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, deciding that:\nIndexing information by a search engine is ‘processing of personal data’ Google is a ‘controller’ of personal data Spanish data protection law is applicable, even if indexing happens in the US Google should remove links to webpages containing personal data, even if the webpages themselves are lawful A fair balance should be sought between the legitimate interests of search engine users and the privacy rights of individuals The right to be forgotten is recognised by the Court of Justice. I\u0026rsquo;ve owned the domains forgetweb.com and forgetweb.org since 2010, so this is something I\u0026rsquo;ve contemplated for some time and the domain names betray my leaning, yet I can confidently say the Court has got it wrong. Julian David, techUK CEO, explains why in The Telegraph: \u0026ldquo;Forget about it: the ECJ ruling on the \u0026lsquo;right to be forgotten\u0026rsquo; is unworkable .\u0026rdquo; I support his balanced sentiment 100% and would add one more vitally important perspective.\nAWStats tells me that 17 bots crawled philipsheldrake.com this month, including Googlebot and MSNbot. Some companies crawl the web to make it accessible to everyone with Internet connection, Google and Microsoft for example, and some crawl the web to compile data to power commercial services, social web and influence analyses for example. So the focus on removing search results from freely available search engines does not deliver the remedy the Court thinks it needs. Rather, it removes the facility from the everyman, leaving only those who can afford commercial services unfettered; effectively the antithesis of the democratization of knowledge .\n(Quick asides: CIPR President Stephen Waddington describes why it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;unworkable\u0026rdquo; here . This also appears to run counter to the spirit informing the recent European ruling supporting net neutrality – see ZiL Lane 2.0 – the new killer app for the interwebs .)\nIf this search ruling bothers you, make sure to use the search engines\u0026rsquo; US services rather than your local country service. If Google and Microsoft determine they need to run these through a European filter too, I won\u0026rsquo;t be the only one publishing a simple technique to get round this constraint. If there is a silver lining here, Julian sums it up: \u0026ldquo;Do we need to ensure we offer meaningful safeguards that consumers and businesses can understand and rely on? Yes.\u0026rdquo; – and it looks like we should now have that debate sooner than later.\nMaybe those domain names will come in useful after all!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/05/access-search-result-denied-unless-money-course/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"access to this search result is denied\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/access-denied.png\"\u003e Today, \u003ca href=\"https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle has published a webpage with a form\u003c/a\u003e\n allowing anyone in Europe to ask that personal data be removed from search results. This follows the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, deciding that:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIndexing information by a search engine is ‘processing of personal data’\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGoogle is a ‘controller’ of personal data\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSpanish data protection law is applicable, even if indexing happens in the US\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGoogle should remove links to webpages containing personal data, even if the webpages themselves are lawful\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA fair balance should be sought between the legitimate interests of search engine users and the privacy rights of individuals\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe right to be forgotten is recognised by the Court of Justice.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve owned the domains \u003cem\u003eforgetweb.com\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eforgetweb.org\u003c/em\u003e since 2010, so this is something I\u0026rsquo;ve contemplated for some time and the domain names betray my leaning, yet I can confidently say the Court has got it wrong. Julian David, techUK CEO, explains why in The Telegraph: \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10836647/Forget-about-it-the-ECJ-ruling-on-the-right-to-be-forgotten-is-unworkable.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eForget about it: the ECJ ruling on the \u0026lsquo;right to be forgotten\u0026rsquo; is unworkable\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u0026rdquo; I support his balanced sentiment 100% and would add one more vitally important perspective.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Access to this search result is denied, unless you have the money of course"},{"content":"\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.\nMike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.\n[embed width=\u0026ldquo;960\u0026rdquo;]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]\nThe Slideshare and YouTube versions You can view the video on YouTube if you prefer, and here\u0026rsquo;s the stack in Slideshare so you can click all those hyperlinks in the footer.\nhttp://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/the-future-of-organization The Slideshare page lists the slide contents as free text, and I\u0026rsquo;ve pasted below the transcript of my voiceover just in case it\u0026rsquo;s useful to anyone, and for good old-fashioned SEO purposes of course.\nHi, I’m Philip Sheldrake. The Future of Organization fascinates me. We are all involved in many organizations to varying degrees of personal dissatisfaction, satisfaction and delight. We all then have a personal interest in organization working better tomorrow than it does today. Here’s a bold goal – eliminating compromise in organizational life. What a utopian aspiration! We’re going to cover all sorts of ideas, with the intention of being interesting, of being provocative, but not comprehensive. Just so you know. There’s a lot of relevant stuff from a lot of great people out there I haven’t had time to reference. This video comes one year from my book Attenzi – a social business story, and three years from my first book, The Business of Influence. I mention that because you’ll find some of the ideas presented here written there. But the majority of slides here reference other stuff. Thanks to those in the Future of Work community and The Responsive Organization who took the time to review and comment on a draft version of this stack. Much appreciated. In fact, such collective activity is the very object of focus here. We’re talking about every and all situations where people come together to do something they might not achieve alone – so not just organizations in the legal, corporate sense. We organize ourselves to achieve things we can’t achieve singly, or to achieve them more productively, more consistently and more speedily. Nevertheless, we haven’t mastered organization by any stretch of the imagination. It’s too difficult … to give all one can give and to derive all the value there is to derive. When it comes to those incorporated organizations, a recent and well reported Gallup poll pegged engaged employees around 1 in 8 of the workforce. Ouch. Even worse, nearly a quarter could be described, perhaps uncharitably, as deadweight. So we have a distinct opportunity. You might say that seven in eight people think the only way is up! So let’s crack on. All human beings … should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. This is a quote from the 1st article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I like it. The aspiration to foster such kinship is surely a great place to start here. Perhaps our understanding of and approach to organization has been too immature to date to live up to this intent. President Lincoln championed the principles of human equality, and his advocacy of government of the people, by the people, for the people is well known. Government is organization, so I’ve cheekily expanded his proclamation from government to all organization. This is a polemic. It gets us thinking. And perhaps reactions to this run from “surely not!” to “ah, if only.” Simon Terry alludes to the same sort of thing with his blog post titled… If your company was a country, would you live there? An interesting challenge. The Democracy Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks all countries, from 1st placed Norway all the way down to North Korea in last place. I wonder where your company might slot in. What about the other organizations you’re part of? Sociology is the scientific study of human social behavior and its origins, development, organizations, and institutions. So we’re talking sociology here. This is how Philip Selznick, a professor of sociology and noted author, described sociology’s contribution towards the close of the last century. We’re social animals. It’s part of being human. So after all these millennia, why do we find organization so damn difficult? Complexity is a good part of the answer. When anyone asks me to recommend an introductory text to the topic of complexity, this is where I point them. And what a perfect book title for our context here, for most every organization involves more than two people. Here’s a reasonably short definition. The last bullet refers to emergent behaviour, which is the name we give the appearance of patterns, of unexpected order arising from many otherwise simple interactions. It’s interesting to read this three point definition again, but this time as the definition of the word “social” for example, or indeed “organization”. This slide portrays complexity. The pattern you see here is the result of a very simple function known as cellular automata. The upper dot identifies a point where a chaotic cascade becomes ordered – we get emergence – and the lower dot identifies just the opposite. Complexity is a system with a seemingly random mix of chaos and order. The 19th Century philosopher and psychologist GH Lewes is credited with coining the phrase emergence, but complexity science only really emerged itself in the 1970s. And we’re still learning about the theory today let alone its application. Every Chief Executive should note the point Stephen Johnson makes about complex systems: they get their smarts from below! Padget and Powell’s book is focused entirely on emergence with respect to organizations and markets, with markets effectively a form of macro organization. This is Padgett and Powell’s mantra. We’ll come back to this shortly in terms of influence flow. So in looking to adapt to complexity, in looking to apply emergence to our organizational advantage, we look to nature for clues, for nature is a complex system. Aristotle knew this instinctively. We know it mathematically. We can even view sociology as emergent itself. It emerges from psychology, which in turn emerges from biology, emerging from chemistry, emerging from physics, emerging from mathematics. Here’s the last slide on complexity. While we might use the words complicated and complex interchangeably in everyday language, they are in fact quite different. Cars are complicated but complication of itself doesn’t necessarily exhibit emergence. We wouldn’t call traffic flow complicated because it doesn’t consist of interconnected parts, but it sure exhibits complexity. Organizations, however, are complicated AND exhibit complexity. Why have I made this point here? Well many people talk about the power of simplification. We can talk about simplifying complication, but organizational complexity and the complexity of the market are the natural products of many people coming together. It can’t be made simple, only simpler to navigate. Today then we have an unprecedented appreciation of complexity AND access to information technologies to help us navigate it. That means we increasingly have the facility to kiss goodbye to some of those heuristics that made up for our ignorance in the past. Look at these 20th Century heuristics. Apparently customers are our number one priority. Oh no wait, shareholders must be. Oh except of course we couldn’t do it without our people. Obviously we can’t have three No. 1 priorities, and in practice of course we know that. So yes, these heuristics make sense up to a point, but now we can regard these stakeholder groups as all being in the complex mix. We scaled organizations up in the 20th Century, but not our corresponding facility to maintain the qualities of relationships at this scale. Sometimes when asked to define social business I simply say – relationships at scale. We’re not yet very good at this. Isn’t customer relationship management, CRM, supposed to address this for those precious customers at least? A character in my Attenzi story focuses on this question. I’ll read this one verbatim if I may. … I will just flag up VRM here, vendor relationship management. It’s the name given to the intent to equip customers and citizens with the same capabilities wielded at them today by Big Co and Big Gov., to balance things out a bit. We saw earlier that our approach to organization must be informed as much, if not more, by the relations than the actors. Esko Kilpi puts it like this: “the basic unit of work is not an individual, but individuals in interaction.” So let’s now look at influence. You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. At the organization level, we can consider six types of influence flow. This diagram is useful in getting people to think differently about their business. By the way, a stakeholder is any person or organization with an interest or concern in our organisation or something we’re involved in. The Six Influence Flows deliberately avoids the blinkers of 20th Century job titles, disciplines, functions and department names. It gets people thinking about how to we might use information technologies to trace and understand how minds and behaviours are changing – how to influence, and how to be influenced, systematically. “There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do.” “What is the intended outcome of your marketing and PR campaigns, and the design of your organization overall, if it’s not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you’d like, and to be sensitive to how they’d like you to think and behave?” The idea of information flowing is well established, but it’s the process of changing minds and behaviors that actually matters in our organizational context, fuelled by those flows of data, information and knowledge. Nature doesn’t have a central bureaucracy, and perhaps that’s how it emerged for very good reason. Harold Jarche labels this focus on empowering the individual, personal knowledge mastery, or PKM for short. He used to call it personal knowledge management but recently moved away from the management word to move away from all the baggage that word comes with, especially as PKM celebrates autonomy as well as mastery and purpose. It’s at the point of looking back at the organization from the individual’s perspective that we appreciate that the Six Influence Flows is a transitory construct. It works so long as we consider the idea of the organization separately from those stakeholders. To reify it, as in fact most people do most of the time; so this does have value. But even today, the corporate organization is usually considered the sum of its payroll. But it is clearly more than that – always was and always will be. Note for example the relatively recent excitement about collaborating with customers. While the value of this process may have been lost during the industrial age, it is in fact a process as old as trade itself. Here’s Alex Sandy Pentland on social physics. The history of the phrase harks back to the philosopher and founder of sociology, Auguste Compte. It’s with this heritage in mind that Pentland now uses the term to describe the application of big data and related technologies to analyse and understand human behavior. Fundamentally, social physics seeks to answer the question: How can we create organizations and governments that are cooperative, productive, and creative? The nature, volume and flux of influence flows, it appears, are all in the mix. We’re now in the domain of working openly and, to quote Bryce Williams, working out loud. If we’re to remove the friction holding back influence flow, then we move from asking ‘who needs to see this?’ to ‘really, does it matter who sees this?’. And that has significant net benefits in terms of trust. Public relations as we’ve known it, as spin, as publicity, as inauthentic manipulation, is dying. Thankfully. Attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing is no longer a realistic prospect. And this is very good news for our ambition here to eliminate the compromises in organizational life. “If perception is reality characterized twentieth-century marketing and PR, reality is perception is the twenty-first century axiom.” Increasing trust eases influence flow, increasing trust. As Andrew McAfee said in 2007 with respect to Enterprise 2.0, “it’s not not about the technology”! We often reflect on serendipitous events in relation to business breakthroughs. Might technology change our concept of serendipity? Can tech effectively nurture more of it? Here’s a rather famous technologist writing in 1999 along similar lines. Gates popularized the phrase “digital nervous system” in framing how IT can help organizations think, act, react and adapt. Thinking of organizations in biological terms is quite natural, as evidenced by the proliferation of biological metaphors throughout management speak – indeed, the word organization has roots back to the word organ. And dropping down from the sociological to the biological is also in keeping with our references to complexity earlier. 1999 doesn’t feel all that long ago, yet the original expression of the digital nervous system now appears too limited. In the intervening years, with the rapid growth in mobile and big data and analytics and social and the Internet of Things, we can now consider technology’s role more expansively. I can’t imagine many people tuning in here that don’t appreciate the importance of social and mobile for example – but perhaps the Internet of Things in relation to organizational design remains most nascent. As we instrument the planet, as we make computing ubiquitous and pervasive, the boundary between the technological and the non-technological, the digital and the analogue, blurs. This will be critical in achieving our facility to deal with relationships at scale. Relationships are real-time, visceral, emotional. They occupy space, and they stimulate all senses. I call the manifestation the Internetome and its study Internetomics. The EU COMPOSE project is a case in point – building a “Collaborative Open Market to Place Objects at your Service”. Thinking in terms of senses is also perfectly suited to reframing business performance management. Performance measurement as stick and carrot may well be associated with traditional command and control hierarchical organization, but they are not synonymous and we won’t throw one out with the other. Performance management as sensory feedback is a critical function of cooperation and collaboration, central to understanding the rights and living up to the responsibilities of autonomy, and part of the very fabric of networks. More on this in a few slides. But for now, what happens when that technological fabric gets smarter? What happens when the web itself better understands how to deal with the data and information it finds there? When it can identify patterns and trends, prompted and unprompted? This is the domain of Web 3.0, otherwise known as the Semantic Web, and increasingly as the Web of Data. It’s playing out right now. So might we prove Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrong? He didn’t think much of public opinion, and perhaps his most famous pronouncement is: We learn from history that we do not learn from history. Might we however learn from our digital history? We must, in my opinion, in our attempt to eliminate the compromises in organizational life. No voiceover. Public relations has a reputation problem, as we learned earlier. However, new theory, values and behaviors are being championed. They may be such a departure that we end up calling practice something else, as former Edelman EMEA CEO Robert Phillips concludes with his polemic, “PR is dead”. We should learn from this work’s emphasis of mutuality. I consider mutuality, and definitions of public relations like my one here, as fundamental to designing social business. In case it’s not obvious, this definition encompasses everyone with a stake in the organization’s success. This is what I call the social business mutuality stack. Perhaps a key difference between ‘doing’ social and ‘being’ social, between slapping social on versus building it in, is that the former attempts to hone in on monetary value directly. This then requires simplistic ROI calculations social tactic by social tactic, social platform by social platform. It props itself up with Newtonian cause-and-effect thinking, counter to what we know about complexity today. If my book, The Business of Influence, attempts anything, it attempts to rid readers of such blinkered, simplistic and misguided thinking; thinking that fails to realise the full potential value here. True, long-term, sustainable and mutual value is created by working up through the mutuality stack. When one stakeholder group in an organization takes permanent priority over another, that’s not organization. When one always loses a little when another wins a little, all lose a little. Perhaps this sums up my obsession with mutuality. Mutuality as the foundation of social business helps all those with a stake in an organization’s success recognise the fact, and helps them improve their personal motivation manifest across the four cognitions of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Each individual, and therefore the organization in the collective, will be more eager to learn, to build mutual value via mutual influence founded on mutual understanding. Let’s return to performance in the context of learning. Business performance management approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard refer to single and double loop learning. But perhaps a third loop isn’t given the airtime it deserves. If we pursue single loop learning and ignore double loop, then we drive up process efficiency but neglect effectiveness. This is at the heart of the matter when, for example, Adam Pisoni talks about prioritizing organizational responsiveness instead of efficiency. Rather, we can reframe Adam’s clarion call as one for responsiveness executed efficiently. Responsiveness is double loop, under which the single loop of efficiency plays its role. If we pursue double loop learning and ignore triple loop, then we pursue effectiveness in the context of the world we live in, but neglect the opportunity to improve that world. You’ll note the question mark bottom right, and perhaps a chap famous for his mastery of single loop learning can help us put a label on this. Deming spoke of profound knowledge. He also championed the delayering of hierarchy, and systems thinking in relation to org design, and he urged management to create an environment of trust, relationships, interdependence and pride of workmanship. His call for the development of profound knowledge can be interpreted as a call for profound leadership, and by any and all rather than specific individuals with a particular job title or role description. Or, perhaps it’s a collective profound leadership? Here’s the question the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to answer. Perhaps we can interpret the reference to intelligence – a loaded word in IT admittedly – as encompassing the facility to address all three learning loops? You’ll recall the quote from Selznick earlier, from 1996, pointing out that we have failed to address some of the central problems of organization and governance. Well here Stowe Boyd sums up where we find ourselves today. I love the reference to latent energy. Stowe talks about a 3D workforce – that’s three D’s as in is distributed, decentralized and discontinuous – which makes a lot of sense. He has taken the opportunity to bring those of us interested in the future of work together in a free and open community called just that – Future Of Work. It’s one of two communities I name-checked up front. All communities benefit from having something to shoot at than stare at a blank page, and Stowe has offered up a draft manifesto for a new way of work, for which you can see the keywords and anti-keywords here. This table is taken from the manifesto of the other community I mentioned at the start here, called the Responsive Org. As I write, the community has set itself the task of providing practical help to organizations looking to become more responsive. The founding principles of sociocracy include decision-making by informed consent and organization with a hierarchy of semi-autonomous circles without the power implications of autocratic hierarchy. The electrical engineering firm Endenburg is most famous for employing sociocracy and for the development of the formal method known as Sociocratic Circular Organizing. Interestingly, it’s informed by an approach called cybernetics, itself related to the complexity science we talked about earlier. Holacracy is named after the idea of holarchy, as opposed to hierarchy. A holarchy is a fractal-like structure demonstrating similarities at all scales. Holacracy has been compared analogously with a software operating system, albeit proprietary rather than open as you’ll note from the trademark symbol here. It’s informed by sociocracy, agile software development, team dynamics and psychology; from theory and practice. Podularity org design entails pods – small autonomous teams that, like Holacracy, effect a holarchy with fractal-like qualities. In some ways it appears to be Holacracy without the extensive rule book, which may be a saving grace or a failing depending on your perspective. To my mind, Podularity can be traced back to the Toyota Production System from the middle of last century, which later formed the foundation of Lean Manufacturing. In fact one of my first jobs as a young engineer half a lifetime ago championed cellular manufacture, although that cellular ambition didn’t extend beyond the shop floor. Dave Gray, Podularity’s champion, points out that podular organization requires information to be open and transparent, requires principles, platforms and culture to guide decision-making cohesively, and needs the right kind of people, or the right kind of attitudes at least. Perhaps that Holacracy rule book is there should reality fall short of these requirements. The drawing here is reproduced with permission from Dave’s book The Connected Company. Podularity raises the question – What does a pod size of 1 mean? Jon Husband champions wirearchy. In Jon’s words, it’s “about the power and effectiveness of people working together through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.” It’s an emergent organizing principle – referencing complexity science there – informing the transition of org design from command-and-control to what Jon labels champion-and-channel, I quote: “championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and the possibilities for innovation carried in those ideas.” Sociocracy and Holacracy are systems. Perhaps Podularity is a model. And Wirearchy is a principle; a provocative and productive principle perhaps, but not something you might effectively ‘roll out’ starting Monday. Which prompts the question, which of these might be the answer, or point us in the right direction? And do they share more similarities than differences? Lee Bryant puts it succinctly. There is probably no single methodology. To pretend there will be one system is to betray the complexity science and emergence we now appreciate runs through many of the things we as a species are interested in, not least of which the design of organizations, of markets, of society. If you’d like to join the cooperative endeavour to define the future of organization, particularly with the body corporate in mind, then here are some required links. We’ve touched on human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity and wirearchy. This last section presents some provocations to continue to fuel our cooperative endeavour. A lot of the conversation about the future of organization focuses on the future of work, on the body corporate. Anne McCrossan reminds us here that the ramifications run much wider and deeper. And if talking about an emergent civilization isn’t third loop I don’t know what is?! This is my own provocation about social business – a question offered as a definition. It isn’t limited to the body corporate definition of organization. This stack isn’t party political, but perhaps our work here fits with the progressive outlook of the radical centrists. It appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And it appeals to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy. Here’s Drucker on autonomy, on managing oneself. In his words: “Only when you operate with a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence.” Of course, we’re focused on that excellence in the domain of organization. We’re looking to celebrate the individual and the collective in harmony. Self-organization is a process where some form of global order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between the components of an initially disordered system. So the emergence we spoke about earlier. The Organized Self is when we\u0026rsquo;re equipped with an ‘organization agent’ – software representing us in finding opportunities to create mutual value with others, and helping to realise that value. You’ll note a similarity between the phrase The Quantified Self and The Organized Self. I consider them related. We have surveillance and nascent sousveillance. But we need socioveillance for heterarchical relationships at scale. You may or may not be familiar with the idea of sociometrics, pioneered by Sandy Pentland and the team at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, both referenced earlier, but socioveillance adopts a different perspective, if you’ll forgive the pun. Sociometrics aims to, I quote, “help organizations unlock the potential of their people” and “allows management to align internal metrics as well as resource planning based on key behaviors that drive business.” By contrast, socioveillance is the tool of the individual in forming all variety of organization. Earlier, we looked briefly at Personal Knowledge Mastery as a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. Such process will be aided by Organized Self tools and services such as socioveillance. My next provocation is inspired by Creative Commons. Copyright law was found by some to be inadequate in coping with and catering to the unprecedented characteristics of the World Wide Web. Rather than attempting to change existing law – which may have taken some considerable time and energy – the Creative Commons community wielded existing law to create new licenses compatible with their aspirations. In seeking to eliminate the compromises in organizational life we should consider how we might achieve a similar breakthrough with respect to corporate and employment law. I’m specifically thinking about organization within and beyond the traditional company, informed by the light thrown by Ronald Coase on the costs of using the pricing mechanism, better known as transaction costs. The following diagram portrays an architecture to these ends. It shows the application of a corporate as middleware, a term borrowed from IT meaning a bridge between the operating system and the application layer. This middleware company provides the bridge from today’s corporate, commercial and legal environment to a new organizational ecosystem. The word company has its origins in the Late Latin, companio, meaning \u0026ldquo;companion, one who eats bread with you”. So I call the middleware company Bread incorporated. Subsidiaries are required as physical location cannot be ignored. Anyone can join the company as companions – a term usefully void of existing legal meaning – defining and declaring their license of participation. Companions coalesce by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value – powered by the organization agents of the Organized Self. Companion groups are the closest equivalent in this system to today’s companies and while not strictly necessary in the long-run provide some atavistic comfort, particularly during migration. They may endure if specific groups of individuals decide they can add and derive more value presenting themselves as a band than as individuals. And sometimes people just love sticking together, right? Participation by established corporate entities is essential, and they can do so via the companion API, a proxy for the corporate in this ecosystem. This approach aims to do for organizing what social media has achieved for communications – eliminate friction and encourage heterarchy. So how is this system frictionless? Being a companion of Bread incorporated allows legal and commercial matters with other companions to be rendered in software. The concept of distributed autonomous corporations or organizations emerged in 2013 with the characteristics listed here, although it has to be said that they have yet to be tested at length beyond the Bitcoin system itself, let alone at the scale demanded here. Bread incorporated is effectively a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. There are many potential advantages to Bread. For example, a digital message can act as a contract – your word is your bond. Payment terms can be whatever the companions decide – 10 minutes without the need to invoice or chase for payment sounds good to me. Create a reputation currency to boot to enable our facility to do relationships at scale, and make all digital collaboration tools read and write structured data via HTTP hyperlinks (which will please Kingsley Idehen among others) and it’s beginning to sound utopian to me. Brian Robertson over at HolacracyOne has posited that the progression from shareholder value to stakeholder value progresses further to an evolutionary type organization, a “transpersonal” model. In other words an organization existing for its own sake, a new life form – one that’s not “all about people”. I love developing ideas by extrapolation, but some things don’t feel like they sit on the continuum. If this isn’t about people why would people be bothered to create one let alone contribute to its ongoing operations? In The Business of Influence, I noted that “some include the environment and non-human sentient beings as [organizational] stakeholders [but] … for our context … I’ll regard citizens as taking representation by proxy.” Perhaps then such a transpersonal organization obviates the need for such ongoing proxy. Could a transpersonal organization represent the environment and non-human sentient beings directly? Might they then join Bread as companions? Might human companions then voluntarily organize with these transpersonal companions, recognizing environmental costs and demonstrating as much to the wider ecosystem? The transpersonal companions then organize with the resources accrued. By way of example, could emergent carbon trading work better than deliberative carbon trading? Ultimately, Bread is an ecosystem that recognizes complexity, eliminates friction, and appreciates that organization extends beyond the body corporate and indeed beyond the human. It appreciates the difference between the organization as body corporate and organization as co-operative coalescence, employing the former to create the latter. But I think that’s as tangental as we should get here. It’s time to wrap up this section of provocations and this presentation. Early on I paraphrased Lincoln, and I like this technique so I’ve done it again. Inspired by the analogy of organization-as-software, and indeed the reality of organization-as-software, what might it look like to take a manifesto about software and digital networks and apply it to human networks and organization? To conclude here then, I’ve pasted the majority of the Mozilla manifesto on the next three slides, replacing references to the Internet with references to organization. Organization is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. Organization must enrich the lives of individual human beings. Individuals’ security and privacy in organizations are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. Individuals must have the ability to shape the organization and their own experiences in the organization. The effectiveness of the organization as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide. Free and open source software promotes the development of organizations as a public resource. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust. A balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of organizations is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment. Thanks to Lee Jang Sub for giving me permission to use his artistic representation of Rome from his ComplexCity work in the identity for this presentation. And thank you for investing your time and attention. ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/05/future-organization-video-presentation-major-themes-new-provocations/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Office building in New York\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/office_building_newyork.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.futureofwork.co/post/79984106877/future-of-work-advisory-council\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eadvisory council\u003c/a\u003e\n for the \u003ca href=\"http://futureofwork.co/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFuture of Work\u003c/a\u003e\n community, and part of the steering group for \u003ca href=\"http://theresponsiveorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Responsive Organization\u003c/a\u003e\n community, I know I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/mgrafham\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMike Grafham\u003c/a\u003e\n and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[embed width=\u0026ldquo;960\u0026rdquo;]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations"},{"content":"\nThe recent antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel for collusion in hiring practices demonstrates a lack of respect for the respective organisations\u0026rsquo; employees. Fundamentally, how dare one\u0026rsquo;s employer collude with another in ways that may limit one\u0026rsquo;s career progression!\nHaving been an employer carrying the not insubstantial costs of hiring I know how difficult it is to watch someone in whom you have invested considerable time, money and energy walk out the door, but I think my memory serves me well when I say we encouraged the team to celebrate such departures. If anything, our alumni network grew +1 each time.\nWhen you define social business as I do , what might the clause for \u0026ldquo;non-solicitation\u0026rdquo; look like in your terms of business? How about this:\nWe believe our employees should be free to do whatever they consider best suits them. We do not therefore seek to apply any restrictions on their future employ. Their success is our success.\nIf such a declaration is representative of your wider values, you might find loyalty actually improves. By investing in our culture and award winning training and development, we felt comfortable wishing leavers the very best for the future. It felt right and served us all well.\n[Image credit: Department of Coffee and Social Affairs – a fine selection of London coffee shops in which to have such conversations.]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/05/fancy-coffee-social-business-non-solicitation-terms/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Department of Coffee\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/departmentofcoffee_cup.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-google-settle-antitrust-lawsuit-hiring-collusion\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003erecent antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel for collusion in hiring practices\u003c/a\u003e\n demonstrates a lack of respect for the respective organisations\u0026rsquo; employees. Fundamentally, how dare one\u0026rsquo;s employer collude with another in ways that may limit one\u0026rsquo;s career progression!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving been an employer carrying the not insubstantial costs of hiring I know how difficult it is to watch someone in whom you have invested considerable time, money and energy walk out the door, but I think my memory serves me well when I say we encouraged the team to celebrate such departures. If anything, our alumni network grew +1 each time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Fancy a coffee? Social business and your non-solicitation terms"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;m at the #responsiveorg unconference in London today, and I\u0026rsquo;m on the hunt for dissensus rather than the echoic chamber of the converted preaching to the converted, as warm and lovely as that feels. So with that in mind, let me kick the tyres of one of the primary assumptions underpinning the #responsive org manifesto .\nFrom Efficiency to Responsiveness – Historically, competitive advantages came from optimizing for efficiency and labor productivity of standardized product, with companies such as Walmart and Ford being common examples. As the flow of information increases, the competitive advantage is held by the organization that can react the fastest to new information. Companies achieve increased responsiveness by reducing the friction of information flow, increasing their iteration rate, decreasing their cost of failure, and optimizing their structures for adaptability.\nThis I like. I don\u0026rsquo;t however agree that this means we should face-off efficiency and responsive (the main image heading this post is taken from the current #responsiveorg slideshare, embedded below fyi). The following table, which coincidentally featured in my very last post (Doing the triple loop – profound leadership ), expains why:\nSingle loop Double loop Triple loop Are we doing things right? Are we doing the right things? What\u0026rsquo;s right? Learn new behaviour Learn new thinking Learn new beliefs / unlearn old Acting Reframing Transforming Management Leadership ? Of these three learning loops the third loop is most fundamental, informing the second loop, which in turn informs the first loop. Being responsive is part of doing the right things, and with that established we can attempt to do that efficiently. It is not an either/or but a case of responsiveness taking primacy over efficiency.\nThis means the pursuit of efficiency, perhaps with a zero defects / six sigma intention, must be within the context of responsiveness.\nAs I type, Rachel Miller is hosting a session here on failure, and serendipitously this post plays into the concern Benjamin Ellis just identified where organisations find themselves working so hard making sure they don\u0026rsquo;t fail that they neglect to work out how to succeed.\nhttp://www.slideshare.net/responsiveorg/the-responsive-organisation-a-framework-for-changing-how-your-organisation-works ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/05/efficiency-fallacy-responsiveorg-context/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"responsive v efficiency\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/responsive-v-efficiency.png\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nI\u0026rsquo;m at the \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/search?q=responsiveorg\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e#responsiveorg\u003c/a\u003e\n unconference in London today, and I\u0026rsquo;m on the hunt for \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/01/stowe-boyds-manifesto-peoples-front/#dissensus\"\u003edissensus\u003c/a\u003e\n rather than the echoic chamber of the converted preaching to the converted, as warm and lovely as that feels. So with that in mind, let me kick the tyres of one of the primary assumptions underpinning \u003ca href=\"http://www.theresponsiveorg.com/manifesto\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe #responsive org manifesto\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom Efficiency to Responsiveness – Historically, competitive advantages came from optimizing for efficiency and labor productivity of standardized product, with companies such as Walmart and Ford being common examples. As the flow of information increases, the competitive advantage is held by the organization that can react the fastest to new information. Companies achieve increased responsiveness by reducing the friction of information flow, increasing their iteration rate, decreasing their cost of failure, and optimizing their structures for adaptability.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis I like. I don\u0026rsquo;t however agree that this means we should face-off efficiency and responsive (the main image heading this post is taken from the current #responsiveorg slideshare, embedded below fyi). The following table, which coincidentally featured in my very last post (\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/04/triple-loop-profound-leadership/\" title=\"Doing the triple loop – profound leadership\"\u003eDoing the triple loop – profound leadership\u003c/a\u003e\n), expains why:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The efficiency fallacy in the #responsiveorg context"},{"content":"\nDrucker Peter F. Drucker asserted: \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s measured improves.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from the posts tagged as such here – perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s something to do with my engineering training.\nI advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (on this blog , on briansolis.com , on stoweboyd.com , in the Balanced Scorecard Report ), and that means getting to grips with the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches.\nThe lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the Future of Work , Responsive Org and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops.\nSingle loop Double loop Triple loop Are we doing things right? Are we doing the right things? What\u0026rsquo;s right? Learn new behaviour Learn new thinking Learn new beliefs / unlearn old Acting Reframing Transforming Management Leadership ? Deming W. Edwards Deming , a mathematics, engineering and management consultancy hero of mine, might help us fill in that lower right cell, the one with the question mark:\nTo successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge – knowledge for leadership of transformation.”\nIn other words, the question mark is leadership but of a more profound nature exhibiting higher levels of cognition. Perhaps leadership formed in part by our collective intelligence ?\nInterestingly, this is where measurement gets a little tricky to say the least, even with the latest cutting edge technologies. Drucker again :\nYour first role . . . is the personal one. It is the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, the identification of people, the creation of a community. This is something only you can do. It cannot be measured or easily defined. But it is not only a key function. It is one only you can perform.\nGandhi I\u0026rsquo;ll finish with this quote from Mahatma Mohandras Gandhi:\nYour beliefs become your values\nYour values become your thoughts\nYour thoughts become your words\nYour words become your actions\nYour actions become your habits\nYour habits become your destiny\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m wondering if I\u0026rsquo;m a sucker for measurement because I\u0026rsquo;m an engineer, or I\u0026rsquo;m an engineer because I believe in the scientific method and its application.\n[Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mahatma_Gandhi_laughing.jpeg ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/triple-loop-profound-leadership/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Gandhi\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Gandhi.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"drucker\"\u003eDrucker\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePeter F. Drucker\u003c/a\u003e\n asserted: \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s measured improves.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/tag/measurement/\"\u003ethe posts tagged as such here\u003c/a\u003e\n – perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s something to do with my engineering training.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/02/goal-become-social-business-get-revolution-started/\" title=\"“Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?”\"\u003eon this blog\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/2013/11/impatience-is-a-virtue-whats-next-for-social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eon briansolis.com\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://stoweboyd.com/post/79896477154/socialogy-interview-philip-sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eon stoweboyd.com\u003c/a\u003e\n, in the \u003ca href=\"http://hbr.org/product/balanced-scorecard-report-july-august-2011-vol-13-/an/B11070-PDF-ENG\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBalanced Scorecard Report\u003c/a\u003e\n), and that means getting to grips with the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/balanced-scorecard-and-strategy-maps/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBalanced Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n and similar approaches.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the \u003ca href=\"http://futureofwork.co/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFuture of Work\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.theresponsiveorg.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eResponsive Org\u003c/a\u003e\n and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Doing the triple loop – profound leadership"},{"content":" Just going back through some archives and found the definition I developed for the Internetome conference in 2010. Sponsored by Intel , Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association , it was, I believe, the UK\u0026rsquo;s first all-day Internet of Things conference. The conference website bit the dust some time during my subsequent server migrations, so for posterity, particularly as everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days \u0026hellip;\nThe Internetome The Internet of Things marks the unprecedented intertwining of the Internet with the ‘real world’: the intangible information space with the tangible living space; ubiquitous computing and the informational augmentation of reality .\nTo date, we have employed ‘real world’ metaphors to aid our naming, definition and understanding of information technology, such as the biologically sourced terms web, bug, virus, worm, memory, backbone and sensor. And with the advent of the Internet of Things, IT now interweaves with the reality that provided the metaphors.\nBut we’re not interested in the technology per se. We’re interested in the many facets and implications of its application. So, borrowing from the use of the suffixes -ome and -omics to describe the object and study of a biological field (eg, genomics, the study of the genome), we make the following neologistic definitions:\nThe Internetome: the manifestations (facets and implications) of the Internet of Things.\nInternetomics: the study of the Internetome directed at improving transdisciplinary understanding and its transdisciplinary design, governance and execution.\nJust rediscovered this article about the conference on ReadWrite , written by David Orban (featured in the photo here).\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/internetome/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Internetome conference, David Orban\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/internetome_davidorban.jpg\"\u003e Just going back through some archives and found the definition I developed for the Internetome conference in 2010. Sponsored by \u003ca href=\"http://www.intel.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIntel\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.qualcomm.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQualcomm\u003c/a\u003e\n and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ce.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eConsumer Electronics Association\u003c/a\u003e\n, it was, I believe, the UK\u0026rsquo;s first all-day \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things\" title=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternet of Things\u003c/a\u003e\n conference. The conference website bit the dust some time during my subsequent server migrations, so for posterity, particularly as everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days \u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Internetome"},{"content":" Enterprise social networking is perfectly suited for the so-called onboarding process.\nI say so-called because no dictionary I have lists the word, which is sort of at odds with the fact that they do list the rather unlovely deplane. But I digress. I heard this same claim from Jive , SAP (Jam) and IBM (Connections) at a Eurocloud event last week courtesy of Alan and David @agile_elephant .\nIt seems academics prefer the phrase organizational socialization, defined as :\na learning and adjustment process that enables an individual to assume an organizational role that fits both organizational and individual needs. It is a dynamic process that occurs when an individual assumes a new or changing role within an organization.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been onboarded. Into the Mars way back in the day. Mars prides itself on high performance enabled by a strong culture, and boy were my colleagues keen that I got that culture.\nThe presentations last week (rather than my time at Mars, promise) prompted me to look up the Wikipedia entry for the Borg , the reason for which will become obvious by reading this if you\u0026rsquo;re unfamiliar with the species:\nBorg is a collective proper noun for a fictional alien race [in] the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are a collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones of the Collective, or the hive. A pseudo-race, dwelling in the Star Trek universe, the Borg force other species into their collective and connect them to \u0026ldquo;the hive mind\u0026rdquo;; the act is called assimilation and entails violence, abductions, and injections of microscopic machines called nanoprobes. The Borg\u0026rsquo;s ultimate goal is \u0026ldquo;achieving perfection\u0026rdquo;.\nThe Borg\u0026rsquo;s most famous utterance – they speak as one – is \u0026ldquo;resistance is futile\u0026rdquo;, and yes that gentleman in the photo is dressed up as one. (It\u0026rsquo;s a shame you can\u0026rsquo;t see his left eye clearly, a sophisticated ocular implant allowing Borg to see beyond the human visual spectrum. Thought you\u0026rsquo;d want to know.)\nDigitizing the analogue I opened my presentation to the 3M ThinkTANK conference last year with a look at how our first forays in the digital world are, naturally, informed by the analogue. We moved from mail to email, from files and folders to files and folders, from desktops to desktops, etc. Only much later does it occur to us that digital has unprecedented qualities – that search and discovery is preferable to filing, and new forms of communication may beat email for example. And so it seems here.\nWe are digitizing the onboarding process and throwing everything at new recruits – connections, organisational knowledge, the cultural norms, the inevitable jargon and acronyms, the videos, the e-learning modules, etc. It\u0026rsquo;s ultra-onboarding. We seem incredibly keen to get them up that learning curve ASAP to, well, assimilate them – albeit without the violence and cyborg adaptations.\nBut don\u0026rsquo;t we want to celebrate heterogeneity? Don\u0026rsquo;t we want new recruits to think differently for at least a good while? To maintain that counterpoint to fuel dissensus ? The question then is, how can we wield these technologies to enable the influence to be bidirectional? The academic definition does refer to the needs of both the organisation and individual after all. How can we help Bob onboard Big Inc. into his world while Big Inc. onboards him into its? How might we connect Big Inc. into Bob\u0026rsquo;s network, not just Bob into Big Inc.\u0026rsquo;s?\nSocial business There\u0026rsquo;s a deeper challenge for this process in the context of social business, which as you can see should you review that 3M stack above I consider to be much wider and deeper than procuring an enterprise social network.\nSocial business, aka Enterprise 2.0, is about coalescing the right people with the right skills and knowledge and connections and shared values at the right time to create shared value. The coalescence will include employees, and increasingly partners and suppliers and alum and freelancers and customers and anyone with the right contribution in the right form at the right time.\nWhat then does onboarding mean when the role of employee is increasingly difficult to differentiate from everyone else in the mix?\n[Photo credit: cropped from the original by Sam Chills .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/enterprise-social-networks-assimilation-resistance-futile/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"i want to borg\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/i-want-to-borg.jpg\"\u003e Enterprise social networking is perfectly suited for the so-called \u003cem\u003eonboarding\u003c/em\u003e process.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI say so-called because no dictionary I have lists the word, which is sort of at odds with the fact that they do list the rather unlovely \u003cem\u003edeplane\u003c/em\u003e. But I digress. I heard this same claim from \u003ca href=\"http://www.jivesoftware.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJive\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://sapjam.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSAP (Jam)\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/conn\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIBM (Connections)\u003c/a\u003e\n at a \u003ca href=\"http://eurocloud.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEurocloud\u003c/a\u003e\n event last week courtesy of \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/freecloud\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAlan\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/DT\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/agile_elephant\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@agile_elephant\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt seems academics prefer the phrase \u003ca href=\"http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/oso/viewentry/10.1093$002foxfordhb$002f9780199928309.001.0001$002foxfordhb-9780199928309-e-18\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eorganizational socialization, defined as\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ea learning and adjustment process that enables an individual to assume an organizational role that fits both organizational and individual needs. It is a dynamic process that occurs when an individual assumes a new or changing role within an organization.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been onboarded. Into the Mars way back in the day. Mars prides itself on high performance enabled by a strong culture, and boy were my colleagues keen that I got that culture.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe presentations last week (rather than my time at Mars, promise) prompted me to look up the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWikipedia entry for the Borg\u003c/a\u003e\n, the reason for which will become obvious by reading this if you\u0026rsquo;re unfamiliar with the species:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Enterprise social networks and assimilation – resistance is futile"},{"content":" I described the relatively recent concept of employee advocacy in my last post as \u0026ldquo;rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked to qualify this description.\nFirstly, it\u0026rsquo;s worth stating the obvious – the aspiration that employees might advocate the employer is hardly a new idea. But this relatively new desire to go about it more systematically is prompted by employees\u0026rsquo; increasing social media activity. While recommending an employer down the pub leaves no discernible trace, doing so online does, and that appears to have internal comms, HR professionals and social media types hot under the dollar.\nBut here\u0026rsquo;s the rub. Genuine employee advocacy remains a consequence. That\u0026rsquo;s always been the case and will always remain so.\nYou can\u0026rsquo;t insist. You can\u0026rsquo;t take control of employee social media profiles. You can\u0026rsquo;t pick out people for failing to advocate, not without creating the kind of culture that\u0026rsquo;s counter to employee advocacy.\nThere’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do .\nThe organization (a collection of people, mostly employees) influences the participating individuals (mostly employees) who influence those beyond the payroll. The culture and policies and behaviours that sway whether that influence is constructive or destructive play out long before Fred lets fly on Facebook and Tina trills on Twitter.\nEveryone with a stake in the organization\u0026rsquo;s success has to work hard collectively to build something worthy of advocacy. And that very process prompts the advocacy because everyone then feels a part of the magic, or in more prosaic terms, a part of this mutual value creation . Much easier said than done I know, which is why I advise caution when being sold employee-advocacy-as-a-service.\nI asked Rachel Miller over at All Things IC for her thoughts:\nI think advocacy for me is along the lines of…. \u0026ldquo;We trust ourselves and empower each other to have a voice inside our organisation. Sometimes we all might choose to share thoughts about the company externally, we can’t control what each of us says and we don’t wish to because authenticity is vital. When it’s positive, that has clear benefits for us, when it’s negative, it means we clearly have more work to do internally to ensure these voices are heard and acted on.\nI love that Rachel takes employee advocacy and makes it organizational learning, in tune with public relations excellence theory . She continues:\nA key phrase for me is \u0026lsquo;flexibility within boundaries\u0026rsquo;. That’s how I describe all internal comms activity and particularly social media guidance. As in… we set the parameters and outline expected behaviours internally, yet trust everyone to make smart choices.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you to ponder whether you\u0026rsquo;re ready for a systematic approach to employee advocacy with the following diagrammatic polemic. It\u0026rsquo;s short on detail if only because I believe you\u0026rsquo;ll know in your gut, in your heart and in your mind whether you\u0026rsquo;re about to do something that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced\u0026rdquo;. Or not.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/employee-advocacy-rather-uncomfortable-somewhat-forced/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"red arrow\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/redarrow.jpg\"\u003e I described the relatively recent concept of employee advocacy in \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/04/organization-personal-reputation-first-principles-distributed-autonomy/\" title=\"Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy\"\u003emy last post\u003c/a\u003e\n as \u0026ldquo;rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked to qualify this description.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirstly, it\u0026rsquo;s worth stating the obvious – the aspiration that employees might advocate the employer is hardly a new idea. But this relatively new desire to go about it more systematically is prompted by employees\u0026rsquo; increasing social media activity. While recommending an employer down the pub leaves no discernible trace, doing so online does, and that appears to have internal comms, HR professionals and social media types hot under the dollar.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut here\u0026rsquo;s the rub. Genuine employee advocacy remains a consequence. That\u0026rsquo;s always been the case and will always remain so.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou can\u0026rsquo;t insist. You can\u0026rsquo;t take control of employee social media profiles. You can\u0026rsquo;t pick out people for failing to advocate, not without creating the kind of culture that\u0026rsquo;s counter to employee advocacy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/thirty-iii/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThere’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe organization (a collection of people, mostly employees) influences the participating individuals (mostly employees) who influence those beyond the payroll. The culture and policies and behaviours that sway whether that influence is constructive or destructive play out long before Fred lets fly on Facebook and Tina trills on Twitter.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Employee advocacy – rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;m no etymologist but it seems the verb organize appeared in the 15th Century a few decades before the noun organization . Sometimes we forget that the organization, in terms of the institution or firm, is merely a means to an end, and putting legal entities to one side for the moment, an organization is simply a group of people organized around a common purpose.\nReminding ourselves of such first principles is useful when considering how we might create and nurture new forms of organization and how we might improve the current dominant ones.\nJumping forward over 500 years, let\u0026rsquo;s get bang up to date on so-called social business, aka Enterprise 2.0 , aka Responsive Organization , aka Future of Work . The question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story exemplifies the new vista:\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nThe verb coalesce conveys the facility to combine, and so the facility to recombine, and re-recombine. The coalescence remains for just as long as shared value is created, and created faster than a new combination might afford. Such process appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And there\u0026rsquo;s equal appeal to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy.\nRelationships Sometimes I define social business as relationships at scale , and not just in the CRM 1.0 way:\nGood business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.\nMore on relationships at scale later. Earlier in the story , one of the main protagonists asserts:\nIn mapping the continually changing relationships in an organization – and I don’t define the organization as stopping at the payroll – we can distil a picture of the real organization. I guess you could call it the unofficial or real org chart if doing so didn’t still conjure up outmoded ideas of hierarchy and bureaucracy.\nIn other words, we are free to consider an organized group of people in ways largely ignored by today\u0026rsquo;s corporations, an ignorance that might well be costing them (ie, their stakeholders) some of that shared value creation. We have become so blinkered by the payroll and the org chart that it has appeared revolutionary to many in recent times to consider the customer-as-collaborator for example, even though the concept is as old as trade.\nThe dominant 20th Century thinking left a stubborn legacy when it comes to those relationships. It\u0026rsquo;s quite simple and incredibly dumb. Relationships are governed by your job title, your role description, and the teams you are instructed to work in. Your worth is judged by superiors based on what you were asked to do a year ago when market conditions and related organizational contexts were quite different; and even where that\u0026rsquo;s exaggeration it\u0026rsquo;s definitely emblematic. It\u0026rsquo;s noteworthy that so-called employee engagement only really emerged in the 90s. And when it comes to building relationships beyond the four walls, we\u0026rsquo;ve seen the development more recently of the rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced concept that is employee advocacy .\nHaving derided 20th Century organization, I should dispel any idea that the Century interrupted some agrarian utopia of team work and egalitarianism. There may well be an invented tradition of teamwork, one based on romanticized and mythical depictions of preindustrial work , but that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t dull our enthusiasm to design something better.\nOrganization, noun: esp. a business, society, association Ronald Coase was the first economist to ask a fundamental question – why do we have these organizations-as-legal-entities / business firms at all? Why don\u0026rsquo;t we just have a bunch of self-employed people providing services to one another? He asked this in his Nobel prize winning work, The Nature of the Firm.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a testament to his insight that the question he identified in 1937, in his mid-twenties, still catches people by surprise today. He identified that transaction costs , or in his words \u0026ldquo;costs of using the price mechanism\u0026rdquo;, make the freelance extreme uneconomical:\nthe cost of finding out about each other and working out if the corresponding product or service fits the bill at the right price the cost of negotiating and doing the deal the cost of making sure all parties do as they said they would. It appears it\u0026rsquo;s more economical to form a legal entity and get people on a payroll, although the question about what exactly to do internally and what to outsource has spawned many management texts and academic papers and occupied many long hours of management analyses and debate.\nThe current technology revolution – social / mobile / analytics / cloud – has changed this cost equation. The same technologies powering hundreds of thousands of real-time ad auctions every single second can surely erode those transaction costs by a magnitude or two. If the social graph betrays our relationships in the big wide world, surely similar technology can illuminate the nature of our relationships in the narrower work context. In his post this week, The social graph of work , Esko Kilpi concludes:\nInstead of the topology of organizational boxes that are still often the visual representation of work, the architecture of work is a live social graph of networked interdependence and accountability.\nWe can think of social business in terms of influence flows and in terms of mutuality – building mutual understanding to enable mutual influence to pursue mutual value. But unless mankind suddenly converts en masse to a state of altruism, which I consider extremely unlikely, giving more value to create greater mutual value will still require some sort of ledger. No-one likes free-loaders. No-one wants to be taken for a ride. And it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter whether this concern is real or simply perceived. A ledger How might such quid pro quo be recognised in the long run?\nWe shouldn\u0026rsquo;t forget of course that the same question embitters more than the odd employee today, so, as I write up front here, such exploration can benefit today\u0026rsquo;s dominant business forms as well as help inspire new ones.\nIn a recent blog post, Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now , Adam Pisoni responded to my reference to influence flows in this context:\nYou suggest using \u0026ldquo;influence\u0026rdquo; as proxy metric for contribution. I\u0026rsquo;m assuming you think one could do network analysis to determine one\u0026rsquo;s influence and reward accordingly. Theoretically it could all be automated. No bosses needed. Of course, the problem with applying proxy metrics to humans is that they tend to optimize for the metric as opposed to what actually provides the most value.\nAnd as I wrote for The Guardian in February 2012, The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity , in relation to so-called influence scores such as Klout:\nIn my opinion, complexity and network science will continue to unearth insights of important commercial and societal value, but I\u0026rsquo;m considerably less enamoured about seeming to translate today\u0026rsquo;s analytical capabilities into some kind of a score of an individual\u0026rsquo;s influence. Right now, we have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behaviour, without falling into some kind of last-click attribution trap, so how then can we pretend to score an individual\u0026rsquo;s likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with apparent Newtonian simplicity? We\u0026rsquo;ve barely even attempted to correlate proxies for influence, assuming that universal correlates even exist.\nSo I agree with Adam, but offered this in reply:\n\u0026hellip; but fortunately, we\u0026rsquo;re pretty well evolved to make this assessment ourselves. It\u0026rsquo;s part of what makes us social animals and helps our communities prosper.\nOr to put it another way, I believe aphorisms such as \u0026ldquo;what goes around comes around\u0026rdquo; emerged from experience rather than simple vain hope! (See A Theory of Indirect Reciprocity in Networks , PDF.) It seems we may have evolved behaviours whereby net takers are shunned and net givers are celebrated. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear to square immediately with survival-of-the-fittest evolutionary theory, but Darwin himself recognised animal cooperation and our subsequent understanding is labelled cooperative evolution .\nHowever, we\u0026rsquo;re concerned with a different scale here. Relatively small groups of people in pre-industrial working environments and communities might have been able to keep tally, so to speak, but we\u0026rsquo;re now exploring the potential of relationships at scale – many more relationships and significantly greater flux. So how might we employ modern technology to lend a hand, to represent this quantity and quality?\nMoney?\nEconomists consider money to serve three purposes:\nA \u0026ldquo;medium of exchange\u0026rdquo; that can be swapped for goods and services reliably A stable store of value, holding its purchasing power over time A unit of account against which economic value is measured. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure any of these are requisite to our needs here. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if our ledger needs to be a medium of exchange itself necessarily, or have purchasing power, although it may impact an individual\u0026rsquo;s earning power. Fundamentally, monetary wealth does not proxy for reputation or worthiness in a relationship context, and it only proxies for influence in the narrowest financial sense.\nIf, for our purposes here, money sits in the quadrant marked practical but not very suitable, then perhaps we might appraise Whuffie as appropriate but impractical to the point of impossible. Whuffie is a reputation currency described by Cory Doctorow in a science fiction novel and serves the purpose of scaling the ability to score acceptable and unacceptable, appreciated and unappreciated behaviours. One\u0026rsquo;s total Whuffie then signifies the esteem with which one is held in the community. I say it\u0026rsquo;s impossible however for the simple reason that it requires everyone to have a brain implant, and this isn\u0026rsquo;t the blog post I\u0026rsquo;m afraid to consider aspects of transhumanism!\nCoining reputation Can we look beyond old forms of money then?\nThe obvious place to look is new forms of money, and given its wild market swings in recent times alone I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ll have heard of bitcoin. The Bitcoin system powers the distributed, peer-to-peer digital currency called bitcoin, and the total value in circulation has risen to $7.9 billion, from just $490m a year ago according to The Economist . Its mathematical foundation is the eponym for this new class of currency – cryptocurrency.\nWhile the fascinating mathematics is beyond the scope of this post, Bitcoin has some fascinating qualities that might be of value (no pun intended) to us here. These qualities are quite opposite to traditional money.\nAt the heart of Bitcoin is the blockchain – a giant ledger of every single transaction ever The blockchain is public – everyone can check it It\u0026rsquo;s permissionless – no one needs to approve a transaction or facilitate it (ie, banks) It\u0026rsquo;s programmable – so, for example, a transaction might only proceed by quorum It\u0026rsquo;s supply is finite – so it cannot be devalued by \u0026ldquo;printing money\u0026rdquo;. Are these principles conducive to building a new reputation currency for organizations-as-networks, for circumvision (as opposed to supervision), for wirearchies and holocracies and a world full of freelancers? I particularly like the idea of knowing how much reputation currency has flowed to someone, and that this amount isn\u0026rsquo;t then eroded should they give it away.\nSuch a prospect might not be so giant a leap compared to the vision expressed September 2013 by Stan Larimer, President of Invictus Innovations . He describes Distributed Autonomous Corporates as having the following characteristics:\nThey are corporations – they are free and independent persons (but don’t have legal personality) They are autonomous – once up to speed, they no longer need (or heed) their creators They are distributed – there are no central points of control or failure that can be attacked They are transparent – their books and business rules are auditable by all They are confidential – customer information is securely (and incorruptibly) protected They are trustworthy – because no interaction with them depends on trust They are fiduciaries – acting solely in their customers’ and shareholders’ interests They are self-regulating – they robotically obey their own rules They are incorruptible – no one can exercise seductive or coercive influence over them They are sovereign – over their digital resources (but don\u0026rsquo;t have legal capacity). I prefer the label Distributed Autonomous Organizations if only because the word Corporate has way too much baggage in legal and everyday lexicon. He goes further and describes three laws:\nA DAC must always obey its own published business rules A DAC must never change its rules without consent of its stakeholders, except where such change would conflict with the First Law A DAC must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws. You\u0026rsquo;ll note the similarities to Asimov\u0026rsquo;s Three Laws of Robotics . Could such a thing exist? Well, in fact it does. Bitcoin.\n(I\u0026rsquo;ve done some brainstorming informed by the organization-as-software metaphor in the past, but it was always just a metaphor. Now we can contemplate the actuality. Imagine how that software might communicate more broadly in the pursuit of its organizational vision and in line with its community programmed values. Plugged into Cisco\u0026rsquo;s Application Centric Infrastructure for example, might we solve the thorny and controversial question of ICANN and Internet Governance by programming a distributed autonomous organization to take up the reins?)\nCrossing boundaries Anyone interested in the value of social business will be familiar with the advantages of Enterprise Social Networks over email. ESNs help employees to \u0026lsquo;work out loud\u0026rsquo;, to multiply serendipity, to forge new relationships and knowledge share, to create value together faster than otherwise. But email retains the advantage of being open, distributed and interoperable.\nImagine being a supplier to eight companies who have, between them, adopted Yammer , Chatter , Jive , Connections , Socialcast , Tibbr , Atlassian and Sitrion . Now they chose to extend this functionality to you as a so-called external network. Not very helpful.\nNot only do we need interoperable ESNs to really cement the vision each vendor champions, but we need a common reputation currency as the \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; increasingly becomes an \u0026ldquo;organization\u0026rdquo; of the non-corporate form, and the corporate forms borrow the best bits accordingly. Perhaps built on the nascent Ethereum platform?\nFancy joining me in forging the founding policies?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/organization-personal-reputation-first-principles-distributed-autonomy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Singapore harbour at night\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/singapore.jpg\"\u003e I\u0026rsquo;m no etymologist but it seems the verb \u003ca href=\"http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=organize\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eorganize\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n appeared in the 15th Century a few decades before the noun \u003ca href=\"http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=organization\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eorganization\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n. Sometimes we forget that the organization, in terms of the institution or firm, is merely a means to an end, and putting legal entities to one side for the moment, an organization is simply a group of people organized around a common purpose.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReminding ourselves of such first principles is useful when considering how we might create and nurture new forms of organization and how we might improve the current dominant ones.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJumping forward over 500 years, let\u0026rsquo;s get bang up to date on so-called social business, aka \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEnterprise 2.0\u003c/a\u003e\n, aka \u003ca href=\"http://www.theresponsiveorg.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eResponsive Organization\u003c/a\u003e\n, aka \u003ca href=\"http://www.futureofwork.co/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFuture of Work\u003c/a\u003e\n. The question that concludes \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/seventy-two/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAttenzi - a social business story\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n exemplifies the new vista:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe verb \u003cem\u003ecoalesce\u003c/em\u003e conveys the facility to combine, and so the facility to recombine, and re-recombine. The coalescence remains for just as long as shared value is created, and created faster than a new combination might afford. Such process appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And there\u0026rsquo;s equal appeal to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"relationships\"\u003eRelationships\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes I define social business as \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/fifty-nine/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003erelationships at scale\u003c/a\u003e\n, and not just in the CRM 1.0 way:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy"},{"content":"\nIn my recent post, The social business mutuality stack , I describe PR theory as the foundation for social business. (You might like to read the post if your understanding of PR is what might be described as mainstream – yes, PR has a reputation problem!) Given the import, I added that I\u0026rsquo;d joined a new initiative to kick the tyres of PR theory and make sure it\u0026rsquo;s fit for purpose in the 21st Century.\nThe initiative, #PRredefined, launches today and has a bold ambition – to stimulate and lead the way in new thinking about the theory and practice of public relations, and the first in the corresponding series of ebooks is published today, #PRredefined Vol I. (For Kindle and Kindle apps . Otherwise .)\nIt features new definitions for public relations, challenges much of what constitutes current PR theory, and provides insights and ideas to enable the profession to harness revolutions in neuroscience, psychology, technology, communications, brand thinking and complexity theory. It includes contributions from:\nHelio Fred Garcia , Executive Director at Logos Institute for Crisis Management \u0026amp; Executive Leadership Christophe Ginisty , President IPRA 2013, Creator and Organizer, ReputationWar Conference Andy Green , CIPR Outstanding PR Person of Year, Author, Speaker, Trainer Professor Anne Gregory , Chair Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, Professor at Leeds Metropolitan University Tim Traverse-Healy OBE, Hon FIPR, FIPA, DIPCAM, FRSA Rizwan Sharif , Senior Lecturer Public Relations at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh Chris Skinner , Independent Public Relations and Communications Professional Dan Tisch , former Chair Global Alliance, President at Argyle Communications Stephen Waddington , CIPR President 2014, and Digital and Social Media Director, Ketchum Europe Dr. Jon White , Consultant, Visiting Professor, Henley Business School Paul Willis , Director, Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School and me. Anyone wanting to contribute their ideas, insights or opinions is invited to do so at the G+ community you can find at www.prredefined.org .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/prredefined/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PRredefined Vol I\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/PRredefined-Vol-I.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn my recent post, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2014/03/social-business-mutuality-stack/\"\u003eThe social business mutuality stack\u003c/a\u003e\n, I describe PR theory as the foundation for social business. (You might like to read the post if your understanding of PR is what might be described as mainstream – yes, PR has a reputation problem!) Given the import, I added that I\u0026rsquo;d joined a new initiative to kick the tyres of PR theory and make sure it\u0026rsquo;s fit for purpose in the 21st Century.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe initiative, #PRredefined, launches today and has a bold ambition – to stimulate and lead the way in new thinking about the theory and practice of public relations, and the first in the corresponding series of ebooks is published today, #PRredefined Vol I. (\u003ca href=\"http://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/products/%23PRredefined-Kindle-Edition.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFor Kindle and Kindle apps\u003c/a\u003e\n. \u003ca href=\"http://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/products/%23PRredefined-Epub.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOtherwise\u003c/a\u003e\n.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"#PRredefined"},{"content":"\nThis is a conversation between Adam Pisoni , Stowe Boyd and me relating to a guest post I made to Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; blog, Impatience is a Virtue – What\u0026rsquo;s Next for Social Business .\nThe conversation played out on email, which is ironic given that all three of us advocate \u0026ldquo;working out loud\u0026rdquo; unless confidentiality precludes it. I take the blame for emailing in the first place and hope to make up for the transgression by publishing it now. I have removed those conversational niceties that pepper emails, inserted some helpful hyperlinks and comments in square brackets by way of explaining some of the terms used and topics raised, and tweaked a few things to improve readability here.\n[Photo of Adam by Intel Free Press . Photo of Stowe by Paul J Corney .]\nAdam Honestly, one of the most enlightening aspects of finally working within a real, big enterprise [Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012] is the affect of performance management and budgets. Yammer loved to yell at our large customers to just change how they worked. That anyone at any level could affect change. But what you see inside large companies is that really good people will do all the wrong things either because they eventually feel pressured to optimize for what they are incentivised to do, or because their scope of power is too narrow to affect any change. This happens with budgets all the time. Two people in different parts of the org may have an idea that could make the company lots of money, but since the budgets were set up a year in advance, they can\u0026rsquo;t shift the money between them.\nThe performance systems are far more insidious though and a wholesale rethinking of how they work is required. You see, whether you stack rank , or have some other system, all performance systems are run through the org chart. That is to say, your boss, and maybe his immediate peers, are up judging your performance as it relates to your commitments made too long ago to matter. As such, your boss can really only judge you on what she sees, and furthermore, has no real interest in encouraging you to do things for others that don\u0026rsquo;t affect your boss because your boss has to show progress to her boss as well. I see this every day when people genuinely want to do something so simple as working cross-functionally with another team. Suddenly, the boss wonders what they\u0026rsquo;re doing and how it will affect her part of the org.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had this discussion with lots of people and I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet seen good models to get around this problem. I have lots of examples of where it\u0026rsquo;s broken though. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve told you guys about the really innovating development model Yammer invented. It really is a revolutionary change to how we organize and build software, but it basically doesn\u0026rsquo;t work in a hierarchical performance model because in our methodology an engineer\u0026rsquo;s boss doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell them what to work on. Longer story, but I agree with your premise [about co-opting performance management presented in the post ] and think people need to start showing a big company can create a non-hierarchical performance system that successfully moves out bad people and recognizes good ones.\nStowe Adam - I\u0026rsquo;d like to hear more about the method.\nPhilip - Keep me posted. We can discuss the \u0026lsquo;shared purpose and common values\u0026rsquo; next time we\u0026rsquo;re talking in real time, too, because I believe fast-and-loose require dissensus [\u0026ldquo;active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink\u0026rdquo;] and reduced communications! Just like Adam\u0026rsquo;s method, in which an engineering manager doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell his direct report what to work on, laissez-faire management is about getting the context right so that people can work together or alone, based on what makes sense, and they won\u0026rsquo;t spend a great deal of time justifying what they decided to do today, yesterday, and last week.\nPhilip Adam, I know we share heartfelt dismay at the state of budgeting today. It\u0026rsquo;s so incredibly awful that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to think of one redeeming characteristic. And perhaps my \u0026ldquo;tapping the monster\u0026rsquo;s own strength\u0026rdquo; [a reference to a jujitsu style tactic to change the nature of firms] demands a two-pronged attack, performance management and budgeting, although I\u0026rsquo;m confident we can co-opt the former more easily than the latter.\nI hear your criticism that performance management is run through the org chart. That\u0026rsquo;s not how it should be. It should be run through the organizational mission, objectives and strategy – what Kaplan and Norton refer to as strategy maps – and the Balanced Scorecard Hall-Of-Famers are therefore better at this than those who have no other guide for performance management than operational P\u0026amp;Ls and cashflow statements. We filter our prospective customers on the maturity of their existing business performance management.\nYour phrase \u0026ldquo;your boss can really only judge you on what she sees\u0026rdquo; sits at the heart of my Trojan horse tactic. If we can wield today\u0026rsquo;s big data / analytics capabilities to track, analyze and understand the flows of influence – many are intent on doing so out there in the social Web but not so much closer to home just yet – then we encourage what I like to call a sensory environment. It\u0026rsquo;s not so much performance management in the old simple counting sense, but in the full biomimetic sense. Gone are the days when my boss presents my performance data to me, with her interpretation. She knows and I know and everyone already knows the nature and quality and impact of my and my team\u0026rsquo;s contributions because we\u0026rsquo;ve applied information technologies to sensitize ourselves to it. And the organism responds to the nature of its sensory feedback, even monsters.\nFor example, one of my clients has fully accepted that its 2014 Plan must be supported by social and that the development of the 2015 Plan must be driven by social based on what \u0026lsquo;it\u0026rsquo; will tell us through 2014. Early days I know, not least the idea of maintaining 12-month plans, but when I hinted that the 2015 Plan could be the last one, I got some peculiar looks. [A plan describes how an organization might execute its strategy, but strategies must be informed and bound by events, and not time bound. What has the orbital period of the Earth around the Sun – a year – got to do with business exactly?]\nStowe, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in understanding how \u0026ldquo;loose\u0026rdquo; you see \u0026ldquo;loose\u0026rdquo; being. At some point, the definition of an organization must refer to some common fabric. I frequently compare organizations with my home city of London. Now easily a thousand years old and still going strong, how many of my prospects / clients are so confident in their organization\u0026rsquo;s longevity? And if they cannot be confident, what\u0026rsquo;s the difference between the city and the company? Perhaps a certain looseness.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure if you\u0026rsquo;ve had time to read Attenzi - a social business story , but I\u0026rsquo;ll skip straight to a question I pose in the final chapter \u0026hellip;\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nThe ramifications of the answer are such as to redefine some of the well-known phrases invoked in the question. Again, it references this idea of sharing something if only because if they don\u0026rsquo;t then why consider yourself part of the same organization?\nBut returning a moment back to the next year or five, I wonder if you agree with my intent to tap the monster\u0026rsquo;s own strengths? Because right now, \u0026ldquo;dissensus and reduced communications\u0026rdquo; (by which I read \u0026ldquo;explicit communications\u0026rdquo;) is perhaps so far removed from today\u0026rsquo;s organization as to fire up its antibodies.\nAdam The missing piece is explaining tactically how you can have a system of checks and balances without the org chart. For example, I believe companies should constantly be trying to raise the bar for talent. That means helping people improve as well as moving out people who do not want to or do not have the capabilities to improve. We deal with that today with the performance management process run through the org chart. Your boss has the authority to fire you and is supposed to be the judge of your contribution.\nSay a company recognizes how that system is broken. They want to work more like a network. What do you tell them to do? Stop all performance discussions with employees? Stop giving raises?\nYou suggest using \u0026ldquo;influence\u0026rdquo; as proxy metric for contribution. I\u0026rsquo;m assuming you think one could do network analysis to determine one\u0026rsquo;s influence and reward accordingly. Theoretically it could all be automated. No bosses needed. Of course, the problem with applying proxy metrics to humans is that they tend to optimize for the metric as opposed to what actually provides the most value. [People perform as they are measured, so defining such measurement demands great care.] For example, it would be easy for a person to completely optimize for the breadth of people they touch within the org, but manage to do so to the detriment of their existing team.\nIf we\u0026rsquo;re going to help companies grab the next rung, we have to be more explicit about what that rung is.\nAs far as our development methodology goes, I have a more detailed write-up we\u0026rsquo;re working on if you are interested, but here\u0026rsquo;s a talk my VP of Eng gave on it [YouTube video embedded here].\nhttp://youtu.be/RsWZNaaic1k Stowe I just wrote a piece about prosocial bonuses , which are based on circumvision instead of supervision, a distributed decentralized mechanism for aligning rewards with higher performance and better behavior. The same approach can be generalized to advancement, team formation, and so on.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a fairly specific set of recommendations.\nAdam Not specific enough, but I generally agree with having performance be a measure of the \u0026ldquo;customers\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;team members\u0026rdquo; rather than the boss. The problem is in creating the system that has that happen in a fair and balanced way. I do not believe we\u0026rsquo;ve found adequate proxy measures to do it in a more objective way.\nThough just to state it again, I think starting with the performance systems is absolutely the right way to go.\nStowe I don\u0026rsquo;t think it needs to be \u0026lsquo;objective\u0026rsquo; – which generally means something uniform and managed. We shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be afraid of the subjective will of the swarm. What is important is that those that are distributing the prosocial bonuses are happier and more engaged because of their involvement and realization of the third way itself [a term Stowe uses to describe a future way or working]: not individual, or team, but swarm-based reinforcement of cultural norms.\nAdam Do we have any examples of large enterprises who took their performance management system and turned it into something more like we are describing?\nPhilip Just emerging from the conclusion of a client project. Apols for radio silence. Talking of performance metrics, this particular client once talked about \u0026ldquo;growing metrics of engagement\u0026rdquo; in the same breath as saying how important it was to drive \u0026ldquo;call center calls per hour\u0026rdquo;. I think they\u0026rsquo;ve come a long way this year, but tapping back into this thread reminds me how much further there is to go.\nI assisted the complete rewrite of WOMMA\u0026rsquo;s Influencer Marketing guidebook earlier this year. I always define influence as a change in opinion or behaviour. The guidance proposes: \u0026ldquo;The ability to cause or contribute to a change in opinion or behavior.\u0026rdquo;\nThe english language is ambiguous – it is something that happens and it is the potential one is attributed to make it happen (making the assumption that past performance is a good predictor).\nI still defer to my favored definition because it\u0026rsquo;s the very outcome that so-called influencer marketers seek. Any quantitative attribution of influence being \u0026lsquo;possessed\u0026rsquo; by an individual can only be qualified by looking for this outcome, which is where Klout makes no sense (and to your point earlier Adam about gaming the proxy). This distinction has been recognized in the guidebook however: \u0026ldquo;There are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. The potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/after).\u0026rdquo;\nNevertheless, objectively identifying when any one individual or team has exerted influence isn\u0026rsquo;t easy. For example, the result may be an absence\u0026hellip; a decision not to do something. And of course not all influences are equal in sign or magnitude, however one might adjudge the value. While we can machine an increasing quantity of digital exhaust, and even design to kick off more , I don\u0026rsquo;t believe this is yet sufficient to proxy an appreciation of influence flowing through an organization\u0026hellip; but fortunately, we\u0026rsquo;re pretty well evolved to make this assessment ourselves. It\u0026rsquo;s part of what makes us social animals and helps our communities prosper. I\u0026rsquo;m not a trained sociologist or psychologist, but I am aware that these assessments, when elicited, can be colored by other considerations, not least emotions and non-work related connections.\nPerhaps this noise is reduced when the elicitation is quick and in-context; real-time. Yammer\u0026rsquo;s \u0026rsquo;like\u0026rsquo; button for example.\nWhen you ask about \u0026ldquo;checks and balances without the org chart\u0026rdquo; Adam, I think the answer lies in making the outcome of this assessment transparent, although this runs the risk of regressing to the mean – a potential downside of crowdsourcing.\nJust pulled these out of my bookmarks fyi. The third and last is a little tangential to the topic here, but I know you\u0026rsquo;ll appreciate the connection.\nFrom the Atlassian blog – Radical change to performance reviews wins Atlassian Prestigious Human Capital M-Prize From the HBR blog – Crowdsource your performance reviews From Wired – Slime mold grows network just like Tokyo rail system ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/organizational-performance-private-conversation-public-now/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Adam Pisoni and Stowe Boyd\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Adam-Pisoni-and-Stowe-Boyd.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a conversation between \u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/pub/adam-pisoni/1/40b/123\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAdam Pisoni\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.stoweboyd.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStowe Boyd\u003c/a\u003e\n and me relating to a guest post I made to Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; blog, \u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/2013/11/impatience-is-a-virtue-whats-next-for-social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eImpatience is a Virtue – What\u0026rsquo;s Next for Social Business\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe conversation played out on email, which is ironic given that all three of us advocate \u0026ldquo;working out loud\u0026rdquo; unless confidentiality precludes it. I take the blame for emailing in the first place and hope to make up for the transgression by publishing it now. I have removed those conversational niceties that pepper emails, inserted some helpful hyperlinks and comments in square brackets by way of explaining some of the terms used and topics raised, and tweaked a few things to improve readability here.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Photo of Adam by \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/intelfreepress/8490347508/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIntel Free Press\u003c/a\u003e\n. Photo of Stowe by \u003ca href=\"http://www.knowledgeetal.com/?p=603\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePaul J Corney\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"adam\"\u003eAdam\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHonestly, one of the most enlightening aspects of finally working within a real, big enterprise [Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012] is the affect of performance management and budgets. Yammer loved to yell at our large customers to just change how they worked. That anyone at any level could affect change. But what you see inside large companies is that really good people will do all the wrong things either because they eventually feel pressured to optimize for what they are incentivised to do, or because their scope of power is too narrow to affect any change. This happens with budgets all the time. Two people in different parts of the org may have an idea that could make the company lots of money, but since the budgets were set up a year in advance, they can\u0026rsquo;t shift the money between them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now"},{"content":"\nCan you tell by looking at a photo like this if it\u0026rsquo;s of a sunrise or a sunset? Absent knowledge of the time of day or the direction in which it was taken, I think not. Just as well I\u0026rsquo;m talking about both a start and a finish here then.\nSun-setting First, the crap that\u0026rsquo;s finishing – that would be public relations as spin. That would be lying, or inauthentic manipulation at best. That would be attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone.\nEnough has been written on this topic for me to hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll agree, or at least concur the trend is well established. As one of my characters in Attenzi points out :\nIf ‘perception is reality’ was the saying that characterized our approach to marketing and public relations before, we now have to consider that reality is perception.\nSun-rising When I first learned of the excellence theory of public relations I was immediately attracted to it. What\u0026rsquo;s not to like? It\u0026rsquo;s constructed on the basis that we use communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders. It describes a management function focused on this two-way communication to foster mutually beneficial relationships.\nUnlike the asymmetry of publicity intent on \u0026lsquo;getting the message out\u0026rsquo;, practitioners of the excellence theory are as intent on getting the message in. Rather than maintaining a short-term whatever-it-takes interest in selling, they have a longer-term interest in what\u0026rsquo;s ultimately good for the organisation and its stakeholders.\nI wrote more about this recently in the post \u0026lsquo;Big Data. Big Trust. \u0026rsquo;, and Stowe Boyd published an interview with me today where I get to talk about an extension to the excellence theory among other things, so let me move onto the social business mutuality stack.\nMutuality In biology, mutualism is the symbiotic interaction between different species that is mutually beneficial. Of course we\u0026rsquo;re not talking about different species here, although when I find someone religiously wed to command and control hierarchy I do wonder :-)\nI invoke mutuality to mean all parties having respect and understanding for others’ points of view and working together to increase that respect and understanding. There is tacit reciprocity.\nMutuality is central to the way I think about social business. It\u0026rsquo;s part of its DNA. Even if we start from the lowest base of thinking of social business as nothing more than the deployment of the latest social media tools and services we still get there \u0026hellip;\nWe don\u0026rsquo;t have media for media\u0026rsquo;s sake but to communicate. And we don\u0026rsquo;t communicate for communication\u0026rsquo;s sake, but to influence and to be influenced – after all no man is an island, and no organisation can be either. We all tune our communications channels to those we consider serve us best, to those we trust, so if we want our message to get through we\u0026rsquo;d better understand the needs of our interlocutors. And the best way to do that is to listen and learn, respond and serve.\nSo, social business demands we build mutual understanding to enable mutual influence in the pursuit of mutual value. If we start out with shared values (rather than shared purpose necessarily – see this post ), then we should get up that stack all the sooner. If we don\u0026rsquo;t, then more will be demanded of that mutual understanding process.\nPostscript As public relations excellence is core to social business success, I\u0026rsquo;ve joined a small cohort in rekindling the dialogue about what it means in today\u0026rsquo;s world and how it needs to be adapted accordingly. More to come 31st March 2014.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/social-business-mutuality-stack/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Sun horizon\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/sun_horizon.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCan you tell by looking at a photo like this if it\u0026rsquo;s of a sunrise or a sunset? Absent knowledge of the time of day or the direction in which it was taken, I think not. Just as well I\u0026rsquo;m talking about both a start and a finish here then.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"sun-setting\"\u003eSun-setting\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, the crap that\u0026rsquo;s finishing – that would be public relations as spin. That would be lying, or inauthentic manipulation at best. That would be attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnough has been written on this topic for me to hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll agree, or at least concur the trend is well established. As \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/twenty-one-ii/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eone of my characters in Attenzi points out\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf ‘perception is reality’ was the saying that characterized our approach to marketing and public relations before, we now have to consider that reality is perception.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"sun-rising\"\u003eSun-rising\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen I first learned of the excellence theory of public relations I was immediately attracted to it. What\u0026rsquo;s not to like? It\u0026rsquo;s constructed on the basis that we use communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders. It describes a management function focused on this two-way communication to foster mutually beneficial relationships.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The social business mutuality stack"},{"content":"\nToward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life (PDF), abstract:\nFlexible work accommodations provided by employers purport to help individuals struggling to manage work and family demands. The underlying model for change is accommodation – helping individuals accommodate their work demands with no changes in the structure of work or cultural expectations of ideal workers. The purpose of this article is to derive a Work Redesign Model and compare it with the Accommodation Model. This article centers around two change initiatives – Predictability, Teaming and Open Communication and Results Only Work Environment – that alter the structure and culture of work in ways that enable better work and better lives.\nLeslie A Perlow, Erin L Kelly, Work and Occupations, 2014 41: 111, DOI: 10.1177/0730888413516473\nPhotograph of Leslie Perlow. Source, Harvard Business School .\nI posted recently about my experiences curating a Flipboard magazine . One dislike is the inability to \u0026lsquo;flip\u0026rsquo; a URL for a PDF. So in this instance, I\u0026rsquo;ve created this post for the sole purpose of flipping it to Social Business Design magazine.\nIf you missed the link to the PDF above, here it is again .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/toward-model-work-redesign-better-work-better-life/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Leslie Perlow\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/leslie_perlow.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flexiblework.umn.edu/publications_docs/Perlow-Kelly-2014-WO.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eToward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life\u003c/a\u003e\n (PDF), abstract:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlexible work accommodations provided by employers purport to help individuals struggling to manage work and family demands. The underlying model for change is accommodation – helping individuals accommodate their work demands with no changes in the structure of work or cultural expectations of ideal workers. The purpose of this article is to derive a Work Redesign Model and compare it with the Accommodation Model. This article centers around two change initiatives – Predictability, Teaming and Open Communication and Results Only Work Environment – that alter the structure and culture of work in ways that enable better work and better lives.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Toward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life"},{"content":"The pitch for this new product is simple:\nThe Internet is the most important infrastructure we\u0026rsquo;ve ever created, so we mustn\u0026rsquo;t neglect it. We need to build infrastructure for fast, pervasive and inclusive connectivity. We need to invest.\nAnd where should the money come from? It\u0026rsquo;s obvious. Those who use today\u0026rsquo;s infrastructure freely for their commercial gain should pay for the privilege. Blockbuster paid for its own video rental shops, so why shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Netflix pay to deliver its products down our pipes?\nFor-profit companies cannot expect a free ride. They pay. We all benefit.\nSo, are you buying ZiL Lane 2.0?\nNet neutrality and ZiL Lanes Net neutrality is a simple principle integral to the original design of the Internet and, to many minds including mine, absolutely essential to it. The principle asserts that the network will not prioritise – and by inference discriminate – some traffic over other traffic based on where it\u0026rsquo;s come from. Sure, we\u0026rsquo;re all happy to prioritise traffic constituting a video feed over email because who cares if the email takes another tenth of a second to arrive, but we should not for example allow those who operate the Internet infrastructure to prioritise one party\u0026rsquo;s video feed over another.\nWhy?\nBecause such discrimination, whether for commercial or political reasons, leads to a balkanization of the Internet. Such discrimination erodes the potential for creativity and innovation the Internet has catalysed to date. Take that Netflix example.\nNetflix Netflix has been the biggest single source of Internet traffic in the US for nearly two years, and it has just agreed to pay Comcast to improve its reach into the living rooms of the nation. The ISPs are effectively selling ZiL lanes , a term for the motorway lanes dedicated to government vehicles in the Soviet Union, and named after the manufacturer of the cars used to chauffeur the government officials (see the photo at the end of this post).\nImagine a taxi firm with access to ZiL lanes. Now consider starting a new taxi firm, or perhaps a firm based on a reinvention of that old model , without the capital demanded to gain access to those ZiL lanes. In effect, you have no chance. Game over before you\u0026rsquo;ve even started. By agreeing to pay for a ZiL lane, Netflix is erecting a massive capital intensive barrier to entry. By increasing the cost of doing business, Netflix cleverly reduces the likelihood of someone doing to them what they did to Blockbuster.\nAn invader! London accommodated Zil lanes for the London 2012 Olympics. Here\u0026rsquo;s how one journalist described it in the Independent newspaper , and please read it with the Internet in mind!\n\u0026hellip; an excellent impression of what it might be like to live in a once-proud city that had suddenly come under the heel of a foreign invader, or perhaps some home-grown unelected, unaccountable political elite that had chosen to arrogate such power unto itself that ordinary citizens were no longer able to use the roads that they have bought and paid for with their taxes\u0026hellip;\nAccessNow I\u0026rsquo;m a member of AccessNow , \u0026ldquo;an international human rights organisation premised on the belief that political participation and the realization of human rights in the 21st century is increasingly dependent on access to the Internet and other forms of technology.\u0026rdquo; Check it out. And whatever you do, please be vocal with your political representatives about your desire to keep the Internet neutral.\nNow! (#NetNeutrality )\nFor the decisions are being made now. In the US . In Europe . In Turkey and Ukraine and everywhere. An Internet with ZiL lanes is not the Internet we\u0026rsquo;ve known, not the Internet we\u0026rsquo;ve come to treasure. Raising monies in this way, purportedly to invest in Internet infrastructure, kills the very thing we\u0026rsquo;re looking to nurture – I\u0026rsquo;ve called \u0026lsquo;ZiL Lane 2.0\u0026rsquo; a killer app for a reason!\nFree marketers often talk about the invisible hand directing the market; well if Internet access prices are too low to sustain investment, prices adjust and the providers get more efficient. In fact, that\u0026rsquo;s the argument for free markets. Moreover, governments can also invest on behalf of citizens\u0026hellip; after all, we\u0026rsquo;ll all pay one way or another in the end, and I\u0026rsquo;d rather pay and maintain neutrality.\nYou?\nOr do you fancy a ride?\u0026hellip;\nPostcript Just found this excellent summary of the Netflix Comcast deal . It explains peering, which I felt was too technical for my post here.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/zil-lane-2-0-new-killer-app-interwebs/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"ZIL LANE 2.0 - the new killer app for the interwebs\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/ZiL-Lane-2.png\"\u003eThe pitch for this new product is simple:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Internet is the most important infrastructure we\u0026rsquo;ve ever created, so we mustn\u0026rsquo;t neglect it. We need to build infrastructure for fast, pervasive and inclusive connectivity. We need to invest.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd where should the money come from? It\u0026rsquo;s obvious. Those who use today\u0026rsquo;s infrastructure freely for their commercial gain should pay for the privilege. Blockbuster paid for its own video rental shops, so why shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Netflix pay to deliver its products down our pipes?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor-profit companies cannot expect a free ride. They pay. We all benefit.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, are you buying ZiL Lane 2.0?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"net-neutrality-and-zil-lanes\"\u003eNet neutrality and ZiL Lanes\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNet neutrality is a simple principle integral to the original design of the Internet and, to many minds including mine, absolutely essential to it. The principle asserts that the network will not prioritise – and by inference discriminate – some traffic over other traffic based on where it\u0026rsquo;s come from. Sure, we\u0026rsquo;re all happy to prioritise traffic constituting a video feed over email because who cares if the email takes another tenth of a second to arrive, but we should not for example allow those who operate the Internet infrastructure to prioritise one party\u0026rsquo;s video feed over another.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"ZiL Lane 2.0 - the new killer app for the interwebs"},{"content":" This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum\u0026rsquo;s Mark Little knowing I\u0026rsquo;d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – \u0026ldquo;Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA \u0026rdquo; – Mark kicks off with:\nIn the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.\nAs I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.\nBig Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.\nPublic relations The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it\u0026rsquo;s your thing.\nOf course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.\nFor example, former CEO and President of Edelman EMEA, Robert Phillips, left Edelman to found Jericho Chambers for just this reason, and his outlook is captured unambiguously in the title of his upcoming book, \u0026ldquo;Trust Me, PR is Dead \u0026rdquo;. The title invokes the t-word for good reason. And Vanessa Dimauro has been designing and developing online B2B communities for longer than anyone else I know, and the intent to build trust runs deeply through her work .\nAccording to my dictionary, trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something. Notably then, the first two of the Page Principles are:\nTell the truth. Let the public know what’s happening and provide an accurate picture of the company’s character, ideals and practices.\nProve it with action. Public perception of an organization is determined 90 percent by what it does and 10 percent by what it says.\nIn its 2009 report, The Dynamics of Public Trust , the Arthur W. Page Society identifies three core dynamics of trust, all of which apply in the context here of course but with the third speaking loudest:\nMutuality – that is based upon shared values or interests\nBalance of Power – where risks and opportunities are shared by parties\nTrust Safeguards – that limit vulnerability in the context of power imbalances\nThe Intention Economy If your interest is piqued by Mark\u0026rsquo;s blog post, you should read The Intention Economy by Doc Searls. First mooted in this 2006 post , the idea is described as follows in the inside cover:\nWhile marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to:\n• Control the flow and use of personal data • Build their own loyalty programs • Dictate their own terms of service • Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost\nAnd they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo.\nIf you don\u0026rsquo;t have time to read the book, spend an hour with Doc here – it\u0026rsquo;ll change the way you see things.\nhttp://youtu.be/nVP3qF _HVkA\nEthics I\u0026rsquo;m not as well read on ethics in the round as I should be, but if your focus is big data from an ethical perspective then this short book is designed to serve, Ethics of Big Data . It\u0026rsquo;s a little repetitive at times, and invests too much time on the corporate rather than societal in my opinion, but even if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide all the answers, it\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with a deeper appreciation for some of the questions.\nI must also direct you to Chapter 8 on ethics in Strategic Public Relations by Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School , (see my earlier blog post ).\nRethinking personal data While we\u0026rsquo;re on this topic, it would be negligent of me not to point you to the excellent reports from the World Economic Forum on Rethinking Personal Data . The following table is from its February 2013 report Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage (PDF) , Figure 2 on page 7 to be precise.\nOnce you\u0026rsquo;ve digested it, ask yourself what exactly might be meant by data ownership these days.\nTraditional approach New perspective Data actively collected with user awareness Most data from machine to machine transactions and passive collection – difficult to notify individuals Definition of personal data is predetermined and binary Definition of personal data is contextual and dependent on social norms Data collected for specified use Economic value and innovation come from combining data sets and subsequent uses User is the data subject User can be the data subject, the data controller, and/or data processor Individual provides legal consent but is not truly engaged Individuals engage and understand how data is used and how value is created Policy framework focuses on minimising risks to the individual Policy focuses on balancing protection with innovation and economic growth MIT\u0026rsquo;s Alex \u0026lsquo;Sandy\u0026rsquo; Pentland is associated with the \u0026lsquo;Unlocking\u0026rsquo; work, so I\u0026rsquo;ll finish here with his short TEDxCambridge video from 2011. I trust you\u0026rsquo;ll like it.\nhttp://youtu.be/MfPETA4-dvs ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/big-data-big-trust/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/philip_sheldrake/9134388448\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"trust\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/trust.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis morning, my colleague \u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/hectorarthur\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHector Arthur\u003c/a\u003e\n pointed me to a new report from Ovum\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"uk.linkedin.com/pub/mark-little/4/3aa/6b8\"\u003eMark Little\u003c/a\u003e\n knowing I\u0026rsquo;d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://ovum.com/2014/02/17/big-trust-is-big-datas-missing-dna/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBig Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; – Mark kicks off with:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded \u003cem\u003ewith\u003c/em\u003e customers rather than \u003cem\u003eat\u003c/em\u003e them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBig Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"public-relations\"\u003ePublic relations\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Grunig\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwo-way symmetrical\u003c/a\u003e\n PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My \u003ca href=\"http://eulerpartners.com/influence-flows/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSix Influence Flows\u003c/a\u003e\n model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/11/public-relations-defined-%e2%80%93-the-prsa-invites-you-to-help-set-a-new-definition-of-pr/\" title=\"Public Relations Defined – The PRSA invites you to help set a new definition of PR\"\u003emore about PR models in my post here\u003c/a\u003e\n if it\u0026rsquo;s your thing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Big data. Big trust."},{"content":" During a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:\nOur goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?\nThis post addresses two problems integral to this statement.\nA means not an end Social business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, I describe social business by way of the following challenge:\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nShared values Some pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to Stowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. In his words :\nCollaboration is where individuals work socially toward a shared goal. Cooperation is where individuals work toward personal goals, while at the same time working with others toward common ends.\nThe idea of shared values is central to the concept of brand in the 21st Century , a progression enabled by the fact that the \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s got our name on it\u0026rdquo; proclamation of quality (fitness for purpose) is increasingly a given; a qualifier rather than a differentiator. And let\u0026rsquo;s be realistic about this purpose thing – there are very many organisations serving many different purposes that few people could get truly excited about, but they can strive to do it in a way that\u0026rsquo;s aligned with its people\u0026rsquo;s values.\nSocial business is respectful of values, of the human spirit, of the belief that everyone involved can give more and get more. But it is a means not an end of itself. No entrepreneur sets out to start an Enterprise 2.0. Rather, she sets out to build a business and recognises that the ideas encompassed by social business might be useful in building it better, creating value for all stakeholders faster than otherwise.\nSo when my conversationalist asserts the need for his organisation to become a social business, I would argue that his organisation needs a clear understanding of why it exists, its values and its capabilities, its competitive advantages and weaknesses, and how social business thinking and behaviours might help it achieve its objectives.\n(I should note here that there is another school of thought called emergent strategy which in its purest sense asserts that strategy emerges from the social business. However, as I argue in an earlier post here , it\u0026rsquo;s rarely if ever manifest so purely. It\u0026rsquo;s usually moderated by deliberate strategy. Moreover, in this instance, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure the chap I was speaking with did not have this in mind.)\nVive la Revolution! In the most dramatic interpretation, a revolution is a forcible overthrow of a system in favour of a new one. It\u0026rsquo;s marked by substantial change in a compressed time period. Now I ask you, when was the last revolution at your organisation?!\nIt should be said that there are varying definitions of what constitutes a revolution, and Alexis de Tocqueville for example included the slow but sweeping transformations of society that take at least many generations to come about . I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is how we necessarily think of revolution in general parlance today, and perhaps we\u0026rsquo;re more likely to describe slow change over generations as evolution not revolution.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s in these terms that I consider the adoption of social business qualities, systems, behaviours and culture as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Saying that, one hopes we might secure rapid evolution given that time is so frequently a critical dimension in creating competitive advantage. Revolution, on the other hand, is simply too risky. The difference comes down to how we treat flow.\nFlow Being a chartered engineer I\u0026rsquo;ve always enjoyed viewing organisational design through the lens of the physical sciences, from evolutionary theory to thermodynamics. To my mind the 21st Century will be defined by such transdiciplinary analysis and insight. I have a decent enough appreciation of public relations theory, but I only wish I was a psychologist, sociologist, linguist and philosopher too!\nA couple of topics in particular keep cropping up – complexity and flow. I posted about the first of these recently (\u0026quot;You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you’d better know the difference \u0026quot;) so I\u0026rsquo;ll focus here on flow.\nOrganisations are dynamic not static. They don\u0026rsquo;t so much exist as transmute, continuously. They entail flows of money, materials, time and influence . They cannot be considered in isolation but in dynamic tension with the rest of the world. They are a system of systems and a system within systems, always attracted to but never reaching a stasis.\nThis understanding is critical to effecting organisational change. You might consider revolution as the abrupt interruption of flow and evolution as a process of bending flow, nudging flow, improving organisational sensitivity to flow.\nInfluence I realised in the process of writing The Business of Influence in 2010 that the Latin origin of the word influence is influere; in-flow. Flow is a critical facet of social business design, and I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one to think so of course. The description of The Power of Pull (Hagel, Brown, Davison, 2010) includes the following:\nIndividuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that they’ve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream\u0026hellip; Understood and used properly, the power of pull can draw out the best in people and institutions by connecting them in ways that increase understanding and effectiveness.\nIn an October 2013 article in Scientific American ahead of his 2014 book Social Physics , Alex \u0026lsquo;Sandy\u0026rsquo; Pentland writes:\nPatterns of idea flow … are directly related to productivity growth and creative output\nThe relationship between engagement and productivity is simple: high levels of engagement predict high group productivity, almost no matter what that group is working on or what kinds of personalities its members have.\n… exploration – a mathematical measure of the extent to which the members of a group bring in new ideas from outside. Exploration is a good predictor of both innovation and creative output.\nIncreasing engagement is not a magic bullet. … we found that at a certain point people become so interconnected that the flow of ideas is dominated by feedback loops. Sure, everyone is trading ideas—but they are the same ideas over and over.\nAccording to Pentland’s theory of idea flow, certain network structures are more conducive than others to the emergence of innovative ideas or to the coordination of collective action (reference ).\nI can only conclude that we must use this understanding of flow, of influence, to transform the network structures accordingly. We can\u0026rsquo;t go from typical command-and-control hierarchy at 5.30pm Friday and commence an organic \u0026ldquo;wirearchy\u0026rdquo; 9am the following Monday. We need to tap the flows to re-flow. We need to infect the business performance management of today\u0026rsquo;s organisations to catalyse, to encourage, to inculcate the appropriate topological and behavioural metamorphosis – a process I usually think about in terms of one to three years – and this is precisely the mechanism I had in mind when creating the Influence Scorecard .\nTo rephrase my companion\u0026rsquo;s intent then:\nWe think social business will help us achieve our goals and create more value for all stakeholders faster than otherwise. Now, how can we set this transformation in motion?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/goal-become-social-business-get-revolution-started/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/112078056@N07/12192016735/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"revolution Ukraine demonstrators\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/revolution_ukraine_demonstrators.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuring a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post addresses two problems integral to this statement.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"a-means-not-an-end\"\u003eA means not an end\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/2013/10/social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eI describe social business\u003c/a\u003e\n by way of the following challenge:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"shared-values\"\u003eShared values\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to \u003ca href=\"http://research.gigaom.com/2013/05/the-future-of-work-in-a-social-world-part-2/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation\u003c/a\u003e\n with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. \u003ca href=\"http://stoweboyd.com/post/77480001886/collaboration-is-where-individuals-work-socially\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIn his words\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?\""},{"content":" Social Business is such a nascent, deep and wide topic that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t do my thinking or clients justice without reading a lot. Everyday. So it occurred to me that if I\u0026rsquo;m taking the time to do this, then it makes sense to take a few seconds more to act as a filter and pass on the best bits to others.\nI began curating a Flipboard magazine at the tail end of 2013. Flipboard tells me that the resulting magazine, Social Business Design , currently contains 210 articles and has attracted 128 readers.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I like and what I don\u0026rsquo;t like about the process. Perhaps the upsides might prompt you to curate one yourself, and perhaps the Flipboard team might take note of the downsides. They do listen – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (@mmccue ) has taken the time to respond to me via Twitter, as have several of his colleagues.\nI like Flipping I like the simplicity. Drag the \u0026ldquo;flip it\u0026rdquo; bookmarklet from the Flipboard website to your browser\u0026rsquo;s bookmarks bar and you\u0026rsquo;re all set up. When I\u0026rsquo;m reading an article I decide to flip, I just click the bookmarklet and a little window appears, just like this:\nYou can see in this particular instance that it\u0026rsquo;s found 8 images from which I can select one to accompany the article, else if no images are suitable I can opt not to use one at all. My magazine is preselected with a big tick because it\u0026rsquo;s the only one I curate, else you can pick the magazine(s) for which the article is suitable. And then I just click \u0026ldquo;Add\u0026rdquo;. Simples. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to append a comment in the \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s interesting about this?\u0026rdquo; field.\nSubscribers can view the magazine in their browser, or via the Flipboard app for iOS, Android, Windows or Blackberry. And Flipboard really is a sticky app in my opinion. What\u0026rsquo;s more, as a regular reader of a dozen different Flipboard magazines, Flipboard can learn what I\u0026rsquo;m into and suggest other magazines I might like.\nCross-posting I can cross-post articles from other Flipboard magazines to Social Business Design, but I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to do that much. Partly I guess because I\u0026rsquo;ve not found other magazines with quite the same focus, but I can see how this might be increasingly useful in the future.\nThe \u0026ldquo;front cover\u0026rdquo; Lastly, the \u0026ldquo;front cover\u0026rdquo; of the magazine can easily be set to one of the images accompanying a recent article – an important step to give subscribers a visual clue in their app that new content is available. I originally mocked up the small image above to promote the availability of the magazine, but Flipboard now has a small widget available to show the magazine bedecked in its latest cover image. Like this:\nView my Flipboard Magazine. I don\u0026rsquo;t like The stuff Flipboard doesn\u0026rsquo;t like Flipboard doesn\u0026rsquo;t like flipping PDFs, YouTube videos or Slideshare stacks. This is a fairly significant shortcoming, but one I can only assume the Flipboard techies are working on.\nImage grabbing Flipboard grabs quite a few images that are clearly, to the human at least, nothing to do with the article in question. They\u0026rsquo;re ads, or visuals enticing web visitors to click to other content for example. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a problem with this per se as it\u0026rsquo;s rather difficult to program this out, but when Flipboard misses the main image altogether, that\u0026rsquo;s frustrating. Here are two examples that fail at the time of writing:\n8 years of Enterprise 2.0 on medium.com. That city skyline is completely ignored\u0026hellip;\nChanging the world of work. One human at a time. by Change Agents Worldwide. No image detected\u0026hellip;\nNo image thank you Sometimes, when I\u0026rsquo;ve told Flipboard not to use one of the candidate images, it goes ahead and uses one anyway. That\u0026rsquo;s a little annoying.\nAbout the readership Sometimes I\u0026rsquo;m told the name of a new subscriber as a status alert on my phone. And sometimes I\u0026rsquo;m not. Not sure why. And in the same vein, Flipboard doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide me with any facility to see who is reading the magazine. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that I need an email address because that would breach their users\u0026rsquo; privacy, but their Flipboard username would be interesting. Even better, and to Flipboard\u0026rsquo;s advantage too no doubt, it should let me share my social networks with them so Flipboard can tell me which of my network is a subscriber. Nifty, and perhaps a little jab back at competitor Pulse now that it\u0026rsquo;s part of the LinkedIn stable.\nOverall, there\u0026rsquo;s almost too little feedback to curators to keep them encouraged, if you know what I mean.\nDoes Flipboard rate my magazine? Does Flipboard rate my magazine sufficiently to suggest it to those in its community it thinks might want to subscribe to it? I\u0026rsquo;ve no idea.\nWhat exactly is a page flip? My magazine has had 1,328 page flips so far, but I can find no definition of this metric. Is it a subscriber seeing the availability of an article in the app or browser but not clicking / touching to read it? Or does it need a click / touch? And does it include Flipboard users who are taking a look but haven\u0026rsquo;t yet subscribed? Being a special adviser to the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Media , you can guess this annoys me!\nConclusion My first blog post on this topic was back in April 2005 . It wasn\u0026rsquo;t called social news aggregation back then – in fact it didn\u0026rsquo;t really exist at all – and I called the prospect myChannel. Flipboard launced at the end of 2010, effectively pioneering social news aggregation. And I enjoyed playing a part in pivoting Taptu from mobile search to social news aggregation back in the day.\nIn short, I enjoy curating a Flipboard magazine. I actually take it seriously. Half a dozen associates have told me they\u0026rsquo;re subscribed and enjoy the variety of articles I bring to their attention, so that\u0026rsquo;s all the social reinforcement I need for now. But Flipboard needs to address aspects of social capital (the value of the network), as perceivable by members of the network, sooner rather than later to maintain momentum.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/curating-social-business-design-magazine-flipboard/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://eulr.co/socbiz_design\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Social Business Design magazine for Flipboard 18 Feb 2014\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Social-Business-Design-magazine-for-Flipboard-18-Feb-2014.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n Social Business is such a nascent, deep and wide topic that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t do my thinking or clients justice without reading a lot. Everyday. So it occurred to me that if I\u0026rsquo;m taking the time to do this, then it makes sense to take a few seconds more to act as a filter and pass on the best bits to others.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://eulr.co/socbiz_design\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Social Business Design _ Flipboard magazine\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Social-Business-Design-_-Flipboard-magazine.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nI began curating a Flipboard magazine at the tail end of 2013. Flipboard tells me that the resulting magazine, \u003ca href=\"http://eulr.co/socbiz_design\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Business Design\u003c/a\u003e\n, currently contains 210 articles and has attracted 128 readers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s what I like and what I don\u0026rsquo;t like about the process. Perhaps the upsides might prompt you to curate one yourself, and perhaps the Flipboard team might take note of the downsides. They do listen – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/mmccue\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@mmccue\u003c/a\u003e\n) has taken the time to respond to me via Twitter, as have several of his colleagues.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"i-like\"\u003eI like\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"flipping\"\u003eFlipping\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI like the simplicity. Drag \u003ca href=\"https://share.flipboard.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe \u0026ldquo;flip it\u0026rdquo; bookmarklet\u003c/a\u003e\n from the Flipboard website to your browser\u0026rsquo;s bookmarks bar and you\u0026rsquo;re all set up. When I\u0026rsquo;m reading an article I decide to flip, I just click the bookmarklet and a little window appears, just like this:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Likes and dislikes of curating Social Business Design magazine for Flipboard"},{"content":" Customer-centricity is an organizational point of view, not a customer point of view. It’s actually the organization-centric-view-of-the-customer. \u0026hellip; Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer?\nFrom Attenzi - a social business story .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/customer-centricity/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCustomer-centricity is an organizational point of view, not a customer point of view. It’s actually the organization-centric-view-of-the-customer. \u0026hellip; Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Customer-centricity"},{"content":" Stowe Boyd recently published \u0026ldquo;A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work\u0026rdquo; (although the title will change ). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you\u0026rsquo;ve read Attenzi – a social business story then you\u0026rsquo;ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.\n[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to A Manifesto For A New Way of Work .]\nHere are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.\n_____\nDissensus (versus Consensus) — active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business\nCooperative (versus Collaborative) — sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns\nCreativity (versus Tradition) — new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous\nAutonomy (versus Heteronomy) — paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture\n(Hyper)democracy (versus Oligarchy) * — today’s management theory and organizational structure is basically a holdover from the earliest days of the industrial age, a time prior to democracy, when monarchies ruled; businesses today are oligarchies, where the few lead the many; in recent decades, there has been a transition from coercive controls to more consensual ones, but if we are to move fast enough to compete in the new economy we will have to more to a hyper lean, agile, democratic form factor for work\nFast-and-loose (versus Slow-and-tight) — companies need to become much looser (higher degrees of autonomy and voluntary association into working teams) in order to run faster, increase innovation, and provide the sort of environment that top performers best operate in\nLaissez-faire (versus Entrepreneurial) * — the growing uncertainties in complex, interconnected, global economy means that predicting the future and judging risks has become extremely difficult if not impossible; therefore, the notion of organizing any reasonably sized company around a single ‘official future’ is broken; we’ll need to adopt a laissez-faire operating system for business, where many experiments based on different hypotheses can run in parallel, instead of lining up all the troops and making them march to a single unified strategic plan\nHyperlean (versus Waterfall) — all business operations will transition away from top-down, long-term, waterfall-style models to a bottom-up, short-term, hyper lean approach; those closest to the problem will work on its solution, and divvy up the pieces in a way that makes sense to them, and refactor as needed\nSmall-and-Simple (versus Large-and-Complex) * — the technological advances that will disrupt markets and patterns of business in the future will increasingly be small-and-simple, but paradoxically, may force the re-evaluation of everything (like file sync-and-share applications, which are destabilizing the enterprise software market)\nOpen and Public (versus Closed and Private) — the number one factor today in work happiness is the transparency of management practices, and that happiness is likewise reflected in higher engagement at work\nEmergent Strategy (versus Deliberate Strategy) * — the nature of strategy changes in a time of great change, when the future is difficult to foresee; the role of leadership changes with it, as well; instead of concocting a strategic vision and pushing it out to the organization through cultural and managerial channels (the deliberate style of strategy) leadership must shift to distributed, action-based strategic learning about what is actually happening in the market: emergent strategy; this, as Henry Mintzberg observed, does not mean chaos, but unintended order.\n_____\nThis is a serious list of theses with deep and wide ramifications. When presented so baldly, you can see why this vista may be perceived as nothing less than fearsome. While I might champion rapid evolution tapping extant business performance management process (in this guest post to briansolis.com for example ), Stowe plants his standard steadfastly for revolution. Only time will tell which is dominant. I\u0026rsquo;m guessing evolution that may be reported through the compressed lens of historic reflection as revolution.\nOf course there are differences of opinion about what should play out and how exactly it might play out. We have various \u0026lsquo;camps\u0026rsquo; with names such as Social Business, Responsive Organization, Future Work, Enterprise 2.0 and Industry 4.0, and most recently Stowe\u0026rsquo;s Chautauqua [update 20th March 2014: now rechristened Future of Work ]. (Industry 4.0 may be the outlier here with its dominant focus on the machines rather than the humans.)\nAnd perhaps \u0026lsquo;camps\u0026rsquo; is too emotive a word. We should continually remind ourselves that, whichever camp and theses take your fancy, that which binds us far exceeds that separating us. I\u0026rsquo;m reminded of The People\u0026rsquo;s Front of Judea , the sketch in the film Life of Brian where the Monty Python crew poke fun at groups that are indistinguishable to outsiders, yet obsess with nuance internally. Nevertheless, in order for us to come together to develop and present a compelling vision (an irony in the context of this manifesto?) to the vast majority who don\u0026rsquo;t yet appreciate this stuff, we should also consider Bertrand Russell\u0026rsquo;s 8th commandment for living in a healthy democracy:\nFind more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.\n(Hyper)democracy (versus Oligarchy) It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.\nSo said Winston Churchill. (A lesser known quote of his: \u0026ldquo;The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.\u0026rdquo;)\nIn the absence of any better way to run a country with the utmost respect for its peoples, I\u0026rsquo;m a democrat. But I\u0026rsquo;m less sure how Stowe envisages democracy improving organizational success. If we\u0026rsquo;re talking about some kind of crowd-sourced decision-making (and he refers to \u0026lsquo;one person, one vote\u0026rsquo; here ), then we should be alert to the caveats to the wisdom of the crowd, including the types of problem for which the crowd is best suited and the diversity prediction theorem.\nAccording to James Surowiecki , author of The Wisdom of Crowds :\nCrowds are best when there\u0026rsquo;s a right answer to a problem or a question.\nI think then we need to make sure that this interpretation of \u0026ldquo;hyper democracy\u0026rdquo;, if correct, does not contradict other theses, not least the inference that there is rarely a \u0026ldquo;right answer\u0026rdquo;.\nScott E. Page is an American social scientist, a Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan. His diversity prediction theorem asserts that when the diversity of a group is large, the error of the crowd is small. And therefore, that when the diversity of a group is small, the error of the crowd is large.\nLife of Brian Brian: Please, please, please listen! I\u0026rsquo;ve got one or two things to say.\nThe Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!\nBrian: Look, you\u0026rsquo;ve got it all wrong! You don\u0026rsquo;t NEED to follow ME, You don\u0026rsquo;t NEED to follow ANYBODY! You\u0026rsquo;ve got to think for your selves! You\u0026rsquo;re ALL individuals!\nThe Crowd: Yes! We\u0026rsquo;re all individuals!\nBrian: You\u0026rsquo;re all different!\nThe Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!\nMan in crowd: I\u0026rsquo;m not\u0026hellip;\nThe Crowd: Shush!\nFinland is synonymous with social democracy, and its business poster child is (or perhaps was until recent times) Nokia. I understand that Nokia\u0026rsquo;s culture was largely informed by its home country. And yet, by dint of geography, everyone making the commute each day to Nokia HQ came from the same geography and culture, and it\u0026rsquo;s said that they didn\u0026rsquo;t have an ear to what was happening on the West Coast (How Nokia Fell From Grace , Businessweek, 15 Sept 2010). Stowe may rightly argue that this particular case study supports his thesis for dissensus over consensus, and perhaps the two theses are linked.\nThe \u0026ldquo;hyper democracy\u0026rdquo; thesis should therefore be qualified in two regards. The intended scope of the democratic process – does everyone \u0026ldquo;vote\u0026rdquo; on everything? – and the precondition to secure and sustain appropriate diversity.\nAnd I wonder then if the spirit of this thesis isn\u0026rsquo;t captured sufficiently by the one promoting autonomy? Does not the freedom of autonomy come with the responsibility to yourself and those around you to decide how best to employ one\u0026rsquo;s time, skills and knowledge? Perhaps this decision is the \u0026ldquo;vote\u0026rdquo;, in which case we should be careful not to invoke the word democracy without dispelling the general appreciation for its typical mechanics today.\nLaissez-faire (versus Entrepreneurial) Steve Jobs, James Dyson and Elon Musk spring to my mind when thinking of visionary entrepreneurs, but what is this vision thing exactly? The phrase \u0026ldquo;mission and vision\u0026rdquo; is bandied around, and the two words are too frequently blurred. The organization\u0026rsquo;s mission explains the reason it exists, and its vision paints what it aspires to be.\nJobs, Dyson and Musk were discontent with the status quo of personal computing, the entertainment industry, domestic appliances / white goods, payment systems and transport. They could literally see a different future, and they dragged that future into being.\nJust as important, people love visionary leaders. They are excited to be a part of something visionary. I\u0026rsquo;m no sociologist, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure this atavistic trait can be junked.\nPolemically, one might label Stowe\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;laissez-faire\u0026rdquo; thesis haphazard, which my dictionary defines as lacking any obvious principle of organization. I agree with his assertion that an organization may see fit to attenuate its risk profile by having several hares running, but I don\u0026rsquo;t see how that obviates the obvious power of entrepreneurial vision.\nA further point. Mintzberg and Waters (1985) identified eight types of strategy, of which they labeled one entrepreneurial. This thesis might then overlap considerably with the one about emergent strategy, below.\nSmall-and-Simple (versus Large-and-Complex) I wrote a post a few weeks back on the topic of complexity that I think sets the scene for my argument with this thesis and the emergent strategy thesis below: \u0026ldquo;You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you’d better know the difference .\u0026rdquo;\nThe perception of the small-and-simple often forms from the large-and-complex.\nTake Stowe\u0026rsquo;s example of Dropbox , a fabulous service I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed since its earliest days. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those services that just works, requires little effort, and yet serves such a critical role in my digital life that I really would not want to be without it. Once anyone is in the vibe of modern times and savvy with personal computing and the Web, Dropbox appears simple.\nBut consider explaining it to someone who has been asleep forty years. I mean, where would you start? It would not be a simple explanation, and it would be perceived as anything but small-and-simple.\nRather than a thesis based on small and simple technological advances, I\u0026rsquo;d rather recognise that we have, for the first time in our history, the fabulous opportunity to work with the unavoidably complex, as I explain further in my next argument.\nEmergent Strategy (versus Deliberate Strategy) Strategy is perhaps one of the most over-used and misappropriated words in business. (Stowe does neither.) While there are competing definitions, I generally defer to Michael Porter\u0026rsquo;s:\nselecting the set of activities in which an organization will excel to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby creating sustained value for its shareholders.\nSaying that, I think in terms of all stakeholders rather than just shareholders in the narrowest sense (Attenzi chapters 58 and 60 ), but that\u0026rsquo;s a tangent to the focus here.\nStowe asserts that:\nthe new way of work runs more like a forest or a city than a machine. We need to learn by imitating rich ecosystems, where the appearance of chaos yields to emergent order, and reject order imposed by fiat.\nIn the 2nd edition of Attenzi and during the closing keynote at the 3M ThinkTANK conference in September I ask:\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organization build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\nAnd I point out that the very nature of the question demands self-organization, a network more like a city than a traditional business. So once again, I might be contrasting The People\u0026rsquo;s Front of Judea with The Judean People\u0026rsquo;s Front, but perhaps there is a detail worth exploring\u0026hellip;\nA forest (and a city without a strong mayoral team) has no self-direction. What will be, will be. But that\u0026rsquo;s obviously not good enough for our human needs and aspirations. Moreover, complexity is a system with a seemingly random mix of order and disorder (chaos). As Stowe notes, chaos yields to emergent order, but emergent order also yields to chaos.\nWe cannot simplify complexity (as opposed to complication), for it is a natural product, but we can learn to navigate it more simply. Until now, we have effectively had to ignore it because we simply did not have the information technologies and capacity for data collection. Rather, we had to rely on management rules-of-thumb, maxims that endured when considered to be right more often than wrong. Maxims may well have sufficed when that\u0026rsquo;s all the competition had too.\nRather than \u0026ldquo;imitating\u0026rdquo; nature, as Stowe proposes, which effectively means modelling man-made systems on natural systems, we should undoubtedly be informed by nature but be sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.\nPorter and Henry Mintzberg (to whom Stowe refers above) are attributed with standing for deliberate strategy and emergent strategy respectively . In practice, I find that no leader is foolish enough to set a five-year plan and let it play out without close observation and adaption. In the words of the Balanced Scorecard community, there is single-loop learning (are we pursuing the right tactics in the right way to execute the strategy?) and double-loop learning (does the strategy remain appropriate?) In other words, we set a direction based on our understanding of our needs and aspirations today, and the current environment and context, and set off knowing that our journey will demand both flexibility (adapting to the single-loop, operational) and agility (adapting to the double-loop, strategic), and likely as sooner as later.\nIn my story , the Attenzi team moved such capability beyond the usual regard for performance management towards real-time sensory feedback in an organization-as-organism / business-as-biology metaphor.\nIn actual fact, Porter and Mintzberg are meeting somewhere in the middle of the polarized positions they are frequently said to occupy. Indeed, the 1985 paper above points out that we\u0026rsquo;re not talking \u0026ldquo;either / or\u0026rdquo; here, but rather a continuum with little happening at either extreme. I guess then the question here is: how is the appropriate position on that continuum best established at any given time?\nI\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by the facility to navigate complexity in the organizational context and work by the likes of Professors Eve Mitleton-Kelly and Julian Rosenhead at the London School of Economics, the Complexity Centre at the University of Oxford , and the Plexus Institute . This paper by Professor Neil Johnson, then of Oxford University, and David M.D. Smith , for example, argues that we might undertake short-term predictions of the future evolution of complex adaptive systems and, effectively, nudge them away from undesirable states. Very interesting indeed.\nConclusion Without meaning to be the least bit arrogant (for we all have our own unique talents, experiences and insights), the typical leader or manager ensconced in his or her closed, hierarchical, oligarchical, slow and tight niche, will find it difficult to tell Stowe and me apart (excepting accents and his good looks) even after a day-long workshop.\nPersonally, I think the nuances here are worth exploring in preparation for practice, but I fear such debate will play out on blogs and in academic papers long before it hits the typical boardroom. Which is a real shame, because we\u0026rsquo;re talking about some serious competitive advantage for the early adopters, realizing significant mutual value of both fiscal and non-fiscal kinds for everyone involved.\nIn short, this area is crying out for some entrepreneurial visionaries!\nLife of Brian Reg: If you want to join the People\u0026rsquo;s Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans.\nBrian: I do!\nReg: Oh yeah, how much?\nBrian: A lot!\nReg: Right, you\u0026rsquo;re in.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2014/01/stowe-boyds-manifesto-peoples-front/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/gb_qHP7VaZE\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The People\u0026rsquo;s Front\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/The-Peoples-Front.png\" title=\"The People\u0026#39;s Front\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.stoweboyd.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStowe Boyd\u003c/a\u003e\n recently published \u0026ldquo;A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work\u0026rdquo; (although \u003ca href=\"http://stoweboyd.com/post/71622681538/this-is-the-reason-i-am-going-to-have-to-change\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe title will change\u003c/a\u003e\n). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you\u0026rsquo;ve read \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAttenzi – a social business story\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n then you\u0026rsquo;ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to \u003ca href=\"http://www.futureofwork.co/post/78477268155/a-manifesto-for-a-new-way-of-work\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eA Manifesto For A New Way of Work\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"dissensus-versus-consensus\"\u003eDissensus (versus Consensus)\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e— active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"cooperative-versus-collaborative\"\u003eCooperative (versus Collaborative)\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e— sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"creativity-versus-tradition\"\u003eCreativity (versus Tradition)\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e— new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"autonomy-versus-heteronomy\"\u003eAutonomy (versus Heteronomy)\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e— paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front"},{"content":"Having gone down the traditional publishing route with The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011), I decided for a number of reasons to try a different route in 2013 with Attenzi – a social business story . Most of those reasons boil down to one simple fact, the publishing industry isn\u0026rsquo;t yet embracing social business principles. In fact, it\u0026rsquo;s perhaps a prime example of an industry continuously trying to manipulate the application of 21st Century technologies to maintain the 20th Century status quo.\nI appreciate that cannibalizing ones own livelihood is never an easy journey (heck, even management consultancies find it tough ), but I figure it\u0026rsquo;s got to be worth attempting when the alternative is so bleak. I\u0026rsquo;m hardly the first to levy such criticism (crystallized beautifully in The Innovators\u0026rsquo; Dilemma of course), but here\u0026rsquo;s a prime example in my particular case.\nQuite clearly, I\u0026rsquo;d love to stimulate conversation and debate about social business – after all, collaboration and co-operation cannot spring forth without first conversation and sharing. So the ebook formats of Attenzi feature hyperlinks at the beginning of each chapter taking readers from the ebook to the HTML version where they can coalesce to comment, to ask and answer questions, to share resources, as they wish. And share hyperlinks to pages of the book wherever they hang out.\nThat means the whole book needs to be available in HTML – the global, open standard for the presentation and mark up of documents, lest anyone from the publishing world require an explanation here. This in turn means traditional copyright terms would be violated, which means I couldn\u0026rsquo;t work with traditional publishers.\nI appreciate the economics here don\u0026rsquo;t apply to all authors or all published works, but as both Doc Searls and JP Rangaswami note, I will derive more value personally \u0026ldquo;because of\u0026rdquo; the ebook than \u0026ldquo;with\u0026rdquo; the ebook. I have secured two projects during the past six months on the back of releasing Attenzi unfettered, creating revenues far in excess of any I would have derived from traditional royalties. (Note: my writing doesn\u0026rsquo;t achieve Harry Potter levels of readership!)\nSo I have lived up to the principles of social business, and profitably.\nShould any publisher wish to have a conversation about business models for B2B publishing, please get in touch. My network of associates and I have plenty to contribute.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/12/self-published-time/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHaving gone down the traditional publishing route with \u003ca href=\"http://eulerpartners.com/the-business-of-influence\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n (Wiley, 2011), I decided for a number of reasons to try a different route in 2013 with \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAttenzi – a social business story\u003c/a\u003e\n. Most of those reasons boil down to one simple fact, the publishing industry isn\u0026rsquo;t yet embracing social business principles. In fact, it\u0026rsquo;s perhaps a prime example of an industry continuously trying to manipulate the application of 21st Century technologies to maintain the 20th Century status quo.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why I self-published this time"},{"content":"\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve all done it.\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you\u0026rsquo;re a professional data driven content marketer, or some poor soul who\u0026rsquo;s been told to conjure up the December post for the company blog, the temptation to write that post about the looming New Year is, well, too tempting.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for real link fodder, best include a call to action and sell the idea that something may be learned and put into valuable action before Santa boots up Google Maps, post title bait such as:\nPlanning for social media ROI in 2014 (but the true value of social isn\u0026rsquo;t quite so straight forward)\n14 social predictions that will transform your organisation in 2014 (or read Attenzi )\nYour New Year Resolution – Simplify the Complexities of Social Media (yeah right )\nBut when you think about 2014, ask yourself what\u0026rsquo;s in a year? \u0026ldquo;The period it takes the Sun to complete one course throughout the zodiac along the ecliptic\u0026rdquo; says Wikipedia . And as I ask in my Attenzi story : \u0026ldquo;Why are the frequency and duration of our plans linked to the time it takes our planet to complete a particular cycle around the Sun? What’s 365 days got to do with our business exactly?\u0026rdquo;\nIf you champion social business you champion agility, responsiveness and adaptability. Not the annual planning slog.\nMore often than not I get shouted down for being short-termist at this point. Yet I believe a long-term vision remains as critical to business success as ever, but flexibility (finding a new course to execute the strategy; operational) and agility (recognizing when the strategy needs adaption; strategic) are business critical too. We\u0026rsquo;re talking about the facility to take complexity into account.\nStowe Boyd goes even further . \u0026ldquo;The fast-and-loose business that is emerging as the new way of work runs more like a forest or a city than machinery. We need to learn by imitating rich ecosystems, where the appearance of chaos yields to emergent order, and reject order imposed by design.\u0026rdquo; I love this outlook but don\u0026rsquo;t subscribe to it in extremis.\nEither way, the most interesting New Year\u0026rsquo;s Resolution you might make for your organisation in 2014 is to make it your last.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/12/social-business-2014-whats-year-anyway/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"2014 - Happy New Year\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/2014-Happy-New-Year.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;ve all done it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you\u0026rsquo;re a professional data driven content marketer, or some poor soul who\u0026rsquo;s been told to conjure up the December post for the company blog, the temptation to write that post about the looming New Year is, well, too tempting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for real link fodder, best include a call to action and sell the idea that something may be learned and put into valuable action before Santa boots up Google Maps, post title bait such as:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social business in 2014 and your last ever New Year's resolution"},{"content":" The Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity. \u0026rdquo; The column comments on the recent 5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.\nThose that deal with complexity \u0026ldquo;may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.\u0026rdquo; In contrast, \u0026ldquo;the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.\u0026rdquo;\nBut to present the situation as \u0026rsquo;either / or\u0026rsquo; is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.\nComplexity In his excellent introduction to complexity, Two’s Company, Three is Complexity , Neil Johnson explains “there is no rigorous definition of Complexity. But that isn’t so bad – after all, it is hard to define a word such as \u0026lsquo;happiness\u0026rsquo; and yet we all know what its characteristics are.”\nHe lists the characteristics of complexity:\nThe system contains a collection of many interacting objects or ‘agents’ These objects’ behaviour is affected by memory or ‘feedback’ The objects can adapt their strategies according to their history The system is typically \u0026lsquo;open\u0026rsquo; The system appears to be ‘alive’ The system exhibits emergent phenomenon which are generally surprising, and may be extreme The emergent phenomena typically arise in the absence of any sort of ‘invisible hand’ or central controller The system shows a complicated mix of ordered and disordered behaviour. That reference to \u0026ldquo;disordered behaviour\u0026rdquo; is chaos, so complexity is a system with a seemingly random mix of order and chaos.\nComplicated In contrast, complicated simply means consisting of many interconnecting parts or elements. An automatic watch is complicated, but will never exhibit complexity. Cars are complicated, but will never exhibit complexity. The traffic formed by thousands of cars may however.\nOrganisations Large organisations are complicated, and the larger they are the more likely they\u0026rsquo;ll exhibit complexity. At any rate, all organisations sit in markets and in societies that are undoubtedly complex, and the advent of social media and related information technologies is critical in contemplating how an organisation might respond.\nIn the stack I presented at the recent 3M ThinkTANK conference , I adopt this shorter definition of complexity: \u0026ldquo;a system in which there are multiple interactions between many different components; bridges the gap between the individual and the collective.\u0026rdquo; The very next slide presents precisely the same definition for the word \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo;.\nSocial technologies help bridge the gap between the employee and the organisation, the customer and the marketplace, the citizen and the country. We can\u0026rsquo;t understand traffic better by flipping the hood of the car, and we can\u0026rsquo;t understand our organisation and its marketplace better by collating and reviewing an individual\u0026rsquo;s digital footprint. But when we wield information technologies (did someone say \u0026ldquo;big data\u0026rdquo;?) to view these multiple interactions in the large, organisation\u0026rsquo;s acquire an unprecedented facility to visualise the complexity and design responses in real-time.\nThis is central to Euler Partners\u0026rsquo; Six Influence Flows approach.\nOrganisations may gain advantage by reducing the complication over which they have domain – and perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s a happy medium to be found – but they cannot simplify complexity beyond this, for that is the product of nature. We can only seek ways to navigate it more simply and more nimbly.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/12/deal-complication-complexity-chaos-youd-better-know-difference/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.economist.com/news/business/21590341-management-thinkers-disagree-how-manage-complexity-its-complicated\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Economist, Schumpeter, Complicated, 23 Nov 13\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Economist-Schumpeter-23-Nov-2013.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.economist.com/news/business/21590341-management-thinkers-disagree-how-manage-complexity-its-complicated\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity.\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; The column comments on the recent \u003ca href=\"http://www.druckerforum.org/2013/the-event/program/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity\u003c/a\u003e\n and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThose that deal with complexity \u0026ldquo;may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.\u0026rdquo; In contrast, \u0026ldquo;the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut to present the situation as \u0026rsquo;either / or\u0026rsquo; is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you'd better know the difference"},{"content":"Published as a guest post on briansolis.com , Friday 8th November 2013, in response to Chris Heuer\u0026rsquo;s post \u0026ldquo;Social Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next! \u0026rdquo;\nAs he finished a game of Cut The Rope on his iPhone, my young godson asked what my phone was like when I was his age. I broke it down for him. I was in my twenties before someone offered to take north of ten thousand dollars for a basic digital camera, and not much less for a GPS device. And I got my first basic mobile phone (I explained that means just making phone calls and sending text messages) as I approached thirty.\nA few days later, as she dispatched her umpteenth snapchat of the morning, my niece asked me why I obviously enjoy what I do for a living. Imagine a whole lifetime, I replied, during which the only innovation was a tweak to the angle of the plow shear.\nScientists and engineers have been good to us. We’ve come to expect serious technological innovation with the regularity of the seasons. So, just like Chris Heuer, I’m more than ready for corresponding organizational change.\nNow.\nAs in right now!\nHaving reflected briefly on the vast progression of the Internet and the web, computing, mobile infrastructure and social media services – as if you needed a reminder – let’s look at what’s changed at the typical organization during this time, my adult lifetime. Or more pertinently what hasn’t.\nThe org structure and the titles sitting round the board table today are very much unchanged from two decades ago but for the addition of a c-title with an ‘I’ in the middle.\nIndeed, it was twenty years ago that integrated marketing communications first emerged championing a customer-centric outlook to replace inward-looking habits. And two decades later, customer-centricity may be a new religion by diktat but not in practice. From my observations, the truly, fully, consistently, customer-centric organization remains in the minority. Under scrutiny, many claims of customer-centricity turn out to be little more than the prioritization of an organization-centric view of the customer, and many advocates of social business still feel compelled for this reason to list customer-centricity as a core social business behavior.\nSo how is it that social, mobile and related technologies can be adopted en masse and rapidly for our lives outside work, transforming how we express ourselves, maintain relationships and get on with our lives, yet organizational life remain so intransigent?\nI believe the answer is relatively simple. Design.\nThe tectonic forces of the 20th Century led us to design organizations that resist change. Such entities excel at efficiency, at repetition, with varying facility to adopt incremental, evolutionary tweaks to the way things are. There was no facility to recognize the complexities of the marketplace and operations let alone deal with them. So the design worked well enough, particularly when the competition was designed similarly. It competed and survived to this present day by searching for ways to make things a few percent better with a few percent less resources.\nMicrosoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, writes : “Our modern ‘scientific management’ corporations remained competitive by optimizing for efficiency, a result accomplished through greater specialization and driven by overlaying process and rigid structure across the business. In this way, we arrived at the cornerstone of the modern company – predictability. Success was built around predictable costs, revenues, customers, and employees. Inherent in the notion of predictability is a sense of control. For corporations, it seemed that harnessing this control while setting and meeting expectations would keep them on top forever.”\nYet what served us very well for the best part of a century now frustrates and disappoints us. Reifying the organization as more than the sum of its human parts for the moment, we have created a monster that won’t be tamed for the 21st Century. In actual fact, it is doing precisely what we trained it to do.\nHow can we break this deadlock? Here’s Chris’ advice: “While Stowe Boyd still remains an ardent supporter of the impact and power of social in the enterprise as he notes in this GigaOm post citing McKinsey’s Social Economy report , I think it’s just time for us to find a phrase that is more attractive to corporate leadership.”\nNow I’m a keen student of persuasion and the power of language, but really? Will the monster cower and roll over for its tummy to be tickled upon the simple incantation of a new turn of phrase?\nIn Stowe’s response to Chris’ post , he reasserts this point of view: “One of the toolsets to apply in this quest for the fast-and-loose business are ideas about working socially and tools to support that. However, the greatest advances are likely to be more closely linked to fundamentals of organizational culture, and the relationship of the individual to work and the organization, rather than a social business breakthrough, per se.”\nIn other words, social business was never just about social media, despite many twitterings treating #socbiz and #socmed as synonyms. It’s about people being able to behave differently as a result of new technologies, indeed wanting to behave differently, centered around common purpose and shared values.\nIf you share my optimism and assume we’ll get somewhere called social business at some point, then there are only two ways this can happen. One. We change the monster. Two. The monster is killed off by new creations built as social business from scratch.\nThe latter will happen, is happening. But like Chris, Adam, Stowe and Brian, I’m impatient. I want to see many long-established organizations transform. And if not now, then most definitely this decade.\nThe only way I can see that happening is by tapping the monster’s own strength, using its strength against it rather than directly opposing it, a technique anyone skilled in jujitsu will recognize. In The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011) and Attenzi – a social business story (2013), I determined that the appropriate strength to channel is performance management. If people (individually and collectively) perform as they are measured – as indeed Chris points out in his post in relation to senior executive remuneration – and if we wish the organization to behave differently, then we need to infect that performance measurement appropriately.\nI suggest we do that by extending the organization’s capabilities for performance managing the flows of money, the flows of time, and the flows of material, to tracking, analysing and understanding the flows of influence.\nWhether the eventuality is called social business or some future neologism I couldn’t really care less. What’s considerably more important is the simple fact that people designed organizations. And we can redesign them.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/11/social-business-dead-whatever/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePublished as \u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/2013/11/impatience-is-a-virtue-whats-next-for-social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea guest post on briansolis.com\u003c/a\u003e\n, Friday 8th November 2013, in response to Chris Heuer\u0026rsquo;s post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/2013/10/social-business-is-dead-long-live-whats-next/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next!\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs he finished a game of Cut The Rope on his iPhone, my young godson asked what my phone was like when I was his age. I broke it down for him. I was in my twenties before someone offered to take north of ten thousand dollars for a basic digital camera, and not much less for a GPS device. And I got my first basic mobile phone (I explained that means just making phone calls and sending text messages) as I approached thirty.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA few days later, as she dispatched her umpteenth snapchat of the morning, my niece asked me why I obviously enjoy what I do for a living. Imagine a whole lifetime, I replied, during which the only innovation was a tweak to the angle of the plow shear.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScientists and engineers have been good to us. We’ve come to expect serious technological innovation with the regularity of the seasons. So, just like Chris Heuer, I’m more than ready for corresponding organizational change.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs in right now!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving reflected briefly on the vast progression of the Internet and the web, computing, mobile infrastructure and social media services – as if you needed a reminder – let’s look at what’s changed at the typical organization during this time, my adult lifetime. Or more pertinently what hasn’t.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"\"Social business is dead!\" ... \"Whatever!\""},{"content":" I learned this week about the Cockpit-in-Court , an early London theatre that stood where we find 70 Whitehall today. Apparently, it did as the name conveys host cockfights, although they stopped as long ago as the Jacobean times. The current building includes Kent \u0026rsquo;s Treasury, built 1733-37.\nI attended an event in Kent\u0026rsquo;s Treasury this week at the kind invitation of Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School , hosted by Alex Aitken, Executive Director of Government Communications, to celebrate the launch of Strategic Public Relations Leadership.\n[Google books , Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com , Routledge , BookDepository , Waterstone\u0026rsquo;s , WHSmith , Blackwell ]\nThe vision we have for social business at Euler Partners is built up and out from public relations in its \u0026ldquo;excellence theory\u0026rdquo; manifestation (rather than the various flavours of publicity and spin with which some readers may be more familiar). It is a fundamental, and one that has too rarely contributed all it has to give to organisational success, and Anne and Paul believe the time has come for public relations professionals to step up to the mark. They cite the increasing complexity of the modern organisation as reason enough:\nThis context requires public relations professionals to be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness. This textbook provides public relations leaders with a framework to do this, as well as a checklist of essential capabilities which they must acquire and exhibit if they are to operate at the highest levels of any organisation.\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have provided a \u0026ldquo;product description\u0026rdquo; in Amazon\u0026rsquo;s terminology or, in the jargon of the publishing industry, a \u0026ldquo;book blurb\u0026rdquo; for the back cover:\nThe authors write \u0026ldquo;an organisation’s reputation is determined not by expert publicity programs, but the alignment of declared and enacted values as judged by those with whom it has a relationship.\u0026rdquo; If you understand what this means, this book will help you make it happen. If you don\u0026rsquo;t understand what this means, you should read this book. Given the compelling association the authors identify between public relations excellence and organisational leadership, it can only benefit your career trajectory.\nThis heartfelt desire to encourage and equip public relations professionals with the necessary knowledge and skills to deliver greater tangible benefit to their respective organisations, and indeed to all those with a stake in the organisation\u0026rsquo;s success and areas of mutual concern, is a desire I explored in The Business of Influence (pp162-164):\nIt’s only the most proven and persistent Heads of Communications that get the C-title, and only then in organizations with boards that pay a little more attention to good governance and have a better understanding of the wider and deeper strategic role the CCO plays. Reassuming my mode of generalizing: all other organizations are populated by CxOs who consider the Head of Comms to be the ‘head of press releases, other media relations and urgent responses’, or perhaps actually have a comms head that pigeonholes himself and his team as such.\nWhile definitions of public relations vary, as we took time to review towards the beginning of the book, too few practitioners get the opportunity to deliver the benefits of the full gamut of the public relations role definition in my experience, or are under-qualified to do so from a lack of continuous professional development. I’ve claimed that PR professionals today do not generally attain an appropriate balance of 1st and 3rd flows , with the organization’s influence over its stakeholders given considerably more time and effort than the reciprocal.\nHow might the role be evolving?\n\u0026hellip;\nJay O’Connor, CIPR President 2010, emphasizes the need for CCOs / Directors of Public Relations or Corporate Communications to acquit themselves in the wider context of organizational leadership. She is a Chartered PR Practitioner and a Chartered Director of the UK’s Institute of Directors – so she practises what she preaches. Jay believes that more senior PR professionals must prepare themselves \u0026ldquo;to talk the language of the board, with a particular emphasis on strategy formulation, organizational structure, planning, measurement and organizational learning – in short, to play a full rather than simply functional role in the boardroom.\u0026rdquo;\nThe 2007 report from the Arthur W. Page Society, The Authentic Enterprise , identifies four new leadership priorities and skills demanded of the Chief Communications Officer:\nLeadership in defining and instilling company values Leadership in building and managing multi-stakeholder relationships Leadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools and Leadership in building and managing trust, in all its dimensions. To repeat a previous conclusion: ‘our behaviours, manifest in influencing and being influenced through products and services and customer relations and communications and interactions of all kinds, accumulate to form a reputation and a degree of trustworthiness in people’s minds, and to establish a level of significance in people’s lives.’ So it seems that the 2nd and 4th new leadership priorities listed here play well into the Influence Scorecard , and it will be the uncommon influence strategy that doesn’t require emphasis on communicating values and employing new media.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/10/strategic-public-relations-leadership/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HdscAAAAQBAJ\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Strategic Public Relations Leadership\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Strategic-Public-Relations-Leadership.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nI learned this week about the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockpit-in-Court\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCockpit-in-Court\u003c/a\u003e\n, an early London theatre that stood where we find 70 Whitehall today. Apparently, it did as the name conveys host cockfights, although they stopped as long ago as the Jacobean times. The current building includes \u003ca href=\"http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/Palladio/PalladianBritain/Architects/WilliamKent.aspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKent\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s Treasury, built 1733-37.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI attended an event in Kent\u0026rsquo;s Treasury this week at the kind invitation of Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/fbl/cprs.htm\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCentre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School\u003c/a\u003e\n, hosted by Alex Aitken, Executive Director of Government Communications, to celebrate the launch of Strategic Public Relations Leadership.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HdscAAAAQBAJ\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle books\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/041566795X\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon.co.uk\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://amzn.com/041566795X\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon.com\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.routledge.com/9781135946661\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRoutledge\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9781135946661\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBookDepository\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/advancedSearch.do?buttonClicked=2\u0026amp;isbn=1135946663\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWaterstone\u0026rsquo;s\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/SearchWithinCategory.aspx?as_ISBN=1135946663\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWHSmith\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/bobuk/scripts/home.jsp?action=search\u0026amp;type=isbn\u0026amp;term=1135946663\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlackwell\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe vision we have for social business at \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEuler Partners\u003c/a\u003e\n is built up and out from public relations in its \u0026ldquo;excellence theory\u0026rdquo; manifestation (rather than the various flavours of publicity and spin with which some readers may be more familiar). It is a fundamental, and one that has too rarely contributed all it has to give to organisational success, and Anne and Paul believe the time has come for public relations professionals to step up to the mark. They cite the increasing complexity of the modern organisation as reason enough:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis context requires public relations professionals to be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness. This textbook provides public relations leaders with a framework to do this, as well as a checklist of essential capabilities which they must acquire and exhibit if they are to operate at the highest levels of any organisation.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have provided a \u0026ldquo;product description\u0026rdquo; in Amazon\u0026rsquo;s terminology or, in the jargon of the publishing industry, a \u0026ldquo;book blurb\u0026rdquo; for the back cover:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe authors write \u0026ldquo;an organisation’s reputation is determined not by expert publicity programs, but the alignment of declared and enacted values as judged by those with whom it has a relationship.\u0026rdquo; If you understand what this means, this book will help you make it happen. If you don\u0026rsquo;t understand what this means, you should read this book. Given the compelling association the authors identify between public relations excellence and organisational leadership, it can only benefit your career trajectory.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"Strategic Public Relations Leadership"},{"content":"[Edited 7th October to embed the event video and move the slidestack to the end.] http://youtu.be/UkhXr4u9 _J4 I\u0026rsquo;ve been hosted by 3M today in Minneapolis St. Paul, and what great hosts too\u0026hellip; a fantastic team and an incredible company heritage to boot. I could have spent a whole day exploring the Innovation Center, which is so well done I\u0026rsquo;m sure it brings out the geek in just about everyone.\nGregory Gerik is 3M\u0026rsquo;s transformation social media leader, and he led the design and delivery of the 3M ThinkTANK conference today. Kicked off beautifully with a keynote by Brian Solis , we\u0026rsquo;ve been provoked, informed and entertained by:\n3M\u0026rsquo;s Tim McElroy IBM\u0026rsquo;s Susan Emerick P\u0026amp;G\u0026rsquo;s Paul Fox Trek\u0026rsquo;s Jeremy McKinley Sprinklr\u0026rsquo;s Ragy Thomas Verizon\u0026rsquo;s Mason Nelder Bazaarvoice\u0026rsquo;s Lisa Pearson General Mills\u0026rsquo; Kevin Hunt I had the honour of providing the closing keynote (video above and slidestack below ). Greg asked me to give the delegates \u0026lsquo;something to really think about\u0026rsquo; and I hope I did just that.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to thank everyone involved for making me feel so welcome.\nThe McKnight Principles I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with something to think about as you look at the question I ask on slide 33:\n\u0026ldquo;Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?\u0026rdquo;\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what are known as the McKnight Principles, laid out in 1948 by William L. McKnight, 3M president from 1929 and then chairman of the board, 1949 to 1966. Just how beautifully do these principles apply in the coming age of social business?\n\u0026ldquo;As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.\n\u0026ldquo;Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.\n\u0026ldquo;Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it\u0026rsquo;s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.\u0026rdquo;\nThe stack ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/3m-thinktank-conference-getting-social-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Edited 7th October to embed the event video and move \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/09/3m-thinktank-conference-getting-social-business/#stack\"\u003ethe slidestack\u003c/a\u003e\n to the end.] \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/UkhXr4u9\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://youtu.be/UkhXr4u9\u003c/a\u003e\n_J4 I\u0026rsquo;ve been hosted by \u003ca href=\"http://www.3m.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e3M\u003c/a\u003e\n today in Minneapolis St. Paul, and what great hosts too\u0026hellip; a fantastic team and \u003ca href=\"http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/3M-Company/Information/Resources/History/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ean incredible company heritage\u003c/a\u003e\n to boot. I could have spent a whole day exploring the Innovation Center, which is so well done I\u0026rsquo;m sure it brings out the geek in just about everyone.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/ggerik\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGregory Gerik\u003c/a\u003e\n is 3M\u0026rsquo;s transformation social media leader, and he led the design and delivery of the 3M ThinkTANK conference today. Kicked off beautifully with a keynote by \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/briansolis\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBrian Solis\u003c/a\u003e\n, we\u0026rsquo;ve been provoked, informed and entertained by:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"3M ThinkTANK conference – getting down to social business"},{"content":" Next week is Social Media Week . That\u0026rsquo;s well known. What\u0026rsquo;s less well known is that this is Social Data Week , and this facet of social underpins a lot of the stuff on next week\u0026rsquo;s agenda. Nevertheless, many people with social in their job description, from public relations to marketing to \u0026lsquo;digital\u0026rsquo;, are not yet fluent in the data foundations.\nOne aspect of social data that particularly excites me is the Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Web 3.0 describes the web as a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. It\u0026rsquo;s an awesome vision that\u0026rsquo;s playing out right now.\nBrandwatch is one company that understands social data better than most.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known Giles Palmer, the founder and CEO of Brandwatch, since I interviewed him for one of the first ebooks on social analytics all the way back in 2008. Brandwatch shares my enthusiasm for the Semantic Web and related technologies, so I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that the company has sponsored the production of this stack.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re procuring or reviewing your current choice of social listening, analytics and intelligence service, then check them out .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/introduction-web-3-0-social-data-week/","summary":"\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/26268959\" width=\"550\" height=\"460\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNext week is \u003ca href=\"http://socialmediaweek.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Media Week\u003c/a\u003e\n. That\u0026rsquo;s well known. What\u0026rsquo;s less well known is that this is \u003ca href=\"http://socialdataweek.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Data Week\u003c/a\u003e\n, and this facet of social underpins a lot of the stuff on next week\u0026rsquo;s agenda. Nevertheless, many people with social in their job description, from public relations to marketing to \u0026lsquo;digital\u0026rsquo;, are not yet fluent in the data foundations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne aspect of social data that particularly excites me is the Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Web 3.0 describes the web as a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. It\u0026rsquo;s an awesome vision that\u0026rsquo;s playing out right now.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An introduction to Web 3.0 for Social Data Week"},{"content":" The first edition of Attenzi - a social business story was published May 2013. And I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that today sees the publication of the second edition in association with Social Media Today .\nJoining the original foreword by Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, is a new foreword by Social Media Today founder and CEO, Robin Carey. The book also has a new front cover and an additional chapter.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in Atlanta today and for the next couple of days for Social Media Today\u0026rsquo;s inaugural conference, the Social Shake-Up . If you\u0026rsquo;re coming, do say hi. And as Robin says in her foreword, \u0026ldquo;Attenzi makes perfect reading for the flight to Atlanta, or indeed the flight home.\u0026rdquo; :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/attenzi-association-social-media-today/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Attenzi - a social business story, book cover\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Attenzi-NewCover-FLAT-200x260.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nThe first edition of \u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAttenzi - a social business story\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n was published May 2013. And I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that today sees the publication of the second edition in association with \u003ca href=\"http://socialmediatoday.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Media Today\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJoining the original foreword by Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, is a new foreword by Social Media Today founder and CEO, Robin Carey. The book also has a new front cover and an additional chapter.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Attenzi, in association with Social Media Today"},{"content":" Ever since we started the CIPR Social Media Panel we\u0026rsquo;ve been a pro-active bunch. I haven\u0026rsquo;t got the stats to prove it, but I\u0026rsquo;d bet the panel is the most active CIPR group. We launched the successful \u0026ldquo;Social Summer \u0026rdquo; sessions, developed Wikipedia guidance (subsequently adopted by equivalent organisations in Canada, Australia and South Africa), created CIPR TV , published the CIPR Social Media Guidance , updated the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s own social policy, published the CIPR Guide to Social Media Monitoring , and much more.\nSocial Summer was the genesis for the 2012 book, Share This , currently listed by Amazon amongst its UK Top 50 books in the PR category, and US Top 100. (Note to Amazon: PR is not a subsidiary discipline of Marketing, so the PR category should not be subsidiary to the Sales \u0026amp; Marketing category.)\nHaving had the distinct pain of editing Share This, Stephen Waddington demonstrated his masochistic side by proposing a follow up this year. Fortunately, Rob Brown volunteered as co-editor, and tonight is the launch party at the British Library of Share This Too .\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the blurb from the CIPR:\n\u0026ldquo;The book is split into 33 chapters over eight topic areas, covering the future of public relations, audiences and online habits, conversations, new channels, new connections, professional practice, business change and opportunities for the public relations industry, and future-proofing the public relations industry.\n\u0026ldquo;Each chapter has been contributed by one of the foremost experts in the given subject area, and the foreword for the book is from Brian Solis , digital analyst and author of What’s the Future of Business (WTF) .\n\u0026ldquo;Share This Too has been edited by CIPR Board Members Rob Brown and Stephen Waddington with contributions from Dominic Burch , Robin Wilson , Ged Carroll , Kate Matlock , Adam Parker , Mark Pack , Sharon O’Dea , Paul Fabretti , Michael Litman , Russell Goldsmith , Stephen Davies , Scott Seaborn , Dan Tyte , Matt Appleby , Kevin Ruck , Hanna Basha , Chris Norton , Becky McMichael , Rachel Miller , Stuart Bruce , Richard Bailey , Jane Wilson , Julio Romo , Jed Hallam , Katy Howell , Gemma Griffiths , Philip Sheldrake , Richard Bagnall , Drew Benvie , Andrew Smith and Simon Collister .\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/share-this-too/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1118676939\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Share This Too\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/share-this-too.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nEver since we started the CIPR Social Media Panel we\u0026rsquo;ve been a pro-active bunch. I haven\u0026rsquo;t got the stats to prove it, but I\u0026rsquo;d bet the panel is the most active CIPR group. We launched the successful \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/events-awards/social-summer\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Summer\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; sessions, developed \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/06/version-1-of-wikipedia-guidance-for-pr-practitioners/\" title=\"Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners\"\u003eWikipedia guidance\u003c/a\u003e\n (subsequently adopted by equivalent organisations in Canada, Australia and South Africa), created \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.tv\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR TV\u003c/a\u003e\n, published the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/social-media-guidance\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Social Media Guidance\u003c/a\u003e\n, updated the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s own social policy, published the \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/CIPRPaul/cipr-guide-to-social-media-monitoring\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Guide to Social Media Monitoring\u003c/a\u003e\n, and much more.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Share This Too"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;m kicking off #SCRM13 in London this morning. SCRM stands for social customer relationship management, and my role today is to get some energy into the room and, hopefully, encourage delegates to look up from simply slapping \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo; onto business as normal.\nUnfortunately, that\u0026rsquo;s precisely what many have been charged with doing. Those with appropriate powers of persuasion will effect organizational change I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but more to the point I feel that more chief executives need to attend Luke \u0026rsquo;s conferences, a sentiment I\u0026rsquo;m sure he\u0026rsquo;d endorse.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll finish this short post with a quote from one of the characters in Attenzi - a social business story , chapter 60 (they\u0026rsquo;re short chapters!)\n\u0026ldquo;Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer? Who do you think best knows the customer in the round today anyway – you or him?\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/07/what-exactly-is-social-business/","summary":"\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/24046641\" height=\"463\" width=\"550\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m kicking off \u003ca href=\"http://oursocialtimes.com/event/socialcrmlondon\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e#SCRM13\u003c/a\u003e\n in London this morning. SCRM stands for social customer relationship management, and my role today is to get some energy into the room and, hopefully, encourage delegates to look up from simply slapping \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo; onto business as normal.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnfortunately, that\u0026rsquo;s precisely what many have been charged with doing. Those with appropriate powers of persuasion will effect organizational change I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but more to the point I feel that more chief executives need to attend \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/lbrynleyjones\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLuke\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s conferences, a sentiment I\u0026rsquo;m sure he\u0026rsquo;d endorse.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What, exactly, is social business?"},{"content":"I was invited to kick off the CharityComms \u0026ldquo;Made to Measure Communications\u0026rdquo; event today. Being a fan of measurement, or business performance management more widely, I\u0026rsquo;m always excited about meeting new people and sharing ideas and insights, but given that many find the topic a little dry to say the least, I\u0026rsquo;m grateful for any and all interaction and enthusiasm event attendees might muster. And today\u0026rsquo;s audience didn\u0026rsquo;t let me down, so thank you for that.\nAs promised, here\u0026rsquo;s the stack.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/06/measuring-public-relations-a-presentation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI was invited to kick off the \u003ca href=\"http://charitycomms.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCharityComms\u003c/a\u003e\n \u0026ldquo;Made to Measure Communications\u0026rdquo; event today. Being a fan of measurement, or business performance management more widely, I\u0026rsquo;m always excited about meeting new people and sharing ideas and insights, but given that many find the topic a little dry to say the least, I\u0026rsquo;m grateful for any and all interaction and enthusiasm event attendees might muster. And today\u0026rsquo;s audience didn\u0026rsquo;t let me down, so thank you for that.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Measuring Public Relations – a presentation"},{"content":"What, exactly, is the value of social? This was the question I sought to help answer in my slidestack ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid earlier this month. And it was the overarching question that informed much of the three days of debate, discussion and deliberation.\nThis post is about two related developments – the latest from \u0026ldquo;The Conclave \u0026rdquo; (aka the #SMMStandards Coalition), and \u0026ldquo;A New Framework for Social Media Metrics and Measurement\u0026rdquo;.\nMeasurement standards \u0026ldquo;Perhaps the most important Social Media launch of the year \u0026rdquo; is how Katie Delahaye Paine portrays it. This is so-Katie that I can actually hear her saying it right now (as she might hear me cry \u0026ldquo;the most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain \u0026rdquo;!)\nKatie refers to a suite of social media measurement standards that represents the work of a collection of organisations (including AMEC, a full list is appended here ) informally referred to as The Conclave. Following 18 months of long conference-calls, meetings, slidestacks and email threads, we have posted standards for:\nContent and Sourcing Reach and Impressions Engagement and Conversation Influence Opinion \u0026amp; Advocacy Impact \u0026amp; Value Congratulations to everyone involved! A PDF of the definitions and status is available here . Comments remain open until the end of July, so dive in! I\u0026rsquo;ll be feeding back some of the points I\u0026rsquo;ve stumbled across in considering a new framework\u0026hellip;\nA new framework Having consistent definitions represents significant progress. It reminds me of the progress the Web Analytics Association (now the DAA ) made more than a decade ago in formalising the analysis of website performance. And indeed of every other more established profession, not least my first love – engineering.\nBut what to do next?\nThe Oxford English defines a framework as a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. Now that we\u0026rsquo;re close to having the component parts, subject to comments, we can turn our attention to the framework for their assembly so to speak.\nDon Bartholomew and Richard Bagnall took on the mantle of reviewing the current landscape and presented their recommendations for a new framework at the AMEC summit. As Don writes in his accompanying blog post , their work seeks to answer the question: How do we take the standards work coming from The Conclave and operationalize it to create proper social media measurement?\nReaders of my blog and my book The Business of Influence will know that I advocate integration of social media measurement into business performance management (BPM), of which the Balanced Scorecard is the dominant framework. If you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with this management approach, I recommend my slidestack for the Madrid summit, \u0026ldquo;What, exactly, is the value of social? \u0026rdquo;, and perhaps my May 2013 ebook Attenzi - a social business story .\nIf you want an even shorter explanation of my advocacy, it goes like this – why reinvent the wheel?\nSo you can imagine my interest in the framework proposed by Don and Richard was piqued when the only mention BPM secured in Don\u0026rsquo;s post is as follows: \u0026ldquo;There are certainly other ways to think about this (e.g. Business Performance Management) and we intend to possibly add others based on industry feedback and suggestions.\u0026rdquo;\nRemaining an advocate of BPM as the logical conclusion to this debate, I will review this proposed framework in that light. Here goes\u0026hellip;\nComments on the proposed new framework It\u0026rsquo;s worth noting Don\u0026rsquo;s clarification of the difference here between model and framework: \u0026ldquo;When we use the word model, we are referring to a representation of a system, in this case social media. In the original Valid Metrics Framework, the model used was the traditional sales funnel. A framework adds additional dimensions to the model and is operationalized with metrics.\u0026rdquo;\n1. Associated models\nFirst up, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t agree more heartily with the conclusion that the sales funnel is an inappropriate model in this context. As Don writes, it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;not the best way to model common uses of social media like customer relations and building relationships with stakeholder groups\u0026rdquo;. And as I wrote in The Business of Influence, \u0026ldquo;the application of the marketing funnel to the horizontal axis [of the existing AMEC framework] may turn out to be a weakness in its ability to help to identify appropriate metrics if ‘action’ is translated simply in terms of ringing up the cash register.\u0026rdquo;\nHowever, there appears then to be a contradiction, at least in emphasis. Having referenced the criticality of \u0026lsquo;social\u0026rsquo; when it comes to all stakeholder groups, Don and Richard pick out Forrester’s Customer Lifecycle and McKinsey’s Customer Journey models in the same paragraph as the phrase \u0026ldquo;social media marketing\u0026rdquo;; three references to a continued focus on the customer above all other stakeholders. I say there appears to be a contradiction, but fortunately the resulting model does not reference the customer exclusively. I fear however that the couching of the model may lead many to read it with the customer solely in mind.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the proposed new model:\n2. Audience\nThe model references the \u0026ldquo;audience\u0026rdquo;. It quotes the new measurement standards definition of impact – \u0026ldquo;effect of a social media campaign, program or effort on the target audience\u0026rdquo;. It also qualifies exposure – \u0026ldquo;create potential audience exposure\u0026rdquo;.\nI know I can be pedantic when it comes to words and their definitions, but our thoughts and behaviours are influenced by the very language we employ. In this instance, the Oxford English explains that audience means \u0026ldquo;the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event\u0026rdquo;. With this in mind, I always think references to audience in the context of social media are inappropriate. It\u0026rsquo;s only appropriate in terms of broadcast. I usually defer to the word stakeholders instead, and some prefer publics or constituencies (ie, those having a say). And at the end of the day perhaps \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;people with an interest or that matter\u0026rdquo; says it all.\n3. Influence\nThe model clarifies \u0026ldquo;influence\u0026rdquo; by reference to the definition in the measurement standards, but the measurement standards as they stand only recognise the top level definition of influence presented in WOMMA\u0026rsquo;s Influencer Guidebook , and not the accompanying qualification: \u0026ldquo;There are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. The potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/after).\u0026rdquo;\nAs I wrote in my post about the guidebook , I\u0026rsquo;d prefer to emphasise the second of these over the first if only for the simple reason that it\u0026rsquo;s the very outcome that so-called influencer marketers seek. Indeed, what is the intended outcome of your marketing (customer) and PR (all stakeholders) campaigns, and the design of your organisation overall, if it\u0026rsquo;s not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you\u0026rsquo;d like, and to be sensitive to how they\u0026rsquo;d like you to think and behave? Put like this, influence is the final outcome of any model in the context here, the consequence of which creates mutual value (and business profit, in the context of for-profit entities), or not.\n4. Value\nUnder \u0026ldquo;impact\u0026rdquo; the proposed model defines value as \u0026ldquo;the financial impact\u0026rdquo;. This is counter to the current standards documentation, which, following some last minute tweaks admittedly, defines value as \u0026ldquo;the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.\u0026rdquo; ROI is one but not the sole way to express the value of something.\n5. Advocacy\nIn my view, any model that acknowledges the possibility of advocacy emerging must also recognise opposition and advocacy for competing agenda. I also don\u0026rsquo;t quite understand why advocacy comes after impact.\n6. Programmatic-level, channel-specific and business perspectives\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the proposed new framework:\nIt recognises the need for tiered metrics (\u0026ldquo;programmatic-level, channel-specific and business perspectives\u0026rdquo;) – a similarity it shares with or perhaps borrows from business performance management. Interestingly, the Balanced Scorecard also talks about perspectives, although with an emphasis on aligning human, information and organizational assets, processes and corresponding performance metrics with strategy.\n6. Paid Owned Earned\nDon writes that an alternative version of the framework employs the Paid Owned Earned media (POEm) taxonomy to address the framework\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;phases\u0026rsquo;, and that this will be published shortly. The model also references \u0026ldquo;owned\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;earned\u0026rdquo; under \u0026ldquo;engagement\u0026rdquo;.\nI dislike this taxonomy for the simple reason that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen it contribute any strategic value. In fact, all I have seen it do is prop up 20th Century organizational silos and reinforce misconceptions (eg, that PR is focused on earned / unpaid media when in fact it\u0026rsquo;s agnostic in this respect). See \u0026ldquo;The Influence View of Content \u0026rdquo; for more on this.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t mind then if this alternative version didn\u0026rsquo;t surface, but I do seem to be alone in my dislike of POEm.\n7. Impact\nThe standards assert that \u0026ldquo;impact and value represent the ultimate outcome of a social media effort.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t believe then that any framework can consider programmatic-level or channel-specific metrics in terms of impact. It just doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to me.\nThe influence scorecard Don, Richard and I have spoken at various lengths about this topic, and indeed the Influence Scorecard framework I have outlined to connect social media measurement into the Balanced Scorecard and similar BPM frameworks. Blog posts are a great way to exchange ideas and air points of view, and I hope such \u0026ldquo;working out loud\u0026rdquo; continues, but I wonder if AMEC and The Conclave might not host a workshop on just this topic.\nMr. Leggetter? Katie?\nMembers of the Conclave Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication The Chartered Institute of Public Relations The Institute for Public Relations The Public Relations Society of America The Council of PR Firms The Global Alliance for Public Relations The International Association of Business Communicators The Society for New Communications Research The Digital Analytics Association (previously the WAA) The Word of Mouth Marketing Association The Advertising Research Foundation Federation Internationale des Bureauxs d\u0026rsquo;Extraits de Press. The Conclave\u0026rsquo;s #SMMstandards initiative also includes:\nThe American Association of Advertising Agencies The Association of National Advertisers The Interactive Advertising Bureau and the following \u0026ldquo;client organizations\u0026rdquo;:\nDell GM McDonalds Ford P\u0026amp;G SAS Southwest Airlines Thomson Reuters. 21st June 2013 Don posts a reply on his blog: New Framework for Social Media Measurement – Update \u0026amp; Debate .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/06/social-media-measurement-after-madrid/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/05/what-exactly-is-the-value-of-social/\"\u003eWhat, exactly, is the value of social?\u003c/a\u003e\n This was the question I sought to help answer in my slidestack ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid earlier this month. And it was the overarching question that informed much of the three days of debate, discussion and deliberation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis post is about two related developments – the latest from \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.smmstandards.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Conclave\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; (aka the #SMMStandards Coalition), and \u0026ldquo;A New Framework for Social Media Metrics and Measurement\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"measurement-standards\"\u003eMeasurement standards\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/2013/06/perhaps-the-most-important-social-media-launch-of-the-year-.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePerhaps the most important Social Media launch of the year\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; is how Katie Delahaye Paine portrays it. This is so-Katie that I can actually hear her saying it right now (as she might hear me cry \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/04/the-most-exciting-development-in-pr-since-the-cluetrain/\"\u003ethe most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKatie refers to \u003ca href=\"http://www.smmstandards.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Complete-standards-document4.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea suite of social media measurement standards\u003c/a\u003e\n that represents the work of a collection of organisations (including AMEC, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/06/social-media-measurement-after-madrid/#conclave\"\u003ea full list is appended here\u003c/a\u003e\n) informally referred to as The Conclave. Following 18 months of long conference-calls, meetings, slidestacks and email threads, we have posted standards for:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social media measurement, after Madrid"},{"content":" According to its website, the Open Mobile Alliance \u0026ldquo;was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network.\u0026rdquo;\nThe OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve met some great people today and we\u0026rsquo;ve covered some pretty geeky things between us, but the experience has left me with a renewed appreciation of the differences between \u0026rsquo;net\u0026rsquo; and \u0026rsquo;telco\u0026rsquo; people. For example, this was the first conference I\u0026rsquo;ve been to in many years that didn\u0026rsquo;t have an agreed hashtag, or many people tweeting come to that. And mine was the only stack not to claim copyright, rather my normal Creative Common licensing. Trivial examples maybe, but indicative nonetheless of a different (but no less apposite) mindset.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried my best to persuade a standards-setting collective to think harder about when to intervene and about the longer-term ramifications they might have on all the good stuff the Internet, the open Web and related technologies can do and are doing for humanity and our custodianship of the planet. That\u0026rsquo;s not to undermine the value of standards, far from it, but as the saying goes, everything can start to look like a nail when you have a hammer.\nI asked them to think about \u0026ldquo;humans\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;consumers\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;users\u0026rdquo;, and about putting the facility for all humans to realise their full potential ahead of shareholders. That\u0026rsquo;s not counter-capitalist. I put shareholders\u0026rsquo; best interests first by putting them second. You can find out more about this perspective in my recent ebook, Attenzi - a social business story .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/06/a-presentation-to-the-open-mobile-alliance-conference-on-big-data/","summary":"\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/22554730\" width=\"550\" height=\"463\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to its website, the \u003ca href=\"http://openmobilealliance.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOpen Mobile Alliance\u003c/a\u003e\n \u0026ldquo;was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A presentation to the Open Mobile Alliance conference on big data"},{"content":"[Also published on Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s #bizremagined website .]\nI’m fascinated by innovations in the language of innovation. Is it the inclinations of the innovator or the characteristics of the innovation that suggests new words and phrases? When and why is existing lexicon deemed inadequate? Why do we embrace some expressions yet others wither and die?\nA quick browse at netlingo.com turns up such beauties as advermation, mouse potato, and idea hamster. All new to me, and for all I know dead already. I had a go a few years ago with Internetome to describe the physical manifestations of the Internet of Things, and let’s just say the word hasn’t made the Oxford English. Yet.\nEnter the phrase “social business”, bandied around with increasing frequency. What is it exactly?\nWell perhaps this particular turn of phrase is sufficiently nascent to mean different things to different people. The candidate meanings form a spectrum to my mind, with “an organisation that uses social media” at one end (with the hashtags #socmed and #socbiz used interchangeably), and a deep, transformative opportunity at the other. Whether or not such a profound transformation ends up being labelled social business, we’ve tried hard at Euler Partners to articulate what it might mean in less ambiguous terms.\nIn setting out our stall, the first assertion we make is that social media are the eggs in the social business cake\u0026hellip; a memorable catchphrase we hope that conveys that social media is essential but far from sufficient to effect social business. And then things get a little separated from today’s typical worldview, which I guess is the property of anything that might be described as transformative. Here’s our thinking.\nWe don’t have (social) media for media’s sake, but to communicate. And we don’t communicate for communication’s sake, but to influence. You have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, and influencing and being influenced is part and parcel of organisational life. Indeed, of life.\nOrganisations have invested lots of money in information technologies over past decades to track the flows of time, money and materials, and now, with the advent of digital services, social media and powerful analytical capabilities, they can contemplate tracking influence flows too.\nIn our view, reputation management does not actually mean managing reputation, and brand management does not actually mean managing a brand. They mean actively attending to the business of influencing and being influenced such that the resultant beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are conducive to our achieving organisational objectives. There’s influence in everything an organisation does. And sometimes in what it does not do.\nWe define social business then as designing the organisation around those influence flows, connecting: its people, partners, customers and other stakeholders; data, information and knowledge in and all around it; more openly, productively and profitably with the application of social web, big data and related information technologies.\nAnd because those influence flows are in constant flux, the design of the organisation is too. Critically, the organisation is no longer defined as the sum of its payroll either.\nThis is the organisational perspective of social business, but what of the human viewpoint? What about the everyday reality of individuals in a society that ‘gets’ social business? What question might we ask ourselves to gauge progression of this transformation in this respect?\nHere’s a candidate.\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organisation (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build richer, more productive relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability, shared values and shared value?\nWe believe that organisations that pursue such a definition of social business are more likely to secure competitive advantage over those looking simply to apply social media technologies to support 20th Century ways of working. Hopefully, you get our meaning.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/05/the-meaning-of-social-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://www.businessreimagined.org/the-linguistic-considerations-of-social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAlso published on Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s #bizremagined website\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI’m fascinated by innovations in the language of innovation. Is it the inclinations of the innovator or the characteristics of the innovation that suggests new words and phrases? When and why is existing lexicon deemed inadequate? Why do we embrace some expressions yet others wither and die?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA quick browse at netlingo.com turns up such beauties as advermation, mouse potato, and idea hamster. All new to me, and for all I know dead already. I had a go a few years ago with Internetome to describe the physical manifestations of the Internet of Things, and let’s just say the word hasn’t made the Oxford English. Yet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnter the phrase “social business”, bandied around with increasing frequency. What is it exactly?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell perhaps this particular turn of phrase is sufficiently nascent to mean different things to different people. The candidate meanings form a spectrum to my mind, with “an organisation that uses social media” at one end (with the hashtags #socmed and #socbiz used interchangeably), and a deep, transformative opportunity at the other. Whether or not such a profound transformation ends up being labelled social business, we’ve tried hard at Euler Partners to articulate what it might mean in less ambiguous terms.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The meaning of social business"},{"content":" The past several months have been hectic for the steering teams at AMEC and The Conclave ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid, 5th - 7th June. We\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to pull together a cohesive and cogent set of definitions for social media measurement, and my last post described just one such workstream, on defining influence .\nIt\u0026rsquo;s gone very well so far I think, not least due to the earnest leadership from people like Barry Leggetter, Katie Delahaye Paine, Richard Bagnall and David Rockland. So well in fact that we\u0026rsquo;re now left training our attention on perhaps the biggest question of them all: What\u0026rsquo;s the value to my organization of doing all this stuff?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a tricky question once you\u0026rsquo;ve found all the good reason to ignore much of the smattering splattering the web, but one I believe can be approached effectively with diligence and professionalism. The slidestack here is my contribution to the debate, and I hope it motivates you to contribute your points of view.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/05/what-exactly-is-the-value-of-social/","summary":"\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/22124936\" height=\"463\" width=\"550\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe past several months have been hectic for the steering teams at \u003ca href=\"http://www.amecorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://smmstandards.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Conclave\u003c/a\u003e\n ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid, 5th - 7th June. We\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to pull together a cohesive and cogent set of definitions for social media measurement, and my last post described just one such workstream, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/05/influencing-influencer-marketing/\" title=\"Influencing Influencer Marketing\"\u003eon defining influence\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s gone very well so far I think, not least due to the earnest leadership from people like Barry Leggetter, Katie Delahaye Paine, Richard Bagnall and David Rockland. So well in fact that we\u0026rsquo;re now left training our attention on perhaps the biggest question of them all: What\u0026rsquo;s the value to my organization of doing all this stuff?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What, exactly, is the value of social?"},{"content":" WOMMA \u0026rsquo;s new guidance on influencer marketing begins with the assertion: \u0026ldquo;This is not an update to the 2008 WOMMA Influencer Handbook - this is a complete rewrite \u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to AMEC and The Conclave , and it was in this capacity that Brad Fay and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA\u0026rsquo;s Neil Beam to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it\u0026rsquo;s turned out to be.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve expressed Euler Partners\u0026rsquo; approach to influence in recent posts, notably \u0026ldquo;Influence - request for comments \u0026rdquo; (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular:\n7 billion influencers There are, I\u0026rsquo;m told, 7 billion of us on the planet, so there are 7 billion influencers. The new phrase then for those considered to be more influential than others is \u0026ldquo;key influencer\u0026rdquo;. This may sound like semantics, but behaviour is affected by language. If practitioners don\u0026rsquo;t appreciate the complexity of influence they will be less effective in their consultancy and practice.\nA cohort The mathematicians and data scientists presenting their work at the ACM SIGKDD Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining investigate what they call \u0026ldquo;influence maximisation\u0026rdquo; (see the slidestack for more information). Importantly, they\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that we can\u0026rsquo;t readily attribute one individual with \u0026lsquo;having\u0026rsquo; influence. We can only approach the problem by identifying a cohort of individuals who together may help the influence sought spread further than otherwise.\nI\u0026rsquo;m particularly delighted then that there are seven references to \u0026ldquo;cohort\u0026rdquo; in the guidance.\nDefining influence We define influence as a change in opinion or behaviour. The guidance proposes: \u0026ldquo;The ability to cause or contribute to a change in opinion or behavior.\u0026rdquo;\nWe still defer to our definition because it\u0026rsquo;s the very outcome that so-called influencer marketers seek. Any quantitative attribution of influence being \u0026lsquo;possessed\u0026rsquo; by an individual can only be qualified by looking for this outcome. This distinction has been recognised in the guidance however, and appropriately so:\n\u0026ldquo;There are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. The potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/after).\u0026rdquo;\nReciprocity So far so brilliant then. Yet we believe one thing is missing from the guidance, and from our experience of working with marketing practitioners and those intent on the excellence model of PR, this omission characterises the different emphases of the two disciplines.\nWe have a mantra: to influence better, be influenced better.\nThis reciprocity is not blatantly recognised let alone promoted in the guidance. The nearest thing to it comes in the listing of five key ethical principles: trust, integrity, respect, honesty, responsibility. You could argue that to build trust and demonstrate respect requires working as hard at being influenced by those that matter to you as trying to influence them. We think our mantra should stand alone from a pure effectiveness perspective however, and perhaps we can continue to exert influence as and when the guidance is next up for revision.\nVisit www.womma.org/influencers now to get your copy of the guidebook.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/05/influencing-influencer-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.womma.org/influencers\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"WOMMA Influencer Guidebook 2013\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/WOMMA-Influencer-Guidebook-2013.png\" title=\"WOMMA Influencer Guidebook 2013\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.womma.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWOMMA\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s new \u003ca href=\"http://www.womma.org/influencers\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eguidance on influencer marketing\u003c/a\u003e\n begins with the assertion: \u0026ldquo;This is not an update to the 2008 WOMMA Influencer Handbook - this is a complete rewrite \u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to \u003ca href=\"http://www.amecorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://smmstandards.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Conclave\u003c/a\u003e\n, and it was in this capacity that \u003ca href=\"http://www.kellerfay.com/about/our-team/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBrad Fay\u003c/a\u003e\n and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/neilbeam\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNeil Beam\u003c/a\u003e\n to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it\u0026rsquo;s turned out to be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve expressed Euler Partners\u0026rsquo; approach to influence in recent posts, notably \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/03/influence-request-for-comments/\"\u003eInfluence - request for comments\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influencing Influencer Marketing"},{"content":" My new ebook is out today .\nI\u0026rsquo;m really excited about it because I\u0026rsquo;m excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here\u0026rsquo;s how the book is presented.\nAttenzi – 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.\nThe story is designed to galvanize the organization.\nAs 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.\nPerhaps most controversially, the story begins to explore the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated management thinking for the past two decades.\nI could write more here, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of that lately, so perhaps I should just invite you to click over to the ebook now .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/05/attenzi-a-social-business-story/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/\" title=\"Attenzi - a social business story\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Attenzi bookccover\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/bookcover_mockup.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.attenzi.com/\" title=\"Attenzi - a social business story\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMy new ebook is out today\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m really excited about it because I\u0026rsquo;m excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here\u0026rsquo;s how the book is presented.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAttenzi – a social business story\u003c/em\u003e 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Attenzi - a social business story"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]\nI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m delighted it\u0026rsquo;s carrying on in their safe hands.\nWe have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; in font size 100!\nIncreasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name \u0026ldquo;social business\u0026rdquo;, and it\u0026rsquo;s increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.\nI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m making progress with the following question, what do you think?\u0026hellip;\nDo you help all the individuals associated with your organisation (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build richer, more productive relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability, shared values and shared value?\nIf this challenge whets your appetite for social business, allow me to finish my Roundup years with a plug. My new ebook tells the story of a team embracing social business, and it\u0026rsquo;s out mid-May. Free. Hashtag #attenzi.\nThanks for your attention and enthusiasm over the years. All the best.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/04/what-is-social-business/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m delighted it\u0026rsquo;s carrying on in their safe hands.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; in font size 100!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIncreasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name \u0026ldquo;social business\u0026rdquo;, and it\u0026rsquo;s increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m making progress with the following question, what do you think?\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What is social business?"},{"content":"[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nYou should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.\nThis Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s Wikipedia guidance , published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)\nIn actual fact, Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s rules for PR practice aren\u0026rsquo;t necessarily that accessible or readily understood, which explains our effort last year to co-develop this more cogent guidance in full partnership with Wikimedia UK representing the Wikipedian community. It was a lengthy and detailed process, but very worthwhile I believe.\nBP has been following these expectations to the letter. Its public relations representative has been engaging with Wikipedians on the talk pages of relevant entries, specifically regarding the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, but not editing entries directly.\nAnd yet here\u0026rsquo;s CNET\u0026rsquo;s headline: \u0026ldquo;BP accused of rewriting environmental record on Wikipedia. \u0026rdquo; It took the publication three days to update its article: \u0026ldquo;This piece was re-edited to stress that BP is following Wikipedia guidelines.\u0026rdquo;\nThe \u0026ldquo;rage\u0026rdquo; CNET describes amongst Wikipedia editors is aimed as much at their own for taking suggested contributions from BP verbatim. But Wikipedians are also critical that the editor representing BP is paid by BP and \u0026ldquo;checks with his higher-ups before responding to any questions. \u0026rdquo;\nIn Wikipedia speak, this is known as paid editing. As a PR practitioner, you are a paid editor when it comes to Wikipedia entries relating to your organisation or client. Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s corresponding policy asserts that \u0026ldquo;paid editing of a talk page is generally acceptable, but undisclosed paid editing of a policy page is forbidden. All paid editors are required to disclose their paid status on both their user page and on the affected article\u0026rsquo;s talk page.\u0026rdquo;\nBP\u0026rsquo;s editor did just that.\nThe excellence theory of public relations states that the profession is about working towards mutual understanding to build goodwill. Well, it seems to me that misunderstanding still reigns here.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/04/how-dare-they/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Written originally for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/how.dare.they\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57575460-93/bp-accused-of-rewriting-environmental-record-on-wikipedia/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"CNET screenshot BP Wikipedia\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/CNET-screenshot-BP-Wikipedia.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/06/version-1-of-wikipedia-guidance-for-pr-practitioners/\" title=\"Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners\"\u003ethe CIPR\u0026rsquo;s Wikipedia guidance\u003c/a\u003e\n, published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How dare they!"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m chairing a session at midday today at the Social Media Measurement \u0026amp; Monitoring conference on selecting social media metrics. Joining me on the panel are Katie Delahaye Paine, Andrew Smith, Matt Owen, and Jacqui Taylor.\nSee you there?\nTo coincide with this event, I\u0026rsquo;m calling for comments regarding the standards setting process for the concept of influence ahead of the AMEC European Summit in June. Please take a look at this stack, and influence proceedings :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/influence-request-for-comments/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m chairing a session at midday today at the \u003ca href=\"http://oursocialtimes.com/socialmediameasurement/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Media Measurement \u0026amp; Monitoring\u003c/a\u003e\n conference on selecting social media metrics. Joining me on the panel are Katie Delahaye Paine, Andrew Smith, Matt Owen, and Jacqui Taylor.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSee you there?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo coincide with this event, I\u0026rsquo;m calling for comments regarding the standards setting process for the concept of influence ahead of the AMEC European Summit in June. Please take a look at this stack, and influence proceedings :-)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence – request for comments"},{"content":"Professor Tom Watson (@tomwatson1709 , @historyofpr ) invited me to deliver a \u0026lsquo;masterclass\u0026rsquo; lecture at Bournemouth University on Friday. (When asked about PR higher education in the UK, most people would mention Bournemouth and Leeds Metropolitan.)\nStudent elections were at fever pitch, and there was a real energy about campus. The students at The Media School were on top form – in fact, I usually only get the calibre of questions they threw at me days or weeks after someone has digested my book or a presentation. So thanks to everyone who attended and participated.\nHT to @lauramanninen , @kbadders , @hannaherowley , @edinjel , @JessicaNorthPR , @lottsGC , @FleurieFM , @morellopr , @BenjaminDeacon .\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the stack.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/masterclass-at-bournemouth-university/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eProfessor Tom Watson (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/tomwatson1709\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@tomwatson1709\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/historyofpr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@historyofpr\u003c/a\u003e\n) invited me to deliver a \u0026lsquo;masterclass\u0026rsquo; lecture at Bournemouth University on Friday. (When asked about PR higher education in the UK, most people would mention Bournemouth and Leeds Metropolitan.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStudent elections were at fever pitch, and there was a real energy about campus. The students at \u003ca href=\"http://media.bournemouth.ac.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Media School\u003c/a\u003e\n were on top form – in fact, I usually only get the calibre of questions they threw at me days or weeks after someone has digested my book or a presentation. So thanks to everyone who attended and participated.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"'Masterclass' at Bournemouth University"},{"content":"I enjoy Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™ (#fauxtrademarks). As amazing as social media is becoming, it\u0026rsquo;s still no full substitute for eye-to-eye interaction. I met the co-founding CTO of Yammer this week, Adam Pisoni , and our conversation came to life immediately in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t believe would be as easy to kindle pixel-to-pixel.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an interesting question I think. Can you distinguish in your mind the kinds of online relationships you have with people you see physically from time to time from those you\u0026rsquo;ve yet to meet? I believe you probably can, and probably do.\nThis topic just cropped up again for me this morning. It may be a sixth of the way through 2013, but Dell has just published a little slidestack quoting some pundits, including yours truly, on some development aspects of social media this year. Geoff Livingston is quoted as saying: \u0026ldquo;I really believe in events. Online becomes much more substantial when someone meets you face to face. Try to create ways to meet your stakeholders in person so you can cultivate a deeper substantial relationship.\u0026rdquo;\nDo you think digital technologies can help crack this nut? How? When?\nSocial Media Predictions for 2013 from Dell Social Media ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/dell-social-media-predictions-2013/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI enjoy Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™ (#fauxtrademarks). As amazing as social media is becoming, it\u0026rsquo;s still no full substitute for eye-to-eye interaction. I met the co-founding CTO of Yammer this week, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/yammeradam\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAdam Pisoni\u003c/a\u003e\n, and our conversation came to life immediately in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t believe would be as easy to kindle pixel-to-pixel.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s an interesting question I think. Can you distinguish in your mind the kinds of online relationships you have with people you see physically from time to time from those you\u0026rsquo;ve yet to meet? I believe you probably can, and probably do.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Dell Social Media Predictions 2013"},{"content":"I have asked six people with senior positions in techie professions who they thought \u0026ldquo;does great PR\u0026rdquo; in the tech sector. Now these individuals are not in marketing and PR functions, so you\u0026rsquo;ll forgive my casual turn of phrase I hope.\nYou might know I detest the idea that you might \u0026ldquo;PR something\u0026rdquo;, as if PR is as tactical and atomic as picking up the phone or putting a release on a wire, but I deliberately didn\u0026rsquo;t wish to infect them with my view of public relations excellence. I wanted to hear what they\u0026rsquo;d say unprompted, unguided.\nEach proffered two or three companies. Samsung and IBM were mentioned twice. Google thrice. But out front with four mentions was Apple.\nNow anyone who follows the world\u0026rsquo;s first or second largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization (it swaps places regularly with Exxon Mobil) will know that they\u0026rsquo;re actually quite a secretive bunch. Steve Jobs infected the company with the idea that it knows what\u0026rsquo;s best for the customer, and any idea that it should work with the rest of us in defining future products and services appears plain counter-cultural.\nIf you, like me, define public relations as pursuing mutual understanding to build goodwill , the PR function at Apple appears quite asymmetric. As and when it suits its agenda, they\u0026rsquo;ll tell you. Otherwise get back in line. End of. I always feel a reluctance on Apple\u0026rsquo;s part to discuss its contractors\u0026rsquo; labour practices , its own environmental and business practices, and the occasional product mess up .\nI can think of a hundred companies more open and communicative than Apple, more transparent and willing to bring you into the fold. So how come my half dozen correspondents regard it so highly?\nI think the answer is simple, and funnily enough relates back to that definition of public relations – and not the one I thought they might have. It appears my assumptions were somewhat misplaced.\nApple delivers awesome products and services. They work. Beautifully. And through the products, and the Genius Bars in their stores, they delight their customers. Apple\u0026rsquo;s approach to PR is to make a promise that exceeds anything else on the market, often by some margin, and then to deliver it near flawlessly. Its customers conclude \u0026ldquo;Apple gets me\u0026rdquo;.\nIn other words, not only is public relations far more than the media relations activity it\u0026rsquo;s often taken to be, it\u0026rsquo;s a function permeating the entire organisation. There is influence in everything an organisation does, and sometimes in what it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do.\nBut Apple\u0026rsquo;s over-arching attitude is risky.\nNo company can rely on \u0026rsquo;talking through their products\u0026rsquo; consistently for ever. Unless Apple has alighted on a previously unknown strategic elixir, there will come a time when they need a more robust community constructed around a nexus of shared values rather than a shared love of the iPad. Some Apple fanboys will argue this already exists, but I\u0026rsquo;d argue they only feel it through the product.\nApple needs to adapt its culture and inculcate PR excellence now, before it really needs it.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the full definition of PR I go by:\nThe profession of public relations entails the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill.\nThis process is critical to maintaining and growing relevance, reputation and trust, and therefore public relations is central to setting and achieving organisational objectives.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/02/great-product/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have asked six people with senior positions in techie professions who they thought \u0026ldquo;does great PR\u0026rdquo; in the tech sector. Now these individuals are not in marketing and PR functions, so you\u0026rsquo;ll forgive my casual turn of phrase I hope.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Apple iPad mini – GREAT (PR)ODUCT\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/apple_ipad_great_product.png\"\u003eYou might know I detest the idea that you might \u0026ldquo;PR something\u0026rdquo;, as if PR is as tactical and atomic as picking up the phone or putting a release on a wire, but I deliberately didn\u0026rsquo;t wish to infect them with my view of public relations excellence. I wanted to hear what they\u0026rsquo;d say unprompted, unguided.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach proffered two or three companies. Samsung and IBM were mentioned twice. Google thrice. But out front with four mentions was Apple.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow anyone who follows the world\u0026rsquo;s first or second largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization (it swaps places regularly with Exxon Mobil) will know that they\u0026rsquo;re actually quite a secretive bunch. Steve Jobs infected the company with the idea that it knows what\u0026rsquo;s best for the customer, and any idea that it should work with the rest of us in defining future products and services appears plain counter-cultural.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you, like me, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/11/public-relations-defined-%E2%80%93-the-anatomy-of-a-candidate-definition-ver-0-2/\"\u003edefine public relations as pursuing mutual understanding to build goodwill\u003c/a\u003e\n, the PR function at Apple appears quite asymmetric. As and when it suits its agenda, they\u0026rsquo;ll tell you. Otherwise get back in line. End of. I always feel a reluctance on Apple\u0026rsquo;s part to discuss \u003ca href=\"http://www.shanghaidaily.com/nsp/National/2012/09/06/Students%2Bsay%2Bthey%2Bare%2Bforced%2Bto%2Bwork%2Bon%2Bnew%2BiPhone%2B5/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eits contractors\u0026rsquo; labour practices\u003c/a\u003e\n, its own environmental and business practices, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/apple-maps-fire-australia/62116/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe occasional product mess up\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"GREAT (PR)ODUCT"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I\u0026rsquo;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.\nI took an action to create \u0026ldquo;something to shoot at\u0026rdquo;, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we\u0026rsquo;re an open and transparent working group, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it here too. Do get in touch if you\u0026rsquo;d like to tell me what you think. Now\u0026rsquo;s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can\u0026rsquo;t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.\nDate: 10th February 2013\nTo: The working group on influence\nAbout this document This document is \u0026ldquo;something to shoot at” in working towards the objectives of the AMEC / Conclave working group on influence.\nWe are trying to develop a standards approach to the terminology of and approach to influence flows – how influence goes around comes around – for the useful application by organizations seeking to encourage various stakeholders to think or behave as the organization would like.\n[Update – Thanks to David Geddes for pointing out that the last paragraph may be interpretted as being supportive of an asymmetric model of PR ie. getting the message out at the expense of getting it in. It is not intended to. I always think of influence flowing every which way when invoking the word, although the ultimate objective of PR practice is helping the organization set and achieve its objectives.]\nTo put that objective into perspective, I believe the best way to exert useful influence remains to deliver great products and services so that your customers evangelize your brand to friends / family / colleagues / industry peers, and to be a well-run organization so that your employees and partners evangelize working with you[1]. As social media facilitates what some call radical transparency, the 20th Century axiom ‘perception is reality’ is transformed in the 21st to ‘reality is perception’.\nAbout influence You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done[2].\nInfluence is complex. In other words, changing your mind or actions is the result of many stimuli over time and entails conscious and subconscious processes. There is currently no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behaviour[3].\nDictum 1 – Influence is a change in opinion or behaviour.\nComplexity Complex systems aren’t easy to grasp. Many people appreciate that the weather is complex, that stock markets are complex, that city traffic is complex, but attributing relatively simple cause and effect in the business of influence appears too tempting for many. Oprah made him buy the book. The ad made her buy the sneakers. Her sister’s recommendation made her vacation in Italy.\nWhile complexity science doesn’t rule out the instances in which a single stimulus suffices, it also recognises that this is the exception rather than the norm. In fact, she’s romanticised an Italian vacation for years, and for many reasons she herself can’t tease apart.\nReductionist approaches do not work here. Reductionism assumes that the underlying mechanisms of a system\u0026rsquo;s behaviour can be understood by studying its parts independently. A complex system, however, is by definition more than the sum of its parts and its overall behaviour emerges through the interactions of constituent parts.\nA complex system is one that by design or function or both is difficult to understand and verify[4]. It’s a system in which there are multiple interactions between many different components[5]. Complex systems constantly evolve and unfold over time[6]. Complexity bridges the gap between the individual and the collective: from psychology to sociology, from organism to ecosystem, from genes to protein networks, from atoms to materials, from the PC to the World Wide Web, from individuals to society[7].\nDictum 2 – Influence is both input to and output of a complex system.\nEveryday language The word “influence” is used commonly in attributing an entity some contextual facility to get others to change their minds and actions. For example: The Beatles were an influential band; Chomsky is an influential intellectual; Alexander McQueen is/was influential in fashion.\nWe may listen out for Beatle-esque riffs, and look out for Chomsky citations and McQueen fashion memes. Perhaps it’s safe to say that the accolade has most often been awarded qualitatively rather than quantitatively. People do not generally count up the number of tracks that seem to have a Beatles-like sound for example. However, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index[8] makes plain the incredible frequency with which Chomsky is cited.\nSocial media appears to leave traces similar to Chomsky’s citation count. The sentiment of both citations and social media references is usually taken to be positive, as supportive, and while the definition of influence above does not infer congruity, the organizational application requires it. This should therefore be made explicit in related standards.\nTypically, both citations and social media references are interpreted as influence having happened and therefore the individual having had more influence than otherwise, and therefore having more influence. It is unclear under which circumstances this assumption may be valid, or indeed on what basis we might assume influence decays or grows with the passing of time. The zenith of Vanilla Ice’s influence on the music scene is past, but the full impact of the Reverend Thomas Bayes’ mathematics (in machine learning) has only played out more than two centuries after his death.\nCommon English language is therefore ambiguous. Influence is apparently both the ability one is attributed to change another’s opinion or behaviour, and the very changing of that opinion or behaviour. The first describes the source of or contributor to a change in the system, the latter describes the result. This ambiguity causes confusion.\nRecommendations I recommend that our standards define influence as a change in opinion or behaviour (per dictum 1 above), and that we substitute “potential influence” for the other use of the word. It is, after all, nothing more than a potential. The fluttering of the butterfly’s wings may have contributed to a storm this time last month, but that does not mean it will again. The driver’s driving style may have contributed to the traffic jam this time last week, but that does not mean it will again.\nOur standards should be accompanied by a brief explanation of complexity. It is central to explaining our work and therefore to winning support for the standards. The simple insertion of the word ‘potential’ helps make this point.\nWe must scope what quantities, analyses and algorithms might help determine a proxy measure of potential influence, and how the corresponding context and conditions should be described.\nSome critics of those services claiming to divine “influence scores” prefer to say that such services quantify little more than the propensity for an individual’s social media contributions to be shared. Some claim such services are confusing popularity for influence[9]. An alternative label – social capital – has been suggested, but this phrase has been used for more than a century to describe the value of the network rather than that of an individual participant in a network[10], and we don’t want to introduce new ambiguities.\nI think we must describe the characteristics and capabilities we consider elemental to any service that aspires to ‘score’ potential influence, a deficit in which forfeits the service from claiming the descriptor.\nIn compliance with the 7th Barcelona Principle[11] (that transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement), I recommend that we insist upon methodological transparency. We cannot endorse black boxes[12]. In fact I believe we have to condemn such opacity in this context explicitly.\nDictum 3 – Professionals don’t rely on opaque analyses.\nAcademic studies Leonard Euler kicked off the field of network science in 1735 with the Seven Bridges of Königsberg[13] problem featuring four nodes and seven edges. Today’s academics can simulate problems with many millions of nodes (typically individuals) and edges (relationships between the nodes).\nI’m not going to undertake an extensive review of the state of network science here, but a few notable papers help us in our endeavours.\nInfluence maximization is the problem of finding a small subset of nodes (seed nodes) in a social network that could maximize the spread of influence[14]. It is a discrete optimization problem in a social network that chooses an optimal initial seed set of given size to maximize influence under a certain information diffusion model[15].\nComputer simulations using real life social network data and various simplifying assumptions show that selecting vertices (nodes) with maximum degrees (connections) as seeds results in larger influence spread than other heuristics, but is still not as large as the influence spread produced by other algorithms[16].\nImportantly, it appears that influence ranking – the process of trying to score an individual’s network connectivity – is only good for selecting one seed[17].\nSeed selection isn’t as easy as picking the most connected nodes. Not all connections are equal, and relatively few so-called friends are actually significant influencers of a given individual’s behaviour, while substantial heterogeneity across all community members exists. Descriptors from user profiles lack the power to determine who, per se, is influential, and friend counts and profile views also fall short of being able to identify influential site members[18].\nReciprocity From general observation, we can say that an organization might heighten its facilities to influence others if it methodically attunes itself to being influenced appropriately – after all the word is derived from the medieval Latin word influentia meaning ‘inflow’ (influere, from in- ‘into’ + fluere ‘to flow’). This is precisely why organizations conduct market research for example, compile daily news insights and business intelligence, and undertake social media monitoring.\nDictum 4 – To influence better, be influenced better.\nTo my knowledge, such reciprocity has not been modelled by academics. I believe this is because it is difficult to model the qualitative characteristics of the idea or message we’re seeking to spread. Yet that might in part be a function of what some consider a critical determinant of influence spread, namely the readiness of the community in question to be influenced. In extremis: “If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one – and it isn’t, then almost no one can.”[19]\nMore on terminology Every fast changing industry has its jargon. The lexicon emerges to aid efficient communication, but that efficiency is only achieved when everyone knows what the words and phrases really mean, and uses them consistently. Based on all our discussions to date, here are my recommendations.\nInfluencers Influencer – Anyone who contributes to someone else changing their opinion or behaviour. (I think this invalidates the draft “citizen influencer” definition. In recognition of complexity, I defer to a definition entailing a contribution rather than being the cause.)\nKey influencer – Someone who, following statistical modelling and analysis, is considered key with some degree of confidence (alpha) to the efficacy of a program of influence.\nInfluential – A descriptor applied to an individual deemed to have been a key influencer and who might (but might not) remain one.\nTypes of influencer, key or otherwise:\n(based on work by Womma via Neal Beam )\nAdvocate – An individual who shows support for, pleads the case of or defends a brand, cause, product or service while remaining formally unaffiliated with it and unremunerated.\nAmbassador – An individual remunerated by or otherwise allied with a brand; their actions are, in some manner, endorsed by the brand with an acknowledged and transparent affiliation that is mutually beneficial.\nProfessional / occupational – Individuals who by definition of their job function are in the position to influence others directly through authoritative or instructive statements.\nCelebrity – An individual whose name recognition commands a great deal of public fascination (“celebrity status”) and has the ability to use their status to communicate with broad effect, either as advocate or ambassador.\nInfluencee Influencee – a person who changes their opinion or behaviour as the result of exposure to new information.\nNote that this definition doesn’t convey the congruity of the influence effected. Every individual can be categorised as being an influencee (types 1-3) or not (type 0):\nType 0 – no exposure to the message, no influence Type 1 – exposure to the message yet no influence Type 2 – exposure to the message and influenced as the originator intended Type 3 – exposure to the message and influenced contrary to the originator’s intention. Modelling Influence modelling – statistical modelling and analysis to inform the design of a program of influence. (We should list some of the properties, inputs and constraints that might constitute an influence model, without implying assumed association or correlation of course.)\nNetwork analysis The terms \u0026ldquo;influencer marketing\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;influencer PR\u0026rdquo; are inappropriate in my opinion as they emphasise “influencer” over “influence”. If we wish to distinguish marketing and PR practice that utilises network analysis from practice that does not, perhaps we should say “network analysis marketing / PR” or “influence analysis marketing / PR”.\nOf course this horse has already bolted – the term “influencer marketing” is already out there. But perhaps that’s appropriate as it’s typically invoked to endorse a methodology this document cautions against.\n[1] P. Sheldrake. A Measure Of Influence. Communication World magazine, Jan/Feb 2013, IABC (See https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2013/01/a-measure-of-influence-iabc-communication-world-magazine/ .)\n[2] P. Sheldrake. The Business of Influence – Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age. Wiley, 2011, ISBN 978-0-470-97862-7\n[3] P. Sheldrake. The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity. The Guardian Media Network. 15th February 2012.\n[4] G. Weng, U.S. Bhalla and R. Iyengar Complexity in Biological Signaling Systems Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 92-6. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.92\n[5] D. Rind. Complexity and Climate Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 105-7. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.105\n[6] W.B. Arthur. Compexity and the Economy Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 107-9. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.107\n[7] Professor Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College. https://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~hjjens/ [8] http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/arts_humanities_citation_index/ [9] Solis, B. Please Repeat: Influence is not popularity. A blog post. 11th August 2010. http://www.briansolis.com/2010/08/please-repeat-influence-is-not-popularity/ [10] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon \u0026amp; Schuster. 2000. (See http://bowlingalone.com/?page_id=13 .)\n[11] http://amecorg.com/2012/06/barcelona-declaration-of-measurement-principles/ [12] https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/10/are-you-a-professional-or-a-user/ [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg/ [14] W. Chen, Y. Wang, and S. Yang. Efficient Influence Maximization in Social Networks. Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 199-208, 2009.\n[15] Ibid 14.\n[16] D. Kempe, J. M. Kleinberg, and É. Tardos. Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp 137–146, 2003.\n[17] K. Jung, W. Heo, W. Chen. IRIE: Scalable and Robust Influence Maximization in Social Networks. Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), pages 918-923, 2012.\n[18] M. Trusov, A. Bodapati, R.E. Bucklin, Determining Influential Users in Internet Social Networks, Journal of Marketing Research, August 2010.\n[19] C. Thompson, Is the Tipping Point Toast?, Fast Company, 1st February 2008. http://www.fastcompany.com/641124/tipping-point-toast ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/02/setting-the-standards-for-influence/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m a special advisor to \u003ca href=\"http://amecorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI took an action to create \u0026ldquo;something to shoot at\u0026rdquo;, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we\u0026rsquo;re an open and transparent working group, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it here too. Do get in touch if you\u0026rsquo;d like to tell me what you think. Now\u0026rsquo;s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can\u0026rsquo;t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Setting the standards for influence"},{"content":" Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World , the IABC \u0026rsquo;s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).\nThe resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it\u0026rsquo;s a publication for members\u0026rsquo; eyes only, I can\u0026rsquo;t add a link here.\nFortunately, Jessica has given me permission to reproduce the article right here, \u0026ldquo;A Measure Of Influence \u0026rdquo; (PDF). I hope you find it interesting.\nThe article pulls out one quote up front. At the risk of stating the obvious:\nThe best way to exert useful influence remains to deliver great products and services so that your customers evangelize your brand to friends and family, and to be a well-run organization so that your employees and partners evangelize working with you.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/01/a-measure-of-influence-iabc-communication-world-magazine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CW_JanFeb2013_AMeasureOfInfluence.pdf\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Communication World, Jan/Feb 2013 cover\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/CommunicationWorld_JanFeb2013_Cover.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nJessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of \u003ca href=\"http://www.iabc.com/cw/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCommunication World\u003c/a\u003e\n, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iabc.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIABC\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it\u0026rsquo;s a publication for members\u0026rsquo; eyes only, I can\u0026rsquo;t add a link here.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nThe 2007 report from the Arthur W. Page Society, The Authentic Enterprise , identified four new leadership priorities and skills demanded of the Chief Communications Officer:\nLeadership in defining and instilling company values Leadership in building and managing multi-stakeholder relationships Leadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools; and Leadership in building and managing trust, in all its dimensions. The report marked the beginning of a rethink at the Society that culminated last year in Building Belief: A New Model .\nI\u0026rsquo;m a fan of the Society and made sure to reference the four leadership priorities in my book The Business of Influence. I\u0026rsquo;m slightly obsessed with defining the role, skills and traits of CCOs, if only because this matter appears to be mission critical when it comes to making an organisation fit for the 21st Century. If you share this interest, do take time to familiarise yourself with Building Belief if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already done so.\nAs we approach the first anniversary of Building Belief, I\u0026rsquo;m very interested in gathering reports of the model in practice, particularly as it complements aspects of the Six Influence Flows model. If you have a story to tell in this regard, do please drop me a line.\nArthur W. Page Society Chairman, Jon Iwata, on Building Belief ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/01/do-you-believe-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/do.you.believe.it\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2007 report from the Arthur W. Page Society, \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.awpagesociety.com/insights/authentic-enterprise-report/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Authentic Enterprise\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e, identified four new leadership priorities and skills demanded of the Chief Communications Officer:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeadership in defining and instilling company values\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeadership in building and managing multi-stakeholder relationships\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools; and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeadership in building and managing trust, in all its dimensions.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.awpagesociety.com/insights/building-belief/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Building Belief - Arthur W Page Society\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Building-Belief-Arthur-W-Page-Society.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nThe report marked the beginning of a rethink at the Society that culminated last year in \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.awpagesociety.com/insights/building-belief/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBuilding Belief: A New Model\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Do you believe it?"},{"content":"[Originally posted to Euler Partners .]\nWe 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\u0026rsquo;s a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.\n1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market? Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for \u0026ldquo;buzz monitoring\u0026rdquo;, 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 \u0026lsquo;misses the trick\u0026rsquo;. It fails to recognise that today\u0026rsquo;s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.\n2) Where are the biggest opportunities for growth within the social media management technologies market? Integration. This market is maturing from product to platform with unprecedented speed.\n3) What do you consider to be the most important challenges or threats facing this sector today? Integration. Standalone products don\u0026rsquo;t stand a chance. We don\u0026rsquo;t believe this necessarily requires procurement to select a single vendor, as perhaps the phrase \u0026lsquo;platform\u0026rsquo; has implied traditionally, but it does require due diligence as to how well products and services plug\u0026rsquo;n\u0026rsquo;play. Procurement should place considerable emphasis on open data formats and extensive and well documented APIs.\n4) How do you see the competitive landscape for this market evolving over the next few months? (e.g. consolidation, differentiation, fragmentation) As much as I consider integration to be the biggest opportunity and challenge, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily mean we\u0026rsquo;ll see consolidation. The market remains sufficiently nascent to witness consolidation, differentiation and fragmentation in 2013. Or perhaps we\u0026rsquo;re just hedging our bets!\n5) Does this area have any other strengths and/or weaknesses? A significant weakness is inadequate procurement process. Procurement too often fails to recognise the criticality of social media management and workflow to long-term organisational success, the corresponding adjustment required to the organisation\u0026rsquo;s structure and process, the upheaval required in changing systems at a later date, and the importance of data portability. It may also approach the topic with a campaign mentality rather than with the more appropriate 24/7/365 outlook.\n6) Are there any other issues that you believe will be extremely relevant over the next 12 months? Many organisations have privacy policies. Unfortunately, too few of these policies address the full gamut of privacy ramifications of social media management, workflow and social CRM, leaving a potential trust deficit between the organisation and its publics.\n7) Do you have any other thoughts or insights from a non-vendor point of view on the SMM marketplace? SMM cannot be considered a point solution if an organisation is to adjust to the full scope of opportunities and challenges here.\nAt Euler Partners, we define social business as designing the organisation around influence flows, connecting: its people, partners, customers and other stakeholders; data, information and knowledge in and all around it; more openly, productively and profitably with the application of social web, big data and related information technologies.\nOrganisations have invested many millions in recent decades to track the flows of money, materials and time. This decade, they must extend these capabilities to track the flows of influence amongst all stakeholders to maintain and grow engagement, relevance, trust, reputation and profitability.\n8) Are there any tips or pitfalls that you can share for companies looking for a vendor or consultancy looking to provide social media management technology or services? Here\u0026rsquo;s our favourite tip. Qualitative rather than quantitative, but revealing nonetheless.\nKeep a record of how often the vendor / consultancy mentions group A and group B phrases. Group A includes names such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and phrases such as Facebook strategy, Twitter strategy etc. Group B includes words and phrases such as mission, vision, business objectives, business strategy, social business, organisational learning, knowledge management, business performance management, measurement, etc. You get the idea.\nWe\u0026rsquo;d always recommend gravitating towards vendors and consultancies who score higher in Group B than A.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2013/01/social-media-management-buyers-guide/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Econsultancy Social Media Management Buyer\u0026rsquo;s Guide 2011\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/econsultancy-social-media-management-buyers-guide-2011.png\"\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/2013/01/social-media-management-buyers-guide/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally posted to Euler Partners\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful \u003ca href=\"http://econsultancy.com/reports/social-media-management-systems-buyers-guide\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011\u003c/a\u003e\n. Here\u0026rsquo;s a rundown of the questions \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodgersamy\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmy Rodgers\u003c/a\u003e\n put to us and our responses.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4 id=\"1-what-are-the-most-important-trends-occurring-in-this-market\"\u003e1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMaintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for \u0026ldquo;buzz monitoring\u0026rdquo;, and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/influence-flows/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003einfluence flows\u003c/a\u003e\n 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 \u0026lsquo;misses the trick\u0026rsquo;. It fails to recognise that today\u0026rsquo;s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide"},{"content":"[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nThe Internet is the most powerful, flexible and critical infrastructure ever invented. Every aspect of our daily lives is supported by this wondrous invention.\nBut here\u0026rsquo;s the important thing.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve passed the point where the fabric of our societies is supported by the Internet – the all pervasive Internet increasingly defines that fabric. Its architecture is becoming our architecture, and that is why any motion to challenge or change the way in which the Internet is governed must be subject to the most critical eye.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been on tenterhooks the past fortnight watching the deliberations of WCIT play out – the World Conference on International Telecommunications. WCIT is a UN body that has played a vital role over nearly one and a half centuries coordinating telecoms standards and interoperability and radio spectrum and satellite orbits, and it has tried once again to wrestle Internet governance from the hands of the open community that has shepherded it so beautifully to date.\nLast night, the vote went against it . Thankfully.\nYet just as many fight the good fight to keep the Internet open, free and neutral, many more are complicit in seeing the World Wide Web go the other way. (Like many other things, the web runs on the top of the Internet. They are not the same thing.)\nThe web is increasingly dominated by a small number of proprietary sites and services requiring no more governance, openness or interoperability than demanded of their owners under corporate law. This is why you can no longer find your Twitter friends on Tumblr, and why Facebook won\u0026rsquo;t let your (your!) Instagram photos show up on Twitter for example. (See \u0026lsquo;The web we lost \u0026rsquo;.)\nDespite the availability of \u0026lsquo;Do Not Track\u0026rsquo; on all modern browsers (Google\u0026rsquo;s Chrome is the last to get the facility), many web users still don\u0026rsquo;t express this desire not to be tracked, happy instead to have every detail of their digital lives catalogued and indexed by private companies in a way they\u0026rsquo;d abhor if it was their own accountable government doing it.\nThe Internet remains open, free and neutral, for now. Your web behaviours and choices of websites and web services will ultimately determine whether an open World Wide Web will thrive too.\nMarketing and PR professionals can do one important thing that\u0026rsquo;s good for the brand and good for the Web – put your own website at the heart of your strategy. I\u0026rsquo;ve come close to throwing up over the years on hearing CMOs say Facebook need be the only brand presence. OK, that\u0026rsquo;s a little melodramatic. But don\u0026rsquo;t take my word for it, here\u0026rsquo;s how Forrester has come to think of \u0026ldquo;an interactive brand ecosystem\u0026rdquo; in recent times.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/12/destroying-the-web/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/destroying.the.web\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWritten for the CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Internet is the most powerful, flexible and critical infrastructure ever invented. Every aspect of our daily lives is supported by this wondrous invention.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut here\u0026rsquo;s the important thing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;ve passed the point where the fabric of our societies is supported by the Internet – the all pervasive Internet increasingly defines that fabric. Its architecture is becoming our architecture, and that is why any motion to challenge or change the way in which the Internet is governed must be subject to the most critical eye.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been on tenterhooks the past fortnight watching the deliberations of WCIT play out – the World Conference on International Telecommunications. WCIT is a UN body that has played a vital role over nearly one and a half centuries coordinating telecoms standards and interoperability and radio spectrum and satellite orbits, and \u003ca href=\"https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/12/12/the-tragedy-of-the-itu/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eit has tried once again to wrestle Internet governance\u003c/a\u003e\n from the hands of the open community that has shepherded it so beautifully to date.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Destroying the web"},{"content":" I hosted the CIPR TV show on the Leveson Inquiry on Monday. As you may have seen, I wrote about the inquiry for last week\u0026rsquo;s CIPR Friday Roundup, a day after the publication of the inquiry\u0026rsquo;s report – Public relations and the \u0026rsquo;ethical vacuum\u0026rsquo; .\nOur guests were Michelle Stanistreet , General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists , and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/12/cipr-tv-on-journalism-pr-and-the-leveson-inquiry/","summary":"\u003ciframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/YGuf-XOsEkA?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI hosted the CIPR TV show on the \u003ca href=\"http://levesoninquiry.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLeveson Inquiry\u003c/a\u003e\n on Monday. As you may have seen, I wrote about the inquiry for last week\u0026rsquo;s CIPR Friday Roundup, a day after the publication of the inquiry\u0026rsquo;s report – \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/11/public-relations-and-the-ethical-vacuum/\"\u003ePublic relations and the \u0026rsquo;ethical vacuum\u0026rsquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur guests were \u003ca href=\"http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=2515\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMichelle Stanistreet\u003c/a\u003e\n, General Secretary of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.nuj.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNational Union of Journalists\u003c/a\u003e\n, and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV on journalism, PR and the Leveson Inquiry"},{"content":" 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.\nI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026hellip;\nThe webinar is now available on Soundcloud.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/12/social-business-webinar-with-jay-krall-cisions-media-research-supremo/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.cision.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Cision\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/cision_logo.gif\" title=\"Cision\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/social-business/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial business\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jaykrall\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJay Krall\u003c/a\u003e\n and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo"},{"content":" [Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\n\u0026ldquo;Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility.\u0026rdquo; Newspapers have often demonstrated \u0026ldquo;a significant and reckless disregard for accuracy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;misrepresentation and embellishment takes place to a degree far greater than could ever be thought of as legitimate or fair comment.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve just read the Leveson Inquiry , published yesterday and running to nearly two thousand pages. These quotes come from the forty page executive summary. For those of you beyond the UK\u0026rsquo;s shores, the Inquiry is about the freedom of the press in both the positive and negative manifestations of that expression, with a focus on how we can attenuate the negative.\nThe UK enjoys a pluralistic media of which other countries are rightly envious, and a free press is central to our national identity. The report quotes Sir Winston Churchill: \u0026ldquo;A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny \u0026hellip; Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish \u0026hellip; But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.\u0026rdquo;\nTo my mind, press freedom is at its most productive in society when those who have the freedom also respect the responsibility that comes with it. There\u0026rsquo;s no reason why the press cannot be free and accountable, so long as that accountability doesn\u0026rsquo;t impinge on the very definition of the Fourth Estate . And that\u0026rsquo;s the balance the Inquiry endeavours to strike.\nNow when I say I\u0026rsquo;ve read the report, I mean I\u0026rsquo;ve read the page and a bit titled \u0026ldquo;The relevance of the internet\u0026rdquo;. (Did you think I\u0026rsquo;d been up all night?!)\nThe report describes the internet as an \u0026ldquo;ethical vacuum\u0026rdquo;, pointing out that whilst many do conduct themselves online with probity, it\u0026rsquo;s far from a prerequisite, and many do not. Many can publish with impunity. The report asserts that \u0026ldquo;the press, on the other hand, does claim to operate by and adhere to an ethical code of conduct\u0026rdquo; and refers to the \u0026ldquo;notional imprimatur or kitemark which comes from being the publisher of a respected broadsheet or, in its different style, an equally respected mass circulation tabloid.\u0026rdquo;\nThe report criticises the rationale of newspapers who chose to publish (intrusive) photographs simply on the basis that they were already available online (there\u0026rsquo;s a chapter on the Prince Harry Las Vegas photographs). \u0026ldquo;There is a qualitative difference between photographs being available online and being displayed, or blazoned, on the front page of \u0026hellip; the Sun\u0026rdquo;.\nThe section continues: \u0026ldquo;To turn this into a debate about free speech both misses the point and is in danger of creating the sort of moral relativism which has already been remarked on. This is, or at least should be, a debate about freedom with responsibility, and about an ethical press not doing something which it is technically quite able to do but decides not to do.\u0026rdquo;\nWhether a \u0026lsquo;kitemark\u0026rsquo; conveys authority and reputation or whether careful tending of one\u0026rsquo;s reputation imbues a kitemark, the same reputation mechanisms play out online as off. At least I think they do. Perhaps new media enables truth to come out earlier than otherwise, and perhaps I\u0026rsquo;m just an optimist. It will be interesting to see now how much the press can persuade the public to join the prime minister in resisting \u0026ldquo;legislative underpinning\u0026rdquo; of press standards, or whether the public says enough is enough contrary to the headlines inking their fingers and filling their screens.\nThis could be momentous. If you want to find out more about what this means for UK journalism and public relations, join me for a special edition of CIPR TV on Monday at 5pm where the guests taking your questions are Michelle Stanistreet, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists, and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/11/public-relations-and-the-ethical-vacuum/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://levesoninquiry.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Leveson Inquiry\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/levesonreport-300x223.png\" title=\"Leveson Inquiry\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/public.relations.and.the.ethical.vacuum\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility.\u0026rdquo; Newspapers have often demonstrated \u0026ldquo;a significant and reckless disregard for accuracy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;misrepresentation and embellishment takes place to a degree far greater than could ever be thought of as legitimate or fair comment.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just read the \u003ca href=\"http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLeveson Inquiry\u003c/a\u003e\n, published yesterday and running to nearly two thousand pages. These quotes come from the forty page executive summary. For those of you beyond the UK\u0026rsquo;s shores, the Inquiry is about the freedom of the press in both the positive and negative manifestations of that expression, with a focus on how we can attenuate the negative.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe UK enjoys a pluralistic media of which other countries are rightly envious, and a free press is central to our national identity. The report quotes Sir Winston Churchill: \u0026ldquo;A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny \u0026hellip; Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish \u0026hellip; But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Public Relations and the \"ethical vacuum\""},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just kicked off Content Marketing Show 2012 here in London. Thanks to Kelvin Newman and his team for the opportunity. Here\u0026rsquo;s my stack.\nThe Illustrated History of Content http://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/11/content-marketing-show-2012/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just kicked off \u003ca href=\"http://www.contentmarketingshow.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eContent Marketing Show\u003c/a\u003e\n 2012 here in London. Thanks to \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/kelvinnewman\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKelvin Newman\u003c/a\u003e\n and his team for the opportunity. Here\u0026rsquo;s my stack.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15260960\" width=\"550\" height=\"463\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-illustrated-history-of-content\"\u003eThe Illustrated History of Content\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Content Marketing Show 2012"},{"content":"[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nMatt Ambrose posts this week about Red Hot Openers that Get Readers Eager for More . So here goes\u0026hellip;\nThe Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.\nHow am I doing so far Matt? :-)\nSeriously, SWIFT matters to you this week. This member owned co-operative is actually at the cutting edge of dealing with your 21st Century currency – your data. And as I posted a month ago, data is this decade\u0026rsquo;s number one revolution .\nIf you accept that your data is your reputation (credit scoring is over 40 years old), and that your data has value to those who want to understand and serve your needs, then it\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a shocker that in 2012 you don\u0026rsquo;t have much control over it.\nActually, I have a bit more control over mine than you do, but only because I\u0026rsquo;m wielding some fairly blunt instruments. I don\u0026rsquo;t go anywhere near Facebook (been clean for two and a half years – check this out ). I use Firefox, with Do Not Track enabled and some tight cookie controls. And make good use of Google\u0026rsquo;s Data Liberation Front .\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s it. No fine granular control. And no control over the majority of data I kick off from my mobile, from purchases, from interactions of almost any sort with organisations.\nRegular readers might recall a Roundup from November last year describing the UK\u0026rsquo;s leadership in this sector with the launch of midata , supported by twenty six major organisations. Now SWIFT is determined to give you control over your currency with the unveiling this week of a prototype of the Digital Asset Grid, \u0026ldquo;a platform for secure, authorised peer to peer data sharing between known, trusted people, businesses and devices\u0026rdquo;. Information Age has a good write-up .\nSuch facility is known by various names including personal data vault, personal data locker, and fourth party. I call it a Streams Bank because you bank your data streams just like you bank money, and data streams includes sources we haven\u0026rsquo;t traditionally considered personal data. The question is, do we think the banks – or even a co-operative society of them – are really going to lead this revolution? Have they the reputation we\u0026rsquo;re looking for to help us maintain our own?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/11/banking-your-reputation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.2nd.november.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWritten for the CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMatt Ambrose posts this week about \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/matt.ambrose/six-ways-of-writing-red-hot-openers-that-get-readers-eager-for-more\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRed Hot Openers that Get Readers Eager for More\u003c/a\u003e\n. So here goes\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow am I doing so far Matt? :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeriously, SWIFT matters to you this week. This member owned co-operative is actually at the cutting edge of dealing with your 21st Century currency – your data. And as I posted a month ago, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/10/this-decades-number-one-revolution/\"\u003edata is this decade\u0026rsquo;s number one revolution\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you accept that your data is your reputation (credit scoring is over 40 years old), and that your data has value to those who want to understand and serve your needs, then it\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a shocker that in 2012 you don\u0026rsquo;t have much control over it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Banking your reputation"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve never been fond of the word \u0026lsquo;user\u0026rsquo;? It lacks the caring qualities of a much more appropriate word, customer, and even evokes images of substance abuse.\nOn making this point, I\u0026rsquo;m asked what I\u0026rsquo;d call people benefitting from a service or application without handing over their hard-earned. Well, customers of course. In such situations they\u0026rsquo;re simply paying with a different currency, such as their personal data and/or attention, which the supplier of the service does its utmost to monetize.\nBut in one instance, I like that evocation of substance abuse. Of addiction. Of misuse.\nDo allow me to explain and let\u0026rsquo;s see if I\u0026rsquo;ve just been critical of you or a colleague. Please go easy on me if I have, my intentions are honourable.\nI had the privilege of speaking with 150 Masters students at Imperial College London yesterday, taking their Technology in Marketing module. All marketing activity in 2012 is underpinned or impacted by technology, and thousands of tech vendors tempt us with thousands of marketing and PR applications, tools and services. And we buy them. Lots of them. The question is, are you a professional or a user?\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the difference?\nWell my dictionary defines a professional as a person competent or skilled in a particular activity. The CIPR\u0026rsquo;s mission includes this statement: \u0026ldquo;We enhance the reputation and understanding of the public relations profession and the professionalism of our members\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nA professional understands the tools they wield.\nA professional engineer understands the equations employed by her software in stress engineering a bridge. A lawyer understands the legislative framework in which they draft contracts. A doctor understands the scientific basis of the electrocardiogram. A PR professional understands the algorithms employed by their social analytics software of choice, and its empirical basis.\nI was recently invited to endorse an analytics service – one of those that likes to score social media activity – but I was given scant information for its empirical basis. The supplier alluded to an unreferenced research paper. All I know about the \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; is that it involved a selection of unlisted brands over an unknown time span on unknown social platforms for some unknown geographic region in unknown languages. And there was no mention of peer review.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, the service is a so-called black box. In other words: \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;d like to tell you how it works but we can\u0026rsquo;t, sorry – commerically sensitive you know.\u0026rdquo;\nI can\u0026rsquo;t endorse this product until my questions are answered. And it obviousy can\u0026rsquo;t have any PR professionals amongst its customer base. Just users.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/10/are-you-a-professional-or-a-user/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve never been fond of the word \u0026lsquo;\u003cem\u003euser\u003c/em\u003e\u0026rsquo;? It lacks the caring qualities of a much more appropriate word, \u003cem\u003ecustomer\u003c/em\u003e, and even evokes images of substance abuse.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn making this point, I\u0026rsquo;m asked what I\u0026rsquo;d call people benefitting from a service or application without handing over their hard-earned. Well, customers of course. In such situations they\u0026rsquo;re simply paying with a different currency, such as their personal data and/or attention, which the supplier of the service does its utmost to monetize.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut in one instance, I like that evocation of substance abuse. Of addiction. Of misuse.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDo allow me to explain and let\u0026rsquo;s see if I\u0026rsquo;ve just been critical of you or a colleague. Please go easy on me if I have, my intentions are honourable.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI had the privilege of speaking with 150 Masters students at Imperial College London yesterday, taking their \u003cem\u003eTechnology in Marketing\u003c/em\u003e module. All marketing activity in 2012 is underpinned or impacted by technology, and thousands of tech vendors tempt us with thousands of marketing and PR applications, tools and services. And we buy them. Lots of them. The question is, are you a professional or a user?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s the difference?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Are you a professional or a user?"},{"content":"[Originally written, obviously, for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nThe Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don\u0026rsquo;t believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup\u0026hellip; to eleven recipients.\nFive years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it\u0026rsquo;s gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let\u0026rsquo;s look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we\u0026rsquo;ve covered here for PR professionals.\nFacebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively.\nThere was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves.\nThere was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that.\nIn short, a lot has changed in five years, but hold on tight because the next five will be faster. Watch out for Do Not Track and the growing privacy backlash, vendor relationship management, open social networks, the Internet of Things becoming an organizational stakeholder (OK, maybe not by 2017), the Firefox mobile OS , growing social commerce, bigger big data , the semantic web (Web 3.0) and product hyper-personalisation – so long as we can find the right privacy balance of course.\nI also hope we\u0026rsquo;ll match our love of social commerce with social shareholding, demanding good governance of all bodies corporate.\nI believe we\u0026rsquo;ll see a maturity in the planning, measurement and evaluation of public relations, indeed of all influence-related activities and associated intangible assets. And with social media making up the eggs of the social business cake, we\u0026rsquo;ll see greater demands placed on the most able PR professionals in socializing the enterprise.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, you\u0026rsquo;ll see it all covered on The Conversation and in the Friday Roundup by the people who think it, by the people who shape it, by the people who live it. You.\nBest regards, Philip Sheldrake and The Conversation team.\nP.S. I write Roundups in my own capacity and not as a CIPR spokesperson. On which note, thanks to @andismit, @gemgriff and @simonhill for their part in writing Roundups over the years.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/10/the-cipr-friday-roundup-5-years/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written, obviously, for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/the.cipr.friday.roundup.-.5.years\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don\u0026rsquo;t believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup\u0026hellip; to eleven recipients.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFive years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it\u0026rsquo;s gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let\u0026rsquo;s look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we\u0026rsquo;ve covered here for PR professionals.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFacebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The CIPR Friday Roundup +/- 5 years"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nIdentity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.\nAnd in between we have many shades of identity.\nNightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you\u0026rsquo;ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.\nOK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?\nWell knowing who you\u0026rsquo;re dealing with and their associated reputation are part and parcel of business. And now that we have the Internet of machines connecting the Internet of people, that reputation and trustworthiness needs to be conveyed and understood digitally. This is considered so central to many aspects of the future growth of the Internet and related services that it even has its own European Commission\u0026rsquo;s Seventh Framework Programme: Internet Privacy and Identity, Trust and Reputation Mechanisms .\nThis development has direct ramifications for organisations because, as Euan Semple puts it so beautifully, Organizations Don\u0026rsquo;t Tweet, People Do . Google may have focused for the past decade or so on determining the relative authority of a webpage, its PageRank, but as Julio Romo explains this week on The Conversation, it is now rolling out AuthorRank .\nAt least he says his name is Julio Romo.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/10/who-are-you/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.5th.october.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIdentity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of \u003ca href=\"http://www.4chan.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e4chan\u003c/a\u003e\n, the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elolcats\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRickrolling\u003c/a\u003e\n emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd in between we have many shades of identity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you\u0026rsquo;ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Who are you?"},{"content":"“Data is the new oil.\u0026quot; So said Clive Humby back in 2006.\n\u0026ldquo;Data is the new soil\u0026rdquo; said David McCandless in 2010.\nIn between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: \u0026ldquo;Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026amp;D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it\u0026rsquo;s the facility to work with data.\nI\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s so much of it that traditional data storage and database technologies aren\u0026rsquo;t up to the job. The more interesting answer is this: data helps us answer questions; big data also helps us conceive new questions.\nLast week I was invited to the book launch of In Data We Trust (haven\u0026rsquo;t finished it yet), a best-seller last year in the German language. This afternoon I\u0026rsquo;m meeting up with Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy (awesome), and thought leader on consumer / citizen data.\nLast 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 \u0026ldquo;Dynamic Audience Platform\u0026rdquo; that \u0026ldquo;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\u0026rsquo;s leading advertisers.\u0026rdquo;\nGot that?\nBig data is impacting every aspect of life I can think of. Some might ask \u0026ldquo;even art ?\u0026rdquo; And I\u0026rsquo;d say, \u0026ldquo;of course art !\u0026rdquo; But perhaps the biggest question remains to be answered – who owns the data?\nDoes 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?\nOr are there new ownership models?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/10/this-decades-number-one-revolution/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e“Data is the new oil.\u0026quot; \u003ca href=\"http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSo said Clive Humby\u003c/a\u003e\n back in 2006.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Data is the new soil\u0026rdquo; \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esaid David McCandless\u003c/a\u003e\n in 2010.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn between, in 2009, \u003ca href=\"http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/09/156\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMeglena Kuneva\u003c/a\u003e\n, European Consumer Commissioner, said: \u0026ldquo;Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2008/08/can-you-see-it-making-influence-visible/\"\u003evisualising the stuff\u003c/a\u003e\n back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R\u0026amp;D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it\u0026rsquo;s the facility to work with data.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"This decade's number one revolution"},{"content":"The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme\u0026rsquo;s guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller ), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham ), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer .\nI think you\u0026rsquo;ll agree the audience\u0026rsquo;s questions and the guests\u0026rsquo; responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I\u0026rsquo;ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll know from the Six Influence Flows that I invest considerable energy trying to get clients to view the world without the blinkers of traditional functions and siloed role definitions, particularly as organisational structure and culture are supposed to support the execution of strategy not the other way round.\nCase in point \u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ve had three conversations specifically about internal comms recently where the same assertion was made by the person I was talking with. The assertion, whilst made in different ways, was consistent – internal comms isn\u0026rsquo;t the same thing as PR.\nAnd yet of course it is.\nTheir assertion has more to do with their regard for PR, confusing it for media relations pivoting around getting the message out, rather than the two-way excellence model seeking to grow understanding between an organisation and its publics. And of course employees – past, present and future – are publics, just like customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholder groups.\nWhilst this show wasn\u0026rsquo;t the forum to discuss it, it\u0026rsquo;s the facility for social web and related technologies to help bring the respective stakeholder groups together, to help them influence each other more readily and productively, where I think great value lies this decade, and which forms a central part of my company\u0026rsquo;s definition of social business . After all, the 21st Century organisation is not defined by its payroll.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/09/internal-communications-discussed-on-cipr-tv/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme\u0026rsquo;s guests are Jenni Wheller (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/jenniwheller\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@jenniwheller\u003c/a\u003e\n), Internal Communications Manager at \u003ca href=\"http://www.foodtravelexperts.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSSP\u003c/a\u003e\n UK, and Mike Grafham (\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/mgrafham\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@mgrafham\u003c/a\u003e\n), Head of Customer Engagement at \u003ca href=\"https://www.yammer.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eYammer\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe allowfullscreen frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/YqFuNm-l5xs?rel=0\" width=\"560\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think you\u0026rsquo;ll agree the audience\u0026rsquo;s questions and the guests\u0026rsquo; responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I\u0026rsquo;ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV"},{"content":" The idea of a brand goes back to ancient times when ownership of livestock was asserted by burning one\u0026rsquo;s mark onto the animal. This post is about a book called Brand Anarchy, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d set the scene.\nThe mark would be applied to the animal with a burning stick known as a firebrand. That word has morphed over the years to describe passionate individuals looking to shake things up, so it is then with etymological pleasure that I note the authors of Brand Anarchy are firebrands.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known Stephen Waddington and Steve Earl from about the time we both started competing PR consultancies back in the day, and there\u0026rsquo;s more than a few reasons why these two canny chaps managed to craft a distinctive and successful PR consultancy in a largely undifferentiated and saturated market. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t had the opportunity to work with them, you can at least now read the book.\nThe authors are plain speaking – well, they are adept communicators after all. They have a visceral understanding of the PR and brand communications landscape in the 21st Century, one that has underpinned their personal business success. This book describes how reputations are formed today, and how transformed the process is from just a decade or so ago. This contrast is of course painted in many a book of recent times, but you\u0026rsquo;ll appreciate the candour with which the authors describe how organisations must respond.\nIn fact, perhaps \u0026lsquo;respond\u0026rsquo; is too reactive a word. The medicine here is to change how the organisation behaves, period. To be proactive. To drive engagement between an organisation and everyone involved in its success. To encourage participation and, without wishing to sound too liberal or post-capitalist about it, co-ownership. I mean this in the sense that an Apple fanboy feels a part-ownership of the Apple brand absent a stock trading account.\nIt does feel like anarchy out there, at least for those weaned on the 20th Century simple life. Actually, it\u0026rsquo;s just complex. The authors strongly suggest you deal with it.\n[Disclosure: the book references my work – the Six Influence Flows and the Influence Scorecard .]\nBrand Anarchy on Amazon UK .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/09/brand-anarchy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1408157225\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Brand Anarchy front cover\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Brand-Anarchy-front-cover-200x300.jpg\" title=\"Brand Anarchy front cover\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nThe idea of a brand goes back to ancient times when ownership of livestock was asserted by burning one\u0026rsquo;s mark onto the animal. This post is about a book called Brand Anarchy, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d set the scene.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe mark would be applied to the animal with a burning stick known as a firebrand. That word has morphed over the years to describe passionate individuals looking to shake things up, so it is then with etymological pleasure that I note the authors of Brand Anarchy are firebrands.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Brand Anarchy"},{"content":" 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 \u0026hellip; both an advantage and disadvantage.\nSo, we\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.\nWell 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 \u0026hellip; social media are the eggs in the social business cake.\nThe video here is my take on social business.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/09/social-media-are-the-eggs-in-the-social-business-cake/","summary":"\u003ciframe allowfullscreen frameborder=\"0\" height=\"309\" mozallowfullscreen=\"\" src=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/49168500?byline=0\u0026amp;portrait=0\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"\" width=\"550\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA 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 \u0026hellip; both an advantage and disadvantage.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, we\u0026rsquo;ve been working with \u003cem\u003esocial media\u003c/em\u003e for the past decade; as if all preceding media was \u003cem\u003eanti-social\u003c/em\u003e. And during the past couple of years, we\u0026rsquo;ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of \u003cem\u003esocial business\u003c/em\u003e; as if business previously attracted \u003cem\u003eloners\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social media are the eggs in the social business cake"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s September already. How did that happen?!\nAs we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh.\nBut while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.\nFirst up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January?\nWho knows! Let\u0026rsquo;s face it, we live in uncertain times.\nSo having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway?\nA good proportion of our colleagues in IT have moved towards a shorter drumbeat, often between four and twelve weeks, in an approach known as agile development. Anyone for agile PR and agile marketing?\nWhich brings me to my second point, return on investment. If every one of those shorter cycles is to deliver the goods to help the organisation better live up to its mission and pursue its vision, we have to improve our understanding of what\u0026rsquo;s working and what isn\u0026rsquo;t working more quickly and more accurately than ever.\nThe pressure is on.\nUnfortunately, the marketing and PR professions are struggling to respond. Viewed through the most critical lens, we\u0026rsquo;ve moved from not bothering with measurement and evaluation much at all, to measuring what we can rather than what we should. The hypnotic precision of digital media in particular has distracted us from designing a proper, diligent approach to understanding the full picture, and the efforts of associations such as AMEC are more critical than ever.\nHopefully, these two points will provide sufficient new interest and challenge to make the upcoming planning process a little more enjoyable, at least compared to the same old same old.\nShould you have the ROI bit between your teeth, I have written at greater length on the topic here .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/09/planning-love-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s September already. How did that happen?!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho knows! Let\u0026rsquo;s face it, we live in uncertain times.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Planning. Love it."},{"content":" When George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in January 2005, no one uploaded a video to YouTube.\nWhen Italy beat France to win the 2006 FIFA World Cup final, fans didn’t Tweet. Not once. No one in Europe mentioned it on Facebook. No one captured Fabio Grosso scoring the winner on an iPhone. No one jumped on Gmail to commiserate with French friends. No one used BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) to celebrate with Italian friends.\nSocial media have progressed incredibly quickly and organizations have had to grapple with the challenges and identify and pursue the opportunities.\nBut things began to get serious during 2009 as it became increasingly apparent that social web and related technologies could transform the way organizations go about their business beyond the domains of marketing, public relations and customer service. It might even redefine what it means to be in business. And that’s when we founded the consultancy Influence Crowd.\nBy September 2011, when I had the opportunity to address the executive summit at Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com conference), this radical landscape had been labelled with a distinct call to action – socialize the enterprise .\nBut what does social business mean? Where do you start? How do you transform the organization to secure the competitive advantage quicker than the also-rans?\nThese are just the questions I sought to answer in my book The Business of Influence . The Influence Scorecard , introduced in the book, remains one of the few comprehensive frameworks to socialize the enterprise.\nWe feel it’s now time to revise our brand to reflect the maturation of the market from the relatively lightweight ‘there’s an app for that’ and ‘Twitter strategy’ phase, to this new era. So today Influence Crowd becomes Euler Partners.\nWhy Euler? Well network science is integral to this new frontier, and the renowned 18th Century mathematician Leonard Euler pioneered the field. In short, we’re big fans.\nIf you’d like to find out more, if you want to explore the ramifications of social business for your organization, if you think you might be a potential Partner or alliance partner , please do get in touch .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/09/influence-crowd-becomes-euler-partners/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Euler Partners\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/euler_logo_white_on_green_360_square.png\" title=\"Euler Partners\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in January 2005, no one uploaded a video to YouTube.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Italy beat France to win the 2006 FIFA World Cup final, fans didn’t Tweet. Not once. No one in Europe mentioned it on Facebook. No one captured Fabio Grosso scoring the winner on an iPhone. No one jumped on Gmail to commiserate with French friends. No one used BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) to celebrate with Italian friends.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial media have progressed incredibly quickly and organizations have had to grapple with the challenges and identify and pursue the opportunities.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut things began to get serious during 2009 as it became increasingly apparent that social web and related technologies could transform the way organizations go about their business beyond the domains of marketing, public relations and customer service. It might even redefine what it means to be in business. And that’s when we founded the consultancy Influence Crowd.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy September 2011, when I had the opportunity to address the executive summit at Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com conference), this radical landscape had been labelled with a distinct call to action – \u003ca href=\"http://www.eulerpartners.com/social-business/\" title=\"Social business\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocialize the enterprise\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence Crowd becomes Euler Partners"},{"content":"\nHere’s some rather good news to lift some of that post-Olympic blues. The BRANDiD team has won gold, literally.\nHundreds of starters were whittled down during recent Seedcamp heats to a couple of dozen top performers. Reading the track perfectly and running a very good race indeed, BRANDiD crossed the finishing line to take its rightful place on the Seedcamp podium – just one of three to make it through the London event. The Seedcamp announcement has just gone live .\nIt’s been six months since we first blogged about our work with BRANDiD , and we’ve been working hard in the Meanwhile gym since then refining our game. And it feels great to take things to the Seedcamp level.\nAs you may recall, BRANDiD is an online subscription service for all the things men need, starting with designer basics such as underwear, socks, tees and shirts from the likes of Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren. Seedcamp is “Europe\u0026rsquo;s leading micro-seed investment fund and mentoring program.” The Seedcamp family has grown to 70 of Europe\u0026rsquo;s most promising startups since its launch in 2007. You can find out what BRANDiD’s founders make of the experience over on their blog .\nCommenting on today’s news, BRANDiD co-founder and CEO Ankush Sehgal said: “The Seedcamp team clearly believes we have the potential to grow a valuable brand in coming years, or perhaps they’re all in need of some new pants. We like to think it’s a bit of both.”\nMeanwhile has played its part in BRANDiD’s success, specifically in terms of branding and business model development. Pushed to say something nice about Meanwhile, Ankush continued: “Meanwhile – yes – they rock.”\nBRANDiD cheat notes\nSubscription designer essentials for men Specifically designed from the pixel up for the way men want to shop – no hassle, no fuss, no fluff The convenience of subscription without the commitment – change up, ease back or walk away any time We learn what customers like with our Masculine Algorithmic Learning Engine™ (MALE™) No quibble Return Like A Man™ policy Check it out at www.getbrandid.com. @getbrandid Ankush Sehgal / 07739 070 851 / as@getbrandid.com / @4nkush ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/08/brandid-meanwhile-seedcamp/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"BRANDiD + Meanwhile + Seedcamp\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/BRANDiD-Seedcamp-Home.png\" title=\"BRANDiD + Meanwhile + Seedcamp\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere’s some rather good news to lift some of that post-Olympic blues. The BRANDiD team has won gold, literally.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHundreds of starters were whittled down during recent Seedcamp heats to a couple of dozen top performers. Reading the track perfectly and running a very good race indeed, BRANDiD crossed the finishing line to take its rightful place on the Seedcamp podium – just one of three to make it through the London event. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.seedcamp.com/2012/08/four-new-companies-join-the-seedcamp-family.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSeedcamp announcement has just gone live\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s been six months since \u003ca href=\"http://andmeanwhile.com/2012/02/a-beta-for-alpha-males/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewe first blogged about our work with BRANDiD\u003c/a\u003e\n, and we’ve been working hard in the Meanwhile gym since then refining our game. And it feels great to take things to the Seedcamp level.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"BRANDiD + Meanwhile + Seedcamp"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nThe headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid \u0026lsquo;ghost town\u0026rsquo; claims .\nFor the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words.\nMy schedule hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed. I\u0026rsquo;m jumping on the 94 from West London to Oxford Street every morning, and the return journey every evening, and it\u0026rsquo;s been fantastic. The bus is half empty, the roads are half empty, and the journey time is the quickest I\u0026rsquo;ve ever known. But what\u0026rsquo;s good for me hasn\u0026rsquo;t been good for central London restaurants, theatre and other consumer serving business.\nSo this begs the interesting question, can a communications campaign over-communicate? Success in this instance has not increased in proportion with the resonance of the message. The resonance has been too great and we have overshot the happy optimal balance.\nFrom a measurement and evaluation perspective, the output metrics will be out of line with the desired outcome. The output metrics will look awesome, the outcome looks considerably less so.\nDespite this hiccup, it\u0026rsquo;s been a fantastic games so far, excepting that badminton match, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to the second week and a couple of dinners in town.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/08/too-good/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.3rd.august.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Regent Street London July 2012\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/regent-street-july-2012-1024x767.jpg\" title=\"Regent Street London July 2012\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: \u003ca href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/london-2012-cameron-urges-people-to-return-to-capital-amid-ghost-town-claims-8004705.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCameron urges people to return to capital amid \u0026lsquo;ghost town\u0026rsquo; claims\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Too good"},{"content":"Share This , the new book from the CIPR Social Media panel and friends, is selling rather well indeed. Having shot straight in at number 1 on Amazon UK\u0026rsquo;s best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales \u0026amp; Marketing category.\nWiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don\u0026rsquo;t then register on the Amazon charts else I\u0026rsquo;m sure the book would be Amazon\u0026rsquo;s number 1 of course!\nNeville Hobson , of the massively successful FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast, invited Stephen Waddington and me to discuss the book\u0026rsquo;s content, audience, and the panel\u0026rsquo;s future plans . Follow the link to listen now.\nFYI, you may recall Neville interviewed me once before at my book launch party last year.\n(Photo credit: Neville Hobson presenting at SMPR2012 by Coopr PR Bureau .)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/07/fir-interview-neville-hobson-interviews-stephen-waddington-and-me-about-share-this/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Neville Hobson\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/neville-e1343640453630.jpg\" title=\"Neville Hobson\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/07/share-this-the-social-media-handbook-for-pr-by-the-cipr-social-media-panel/\"\u003eShare This\u003c/a\u003e\n, the new book from the CIPR Social Media panel and friends, is selling rather well indeed. Having shot straight in at number 1 on Amazon UK\u0026rsquo;s best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales \u0026amp; Marketing category.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don\u0026rsquo;t then register on the Amazon charts else I\u0026rsquo;m sure the book would be Amazon\u0026rsquo;s number 1 of course!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"FIR Interview: Neville Hobson interviews Stephen Waddington and me about Share This"},{"content":"\n(Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .)\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll congratulate me for noticing there\u0026rsquo;s a sporting event starting today in London town. Too obvious then not to interweave some Olympic statistics into today\u0026rsquo;s Roundup.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s 2579 days (just over seven years) since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. The exact price tag is still to be totted up, but we\u0026rsquo;re looking at somewhere north or south of 10,000,000,000 sterling; four times the original estimate.\nThe Olympic Delivery Authority has overseen the construction of 30 new bridges, the restoration of 8.35km of waterways, the building of 1.8km of sewer tunnels, the demolition of over 200 buildings, the removal of 52 electricity pylons, and the cleaning of more than two million tonnes of soil. And some more besides.\nThis exemplifies what organisations invest most of their information systems managing – the flows of time, money and materials. Managing these flows is business critical. Obviously.\nThe 21st Century organisation must extend its information systems to cover a fourth kind of flow, the flow of influence. Sure the Olympic Delivery Authority understands marketing and communications, but there is influence in everything an organisation does and sometimes in what it decides not to do. It\u0026rsquo;s not just the domain of marketing and public relations. And the sooner organisations get the systems, processes, skills and culture in place to keep on top of the way influence goes around comes around, the quicker they\u0026rsquo;ll put themselves in a gold medal position.\nHappy Olympics.\n[Photo credit: Nick J Webb ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/07/gold/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"London 2012 Olympic rings forged\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/london_2012_olympic_rings_forged-e1343635968733.jpg\" title=\"London 2012 Olympic rings forged\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.27th.july.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou\u0026rsquo;ll congratulate me for noticing there\u0026rsquo;s a sporting event starting today in London town. Too obvious then not to interweave some Olympic statistics into today\u0026rsquo;s Roundup.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s 2579 days (just over seven years) since London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. The exact price tag is still to be totted up, but we\u0026rsquo;re looking at somewhere north or south of 10,000,000,000 sterling; four times the original estimate.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Gold"},{"content":" After three months of social collaboration involving two dozen authors, we\u0026rsquo;re just a few days away from publishing Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR (Amazon UK ). The authors, all members of the CIPR Social Media panel or friends of, decided that that there was a need for a handbook that covers the full gamut of issues facing the PR practitioner in 2012.\nIncredibly, Lord Sugar provides the endorsement for the front cover :-)\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have authored two of the chapters, Chapter 17 on real-time public relations, and the final chapter looking at the future, beyond social media.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the introductory video featuring CIPR CEO Jane Wilson, and then the Table of Contents. Read the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s press release here . Pre-order your copy today!\nTable of Contents Foreword by Jane Wilson xi\nIntroduction by Stephen Waddington xiii\nPart I Changing Media, Changing PR 1\n1 An Introduction to Social Networks, by Katy Howell\nPart II Planning\n2 Kick‑Start Your Social Media Strategy, by Simon Sanders\n3 What has Google Ever Done for PR?, by Andrew Smith\n4 Integrating Traditional and Social Media, by Helen Nowicka\n5 Social Media Guidelines: Creating Freedom Within a Framework, by Gemma Griffiths\n6 Open Communication: Psychology, Ethics and Etiquette, by Becky McMichael\nPart III Networks\n7 Facebook: A Way to Engage with Your Audiences, by Robin Wilson\n8 Twitter: The Unstoppable Rise of Microblogging, by Alex Lacey\n9 LinkedIn: Social Networking for Professionals, by Matt Appleby\n10 Google+: Better than Buzz?, by Dan Tyte\n11 The Business of Blogging, by Stephen Waddington\nPart IV Online Media Relations\n12 Modern Media Relations and Social Media Newsrooms, by Stuart Bruce\n13 Brands as Media, by Rob Brown\n14 The Future of Broadcast, by Russell Goldsmith\n15 Media Relations Modernised, by Adam Parker\n16 Pitching Using Social Media, by Julio Romo\nPart V Monitoring and Measurement\n17 Real-Time Public Relations, by Philip Sheldrake\n18 Social Media Monitoring, by Andrew Smith\n19 Measuring Social Media, by Richard Bagnall\nPart VI Skills\n20 Skilling Up for the Future, by Daljit Bhurji\n21 The Future of PR Education, by Richard Bailey\nPart VII Industry Change\n22 Employee Engagement: How Social Media are Changing Internal Communication, by Rachel Miller\n23 Back to the Future for Public Sector Communications, by Mark Pack\n24 Modernising Public Affairs for the Digital Age, by Stuart Bruce\n25 Social Media and the Third Sector, by Simon Collister\nPart VIII The Future\n26 Here Comes Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things, by Philip Sheldrake\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/07/share-this-the-social-media-handbook-for-pr-by-the-cipr-social-media-panel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Share-This-Social-Handbook-Professionals/dp/111840484X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;qid=1341486106\u0026amp;sr=8-1\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Share This book cover\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Share_This_frontcover-e1341834417738.png\" title=\"Share This book cover\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter three months of social collaboration involving two dozen authors, we\u0026rsquo;re just a few days away from publishing \u003cem\u003eShare This: The Social Media Handbook for PR\u003c/em\u003e (\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Share-This-Social-Handbook-Professionals/dp/111840484X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;qid=1341486106\u0026amp;sr=8-1\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon UK\u003c/a\u003e\n). The authors, all members of the CIPR Social Media panel or friends of, decided that that there was a need for a handbook that covers the full gamut of issues facing the PR practitioner in 2012.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIncredibly, \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sugar\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLord Sugar\u003c/a\u003e\n provides the endorsement for the front cover :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have authored two of the chapters, Chapter 17 on real-time public relations, and the final chapter looking at the future, beyond social media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s the introductory video featuring CIPR CEO Jane Wilson, and then the Table of Contents. \u003ca href=\"http://newsroom.cipr.co.uk/share-this-the-social-media-handbook-for-pr-professionals-set-for-launch-following-social-collaboration-by-leading-digital-pr-pr/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRead the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s press release here\u003c/a\u003e\n. Pre-order your copy today!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe allowfullscreen frameborder=\"0\" height=\"309\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/NmBZr-FN5FQ\" width=\"549\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e","title":"Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR, by the CIPR Social Media Panel"},{"content":" The title of this post is one of my contributions to the recent PR Week video podcast on measurement where I was a guest alongside SpectrumInsight \u0026rsquo;s Mark Westaby. PR Week\u0026rsquo;s Sara Luker was in the chair, and it was fifteen minutes of good conversation.\nAs I say upfront, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more optimistic than Mark about the future of the measurement and accountability of public relations, if only because I have faith in the Influence Scorecard approach.\nFor some reason only understood by PR Week I\u0026rsquo;m sure, the video cannot be embedded here, or indeed on PR Week\u0026rsquo;s website. Not very social of them! It stands alone over on Brightcove, but you can click here to go and watch it now .\nThe accompanying article in PR Week is: \u0026ldquo;Measurement in PR has not changed in 20 years, say PROs \u0026rdquo;. (PR Week may stop you reaching the article if you\u0026rsquo;re not a subscriber, but at the time of writing any article on prweek.com is accessible if you search for the title on Google and then click the relevant search result.)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/07/the-hunt-for-a-new-universal-measure-we-will-never-find-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://bcove.me/qd3qj28a\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PR Week podcast screenshot\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/prweek-podcast-screenshot-550.png\" title=\"PR Week podcast screenshot\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title of this post is one of my contributions to the recent PR Week video podcast on measurement where I was a guest alongside \u003ca href=\"http://www.spectrum-consulting.net\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSpectrumInsight\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s Mark Westaby. PR Week\u0026rsquo;s Sara Luker was in the chair, and it was fifteen minutes of good conversation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs I say upfront, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more optimistic than Mark about the future of the measurement and accountability of public relations, if only because I have faith in the Influence Scorecard approach.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The hunt for a new universal measure – we will never find it"},{"content":"[Update: Version 2 of the Wikipedia guidance was published May 2014 .] I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that the first comprehensive guidance to public relations practitioners on engaging with the Wikipedia community is published today by the CIPR. Here\u0026rsquo;s the process we\u0026rsquo;ve gone through:\n\u0026gt; Early January 2012 – The CIPR Social Media panel meets and recognises that current guidance is lacking (see my post of 6th January )\n\u0026gt; Mid-January 2012 – PR Week\u0026rsquo;s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, calls on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely (\u0026quot;CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code \u0026quot;)\n\u0026gt; January - April 2012 – The Social Media panel\u0026rsquo;s Gemma Griffiths leads the development of a first draft of guidance; \u0026ldquo;something to shoot at\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026gt; 12th May 2012 – Neville Hobson and I take part in the Wikimedia UK AGM to call for their help in working up the guidance (see my post of 14th May )\n\u0026gt; 14th May 2012 – The first draft is uploaded to Wikimedia UK\u0026rsquo;s wiki\n\u0026gt; To 24th June 2012 – We collaborate with Wikimedians on more than 160 edits on the back of a discussion page running to more than twelve thousand words. So, what do you think of version 1 of the guidance? We\u0026rsquo;re calling it version 1, because the wiki still lives and breathes with the intent that we can continue to refine the guidance together. I for one would like to see greater concision and perhaps a flow chart to explain the process visually.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fantastic to see version 1 supported by the Canadian Public Relations Society , the PRCA and the Public Relations Institute of Australia , but it seems the Public Relations Society of America could not endorse it just yet.\nOur work here is informed by nothing more or less than striving for mutual understanding and goodwill (the very definition of best practice PR), whereas I believe some PRSA members design to affect change to Wikipedia policy, and possibly its core principles. I don\u0026rsquo;t speak for them of course, so I\u0026rsquo;m just guessing. Hopefully, they\u0026rsquo;ll have something to say on the matter later today.\nSpeaking for myself, I can\u0026rsquo;t see how they might achieve such an objective without working in the first place to establish dialogue and goodwill, particularly given the poor reputation PR starts with in the eyes of Wikipedians. We have trampled on their community somewhat over the years after all.\nLastly, it would be remiss of me not to thank the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s Phil Morgan and Andy Ross on behalf of the social media panel for all their help on this. Couldn\u0026rsquo;t do it without them!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/06/version-1-of-wikipedia-guidance-for-pr-practitioners/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Update: \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/policy-resources/best-practice-guides-toolkits/wikipedia-and-public-relations\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eVersion 2 of the Wikipedia guidance was published May 2014\u003c/a\u003e\n.] \u003ca href=\"http://cipr.co/wiki-guide\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Wikipedia Guidance from the CIPR\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Wikipedia-Guidance-front-cover.png\" title=\"Wikipedia Guidance from the CIPR\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted that \u003ca href=\"http://cipr.co/wiki-guide\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe first comprehensive guidance to public relations practitioners on engaging with the Wikipedia community\u003c/a\u003e\n is published today by the CIPR. Here\u0026rsquo;s the process we\u0026rsquo;ve gone through:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; Early January 2012 – The CIPR Social Media panel meets and recognises that current guidance is lacking (see \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/01/reputation-and-wikipedia/\"\u003emy post of 6th January\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; Mid-January 2012 – PR Week\u0026rsquo;s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, calls on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely (\u0026quot;\u003ca href=\"http://www.prweek.com/uk/opinion/1112555/Danny-Rogers-CIPR-set-bar-high-Wikipedia-code/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026quot;)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; January - April 2012 – The Social Media panel\u0026rsquo;s Gemma Griffiths leads the development of a first draft of guidance; \u0026ldquo;something to shoot at\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; 12th May 2012 – Neville Hobson and I take part in the Wikimedia UK AGM to call for their help in working up the guidance (see \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/05/reputation-and-wikipedia-part-ii/\"\u003emy post of 14th May\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; 14th May 2012 – The first draft is uploaded to Wikimedia UK\u0026rsquo;s wiki\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026gt; To 24th June 2012 – We collaborate with Wikimedians on more than 160 edits on the back of a discussion page running to more than twelve thousand words. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"Version 1 of Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners"},{"content":" I swapped sofas on CIPR TV yesterday, seeing the studio from the guests\u0026rsquo; perspective for a change. Gemma Griffiths presented the show and David Gerrard and I were the guests.\nDavid is Wikimedia UK\u0026rsquo;s volunteer spokesperson. As you may know, I\u0026rsquo;ve been helping to lead a dialogue between Wikimedia UK and the CIPR to build mutual understanding, and specifically to co-develop definitive guidance to PR practitioners on how to engage with the Wikipedia community.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re in public relations or have an interest in brand reputation and you don\u0026rsquo;t consider yourself expert in the wheres and whyfores of Wikipedia, do take the time to watch the show. I think it\u0026rsquo;s an excellent introduction to the guidance, version 1 of which is due out next week.\nPrevious posts:\nReputation and Wikipedia Reputation and Wikipedia, part II ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/06/cipr-tv-wikipedia-guidance-to-pr-practitioners-to-be-published-next-week/","summary":"\u003ciframe allowfullscreen frameborder=\"0\" height=\"309\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/N9y_c8woMIc\" width=\"549\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI swapped sofas on CIPR TV yesterday, seeing the studio from the guests\u0026rsquo; perspective for a change. Gemma Griffiths presented the show and David Gerrard and I were the guests.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid is Wikimedia UK\u0026rsquo;s volunteer spokesperson. As you may know, I\u0026rsquo;ve been helping to lead a dialogue between Wikimedia UK and the CIPR to build mutual understanding, and specifically to co-develop definitive guidance to PR practitioners on how to engage with the Wikipedia community.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV: Wikipedia guidance to PR practitioners to be published next week"},{"content":"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake The AMEC European Summit is taking place this week in Dublin. It\u0026rsquo;s a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC\u0026rsquo;s Barry Leggetter and the delegates\u0026rsquo; enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)\nI\u0026rsquo;m here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I\u0026rsquo;m speaking in my own capacity\u0026hellip; my slidestack is embedded above.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s an old theme of mine, the misrepresentation of the idea of influence, and the stack I presented on the topic back in March 2010 has now been viewed some thirteen and a half thousand times – Influence, the bullshit, best practice and promise . It\u0026rsquo;s now 2012 and I feel that we\u0026rsquo;re starting to make some progress towards addressing the complexity of the business of influence. Onwards and upwards.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/06/influence-the-use-and-abuse-of-the-word-in-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more presentations from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://amecorg.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.ameceuropeansummit.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEuropean Summit\u003c/a\u003e\n is taking place this week in Dublin. It\u0026rsquo;s a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC\u0026rsquo;s Barry Leggetter and the delegates\u0026rsquo; enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I\u0026rsquo;m speaking in my own capacity\u0026hellip; my slidestack is embedded above.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence - the use and abuse of the word in social media"},{"content":" [Originally published by Influencer Marketing Review .]\nThis is the third installment of our ‘Q\u0026amp;A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q\u0026amp;A._ IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.\n****Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)\nIMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh. You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place. Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.\nIf our organization’s strategy is unique, why do our organizational structure and processes pivot around the same discipline-oriented departments as everyone else? Shouldn’t the structure be fit-for-process? What if strategy was grounded in the organization’s vision rather than in functional / departmental definitions? What if we elevated this regard for influence flows alongside the flow of money, materials and time?\nIMR: Most discussions of influence or influencers focus on how vendors can best identify and engage with those individuals who most influence buyers’ purchasing decisions. You certainly take that up in the book, but what you also seem to stress is that the vendor, or any company in general, needs not only to influence its stakeholders but also let itself be influenced by these stakeholders. Can you expand on that for those who haven’t yet read the book?\nPhilip: In some ways this has been manifest for decades. Customer-centricity emerged with ‘integrated marketing communications’ in the 1990s. Everyone knows we need to understand the customer, and other stakeholders, better, for how else can we respond to their needs effectively? But modern technology no longer requires this facility to be resigned to ad hoc activity in the marketing department.\nIt’s not well known outside of public relations academia, or at least particularly well practiced, but public relations according to the Excellence model demands that the PR professional act as a proxy for external stakeholders within the organization as much as they represent the organization to the outside world.\nIn my book, I take this principle and make it a quality that needs to permeate the entire organization, systematically. You’ve heard the term “frictionless sharing” in social media lexicon, well I’m trying to help organizations take the friction out of the flow of influence. I also challenge the sacred cow of customer-centricity, but that’s a tangent to our topic here.\nIMR: You make a distinction in the book between influencer-centric and influence-centric approaches, and you advocate the latter. Can you tell us a little about that distinction, and why you find the influence-centric approach to be so superior?\nPhilip: Influencer-centric approaches try to identify the individuals that exert most influence in the context concerned – the so-called influentials. If we can influence them appropriately, they’ll influence their network and job done. It implies that the agency or team that wields such influence tools and approach is in fact a super-influencer; an influencer of the influentials.\nBut this ignores complexity. The ways in which influence goes around comes around are incredibly complex. For example, we are influenced more often by the 150 people nearest to us than the other seven billion odd combined.\nI have developed a new metaphor since writing the book. City traffic. The influencer-centric approach tries to find out about traffic conditions by studying the individual car or individual traffic bottleneck. The first tells you nothing whatsoever about traffic conditions, and the latter ignores the potential emergence of future influence from other sources. Influence-centric practitioners attempt to understand the flow of traffic throughout the entire city, the flow of influence throughout the entire system. It’s a systems approach.\nIMR: But you think it’s still people who are ultimately doing the influencing, right, in some way, shape, or form? If an organization has succeeded in understanding the complexities of the influence flows it wishes to leverage, what does it do next if not work with the influencers within these flows, so to speak? Philip: It’s complex.\nSometimes it’s people explicitly exerting influence on others by their words or deeds. And when it is, it will likely be thousands of them as dozens. Sometimes it’s unconscious; people not appreciating the influence they have on others. And sometimes, it’s like the traffic jam, nothing to do with an individual at all.\nThe very word ‘complexity’ means a system that portrays emergent behavior; that is behavior that cannot be attributed to individual objects in the system. The social web exhibits emergent behavior; that’s two billion odd people online. When we have 30 to 100 billion things online by 2020, the Internet of Things, we can expect this network to exhibit emergent behavior too, some of which will influence people and other systems. I call this the Internetome – the manifestations of the Internet of Things as it intermingles with the ‘real world’.\nIMR: You wrote in the book, “The conclusions of The Tipping Point are overly simplistic and probably just plain wrong.” You’re not the first to take issue with that book, of course – Duncan Watts comes to mind – but that’s a big statement nonetheless.\nPhilip: I’m a rationalist. On compiling research for the book, I found no empirical evidence supporting Gladwell’s hypothesis, and plenty countering it.\nIMR: Online “influence” scoring is getting a lot of attention right now, and the commentary is increasingly negative, at least in the blogosphere. What are your thoughts on all of that? Philip: It’s over two years since I presented “Influence – bullshit, best practice and promise “, and I stand by it. Complexity and network science will continue to unearth insights of important commercial and societal value, but I’m considerably less enamored (as the presentation title betrays) about seeming to translate today’s analytical capabilities into some kind of a score of an individual’s influence.\nRight now, we have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behavior, without falling into some kind of last-click attribution trap, so how then can we pretend to score an individual’s likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with apparent Newtonian simplicity? We’ve barely even attempted to correlate proxies for influence, assuming that universal correlates even exist.\nToday, these scores are apportioned in such naïve fashion that your so-called influence changes following a fortnight offline. Being a Facebook ‘early-unadopter’ myself seriously impairs any score I might be attributed. That’s not a complaint, just an observation with which the scoring companies concur.\nPerhaps these companies attempt a measure at online popularity, or perhaps online authority, or more exactly the likelihood to have one’s online output shared/forwarded, but not one’s influence. Nor indeed one’s trustworthiness.\nSome pundits are starting to replace the inappropriate use of the word influence in this respect with social capital. I prefer to call it what it is to avoid further confusion – propensity to have your stuff shared or referenced, and positively.\nIMR: Where do you see things a few years from now with regard to online influence?\nPhilip: Well, ironically, today’s influence scoring tools have proved influential and have gained widespread adoption. People like simplicity, even when it’s flawed. As H.L. Mencken said: ‘For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.’\nPeople like to think someone with a score of 67 is really more influential than 66. They confuse 70 as ‘twice as influential’ as 35.\nOver the next few years, the influence scoring companies will either evolve towards the framework I describe in my book and take their customers with them, or become increasingly irrelevant as the digerati exert counter-influence. I write and contribute to articles like this to do just that, although I have no way to quantify my individual impact yet of course!\nIMR: We’d be remiss in not mentioning your idea of an Influence Scorecard that you put forth in the book. How would you explain it to someone who isn’t familiar with Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s Balanced Scorecard? Maybe you could touch on the Chief Influence Officer you envision as well.\nPhilip: The Influence Scorecard is a management approach rather than a yardstick per se. It recognizes complexity. It offers a way to redesign an organization’s approach to what I call the Six Influence Flows to its competitive advantage. It’s named in homage to the Balanced Scorecard – the dominant business performance management framework amongst the Global 2000, and works into it.\nThis approach doesn’t sit neatly into one of the core functions that became standard features of organizations during the 20th Century, such as marketing, public relations, customer service, human resources, etc. It transcends traditional functional silos. For this reason, I introduce the role of the Chief Influence Officer if only to underline the transformation required here, and the opportunity.\nIMR: To wrap things up, what’s the one thing you wish people better understood about influence and influencers?\nPhilip: Complexity, simple as that.\nComplexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic. It could be stockbrokers and the phenomenon the stock market.\nHuman ‘objects’ could be the population of Cairo, “the 99%”, sports fans in a sports stadium, people who like photos of cats, your customers, or your employees; in fact, any collection of people interacting with each other. Influencing each other.\nYou can’t understand the termite mound by studying the termite, or reduce the way influence goes around comes around to the role of ‘key influencers’.\nIMR: Well thanks again for joining us, Philip. We trust you’re looking forward to the Olympics coming to your home city this fall. Which events did you get tickets to? Or will you be trying to avoid the whole thing altogether?\nPhilip: I didn’t want to deprive a real sports fan the opportunity, so didn’t apply for tickets. But I’m looking forward to the Olympics ‘the event’, celebrating the best of the UK, the best of London.\nPhilip is a Founding Partner of Meanwhile , a Main Board Director of Intellect , and Board Director of 6UK . He is also a Chartered Engineer. He is the author of The Business of Influence – Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age (Wiley, 2011) and can be followed on Twitter @Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/06/qa-with-influencer-marketing-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://influencermarketingreview.com/2012/06/06/qa-with-the-review-philip-sheldrake-author-of-the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Influencer Marketing Review\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/imr-e1339002225429.png\" title=\"Influencer Marketing Review\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\u003ca href=\"http://influencermarketingreview.com/2012/06/06/qa-with-the-review-philip-sheldrake-author-of-the-business-of-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOriginally published by Influencer Marketing Review\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThis is the third installment of our ‘Q\u0026amp;A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry.\u003c/em\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://influencermarketingreview.com/2012/03/14/qa-with-the-review-openviews-amanda-maksymiw/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAmanda Maksymiw\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003cem\u003eand\u003c/em\u003e \u003ca href=\"http://influencermarketingreview.com/2012/03/28/qa-with-the-review-influencer50s-duncan-brown/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eDuncan Brown\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003cem\u003ehelped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of\u003c/em\u003e The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q\u0026amp;A._ \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e****\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/philip-sheldrake.jpg\" title=\"Philip Sheldrake\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePhilip:\u003c/strong\u003e Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.\u003c/strong\u003e  \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYou’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.\u003c/strong\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePhilip:\u003c/strong\u003e A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Q\u0026A with Influencer Marketing Review"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup .]\nPublic relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted.\nThe way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse.\nThe open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed.\nAnd what\u0026rsquo;s worse, the ITU won\u0026rsquo;t even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn\u0026rsquo;t used to public accountability.\nThe ITU plays an important role in telecommunications and spectrum management but this is not cause for expanding its mandate. While an evolution of Internet governance is needed (not least an examination of the role of the US), it should evolve in the same way that it was originally designed – in an open, decentralized, and inclusive manner.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy to take the Internet for granted. Please don\u0026rsquo;t.\nIf you truly cherish the openness, the ability to connect and share and talk and learn and teach and debate and speak out and speak up, then now is the time to speak up. The Access campaign explains the situation very clearly, and I for one hope that every public relations practitioner takes the time to visit the Access website and signs the petition to protect our Internet.\nThanks.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/06/the-internet-we-know-and-love-is-at-serious-risk/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/the.internet.we.know.and.love.is.at.serious.risk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://AccessNow.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"AccessNow logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/AccessNow.org_logo-e1338548613922.jpg\" title=\"AccessNow logo\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublic relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd what\u0026rsquo;s worse, the ITU won\u0026rsquo;t even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn\u0026rsquo;t used to public accountability.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Internet we know and love is at serious risk"},{"content":"\nYesterday marked 150 years since the first \u0026rsquo;trial ride\u0026rsquo; on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the National Portrait Gallery in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery\u0026rsquo;s accompanying text is as follows\u0026hellip;\nMr and Mrs Gladstone on the Metropolitan Railway The \u0026lsquo;railway mania\u0026rsquo; in the first half of the nineteenth century greatly improved access to and from London. However, acute road traffic congestion created a need for a rail network within the city itself. In February 1860 work began on the Metropolitan Railway, the first underground railway system in the world. The first line, from Paddington Station to Farringdon Street, opened on 10 January 1863. Public figures including William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98), then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his wife Catherine (1812-1900), were invited to take \u0026rsquo;trial rides\u0026rsquo; on the line prior to the opening.\nCatherine Gladstone (nee Glynne) often accompanied her husband on public occasions, including the very first London underground train journey on 24 May 1862. She recognized the importance of their image as a couple and was the first woman to regularly appear alongside her husband on the platform during political speeches. Increasingly committed to charity work and fundraising, she became a celebrated figure in her own right and a market developed for her portrait in the form of photographs and commemorative memorabilia.\n__\nAs this is a photo of an old photo, I think I can set the copyright for the image. As such, please refer to the footer of my blog for license terms (Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 England \u0026amp; Wales License ).\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/05/trial-rides-on-the-new-london-underground-150-years-ago/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Mr and Mrs Gladstone on the Metropolitan Railway, Trial Ride, 24th May 2012\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/DSCF0304-1024x768.jpg\" title=\"Mr and Mrs Gladstone on the Metropolitan Railway, Trial Ride, 24th May 2012\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYesterday marked 150 years since the first \u0026rsquo;trial ride\u0026rsquo; on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npg.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNational Portrait Gallery\u003c/a\u003e\n in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery\u0026rsquo;s accompanying text is as follows\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Trial rides on the new London Underground, 150 years ago"},{"content":" This week\u0026rsquo;s CIPR TV addressed the topic of ethics, and \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;. Joining me in the studio were Eliane Glaser, Guardian columnist and author of Get Real: How to tell it like it is in a world of illusions (Amazon , Waterstones ), and Dr Jon White, PR consultant, strategist, and author of the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s PR2020 report (PDF) .\nIt appears the world of public relations has a reputation problem. It\u0026rsquo;s almost schizophrenic, with one camp entrenched in persuasive \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;, or perhaps publicity, and the other in working towards open, transparent, mutual understanding between the organisation and stakeholders. Max Clifford for example, whilst often introduced by the British mass media as a PR consultant, is actually a publicist; a distinction indeed that the Wikipedia community is able to make at the time of writing.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a fascinating topic and we had a lot of ground to cover in 20 minutes. Hit play and find out more.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/05/cipr-tv-on-ethics/","summary":"\u003ciframe width=\"550\" height=\"309\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/7SIT88Mv0x8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis week\u0026rsquo;s CIPR TV addressed the topic of ethics, and \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;. Joining me in the studio were Eliane Glaser, Guardian columnist and author of \u003cem\u003eGet Real: How to tell it like it is in a world of illusions\u003c/em\u003e (\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Get-Real-Tell-World-Illusions/dp/0007416814\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/eliane\u0026#43;glaser/get\u0026#43;real/8882508/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWaterstones\u003c/a\u003e\n), and Dr Jon White, PR consultant, strategist, and author of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/PR%202020%20Final%20Report_0.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u0026rsquo;s PR2020 report (PDF)\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt appears the world of public relations has a reputation problem. It\u0026rsquo;s almost schizophrenic, with one camp entrenched in persuasive \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo;, or perhaps publicity, and the other in working towards open, transparent, mutual understanding between the organisation and stakeholders. \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Clifford\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMax Clifford\u003c/a\u003e\n for example, whilst often introduced by the British mass media as a PR consultant, is actually a publicist; a distinction indeed that the Wikipedia community is able to make at the time of writing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV on ethics"},{"content":"The public relations profession and Wikipedia community have not enjoyed a productive relationship to date; antagonistic may be a more accurate adjective. For a quick overview of this situation, do take a look at my January 6th post, Reputation and Wikipedia .\nFor my part, I think I understand both parties\u0026rsquo; points of view and see no reason why good public relations practice (the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill) shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be employed to build bridges here.\nCREWE The Facebook group, Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement , has quite rightly stirred the pot, raising the profile of the issues involved. For those who practice public relations according to the definition in brackets above, Wikipedia can appear a frustrating community to work with. One asks: \u0026ldquo;Why, if I know facts on Wikipedia entries relating to my organisation / client are incorrect, can\u0026rsquo;t I jump in and correct them?\u0026rdquo; There are two answers to that, but firstly an update on that process of building bridges.\nCIPR Guidance PR Week\u0026rsquo;s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, called on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely, on 18th January 2012 (\u0026quot;CIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code \u0026quot;). Fortunately, the CIPR Social Media panel had already got its heads together to review the situation.\nThe CIPR\u0026rsquo;s guidance at that point consisted of the general code of conduct and the social media guidelines .\nThe code of conduct was updated in October 2011. A section pertinent to the matter describes good public relations practice as: \u0026ldquo;Never deliberately concealing the practitioner’s role as representative of a client or employer, even if the client or employer remains anonymous: e.g. by promoting a cause in the guise of a disinterested party or member of the public.\u0026rdquo;\nPrior to the update, the code read: \u0026ldquo;Never knowingly misleading clients, employers, employees, colleagues and fellow professionals about the nature of representation\u0026rdquo;.\nIn my opinion, both statements couldn\u0026rsquo;t be clearer when a PR practitioner might contemplate editing Wikipedia anonymously or pseudonomously, at least an entry relating to his employer or client; don\u0026rsquo;t.\nAs for the social media guidance, a brief section specifically addressing Wikipedia reads:\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; if a practitioner is looking to update a Wikipedia entry on behalf of a company or a client, it is best to visit the discussion / talk pages and work with an editor to update the relevant page – all updates and entries to Wikipedia must be neutral in tone, factual and verifiable. Please read the Wikipedia guidelines carefully before submitting or editing an article.\u0026rdquo;\nGiven the tangle in which the PR profession and Wikipedia community find themselves, the CIPR social media panel no longer considers this guidance adequate. Therefore, the CIPR SM panel\u0026rsquo;s Gemma Griffiths took the action to kickstart a Google doc expanding the guidance, and a bunch of us on the panel piled in to challenge, tweak and twiddle. Read on to find out how you can contribute too.\nWikimedia UK AGM Wikimedia is the \u0026lsquo;movement\u0026rsquo; behind Wikipedia, and many other great projects as you\u0026rsquo;ll see if you follow the link. The Wikimedia UK AGM took place this past Saturday at the Science Museum, London, and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that Wikimedia UK invited Neville Hobson and me to participate.\nWe both got a bit of a cheer when we said we were becoming Wikimedia UK members. It\u0026rsquo;s only £5 per year , and what better way to show your willing in getting to know the community?\nNeville and I presented a very simple slidestack (embedded below) conveying our hope that the Wikipedia community, CIPR members, members of the PRCA and PRSA, and indeed anyone with an interest here, could come together to co-develop Wikipedia guidance for PR practitioners. And I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that this \u0026lsquo;something to shoot at\u0026rsquo; has now been posted on the Wikimedia UK wiki: Draft best practice guidelines for PR . Please do take a look, and comment on the talk / discussion page, and edit accordingly, as you see fit.\nPerhaps the most pertinent slide in the stack is the simple one about reputation. Wikipedia has one. And public relations has one. And any member of either group that considers its community to be perfect isn\u0026rsquo;t yet ready to take part in this dialogue.\nNeutral point of view, and verifiability The draft guidelines are not as hawkish at it appears some members of CREWE might advocate. For example, the CIPR SM panel doesn\u0026rsquo;t believe we should consider challenging the Wikipedia founding principle of neutral point of view, NPOV . (If any CIPR SM member disagrees, please correct me in the comments below.) And to consider replacing Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s requirement for verifiability with some idealistic and abstract concept of truth is plain bonkers in my opinion.\nAs Einstein said, whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.\nSo why can\u0026rsquo;t I edit Wikipedia entries directly? You can, when you hold a neutral point of view. In fact it would be beneficial to PR practitioners and Wikipedia if more of us did make edits. The PR practitioner gets to know Wikipedia and Wikipedians better, and Wikipedia gets more valuable contributors. Fab!\nHowever, as I said up top, there are two reasons why you cannot edit entries, outside the exceptions in the guidelines, where your organisation or client is involved.\n1. Wikipedia is a community and we must respect the community\u0026rsquo;s right to set its rules, even if we might not agree with all the rules 100%. That\u0026rsquo;s just the way it is. If anyone believes the rules should be changed, then the case has to be made in public fora for open debate, and what better forum than the community\u0026rsquo;s own (as opposed to Facebook say)?\nand;\n2. The public relations reputation is deserved. Until more practitioners join professional institutes such as the CIPR, adhering to its policies and codes of conduct, undergoing its training and continuous professional development, and aspiring to professional accreditation, then there will always be more practitioners than there would be otherwise that bring the profession into disrepute. Putting our own house in order is a critical step before offering to sort someone else\u0026rsquo;s out.\nWikipedia and Public Relations View more presentations from Neville Hobson .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/05/reputation-and-wikipedia-part-ii/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_RGB_logo_with_text.svg\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/200px-Wikimedia_Foundation_RGB_logo_with_text.svg_.png\" title=\"Wikimedia Foundation\"\u003eThe public relations profession and Wikipedia community have not enjoyed a productive relationship to date; antagonistic may be a more accurate adjective. For a quick overview of this situation, do take a look at my January 6th post, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/01/reputation-and-wikipedia/\"\u003eReputation and Wikipedia\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor my part, I think I understand both parties\u0026rsquo; points of view and see no reason why good public relations practice (the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill) shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be employed to build bridges here.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"crewe\"\u003eCREWE\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Facebook group, \u003ca href=\"http://www.facebook.com/pages/Corporate-Representatives-for-Ethical-Wikipedia-Engagement/109913395802558\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCorporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement\u003c/a\u003e\n, has quite rightly stirred the pot, raising the profile of the issues involved. For those who practice public relations according to the definition in brackets above, Wikipedia can appear a frustrating community to work with. One asks: \u0026ldquo;Why, if I know facts on Wikipedia entries relating to my organisation / client are incorrect, can\u0026rsquo;t I jump in and correct them?\u0026rdquo; There are two answers to that, but firstly an update on that process of building bridges.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"cipr-guidance\"\u003eCIPR Guidance\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePR Week\u0026rsquo;s Editor in Chief, Danny Rogers, called on the CIPR to clarify its guidance to members, and the profession more widely, on 18th January 2012 (\u0026quot;\u003ca href=\"http://www.prweek.com/uk/opinion/1112555/Danny-Rogers-CIPR-set-bar-high-Wikipedia-code/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR must set bar high on Wikipedia code\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026quot;). Fortunately, the CIPR Social Media panel had already got its heads together to review the situation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Reputation and Wikipedia, part II"},{"content":"Back in 2009, at that year\u0026rsquo;s Monitoring Social Media conference, I forecast Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into social analytics in Q1 2010 . Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!\nSo here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:\n___\nMeasure the value of social media with Google Analytics A new set of Social reports help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on your Goals and Ecommerce activities. The 4 new reports aggregate key data points to help you see the complete picture of how social marketing and media affect your business. You\u0026rsquo;ll find the Social Value Overview , Social Sources , Social Plugins , and Conversion Reports in the Traffic Sources section of your account. Learn More .\n___\nFor those who know my views on the widespread abuse of the word \u0026lsquo;influence\u0026rsquo; , I was immediately drawn to Google\u0026rsquo;s use of the phrase \u0026lsquo;social value\u0026rsquo;. Here\u0026rsquo;s what they have to say about social value, although somewhat confusingly it\u0026rsquo;s accompanied by an image centred around the phrase \u0026ldquo;Your Social Impact\u0026rdquo;. Either way, it\u0026rsquo;s a whole lot of analytical goodness to digest ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Dublin in June.\n___\nThe Social Relationship The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. Social analytics provides you with the tools to measure the impact of social. You can identify high-value networks and content, track on-site and off-site user interaction with your content and tie it all back to your bottom-line revenue through goals and conversions.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how we see this story:\nSources \u0026amp; Pages: Identify networks \u0026amp; communities where people engage with your content.\nConversions: Measure the value of social by tracking your goals, conversions and e-commerce transactions.\nSocial Plug-ins: Measure your on-site user engagement.\nSocial Visitors Flow: Compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/05/finally-google-adds-social-analytics-to-ga/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBack in 2009, at that year\u0026rsquo;s Monitoring Social Media conference, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2009/11/friday-roundup-monitoring-social-media-09/\"\u003eI forecast Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into social analytics in Q1 2010\u003c/a\u003e\n. Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Finally, Google adds social analytics to GA"},{"content":"I posted \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;Earned media\u0026rsquo; is not a synonym for public relations \u0026rdquo; late last night. One of the points I made in the post is that a PR campaign may well involve advertising, as odd as the application of the misguided Paid Owned Earned media taxonomy may make people think this might be.\nAnd then I stumbled across this beautiful ad by the Friends of the Earth in the Financial Times today, literally identifying elements of a Daily Telegraph article they consider to be flawed or indeed down right incorrect. I would classify this as an attempt by Friends of the Earth to achieve mutual understanding with stakeholders; as public relations.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a great ad. But I would have appreciated it more had it been easier to share with you. I can\u0026rsquo;t find it online anywhere, so had to resort to taking a photo and uploading it here. Come on Friends of the Earth! :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/04/daily-telegraph-article-picked-apart-by-friends-of-the-earth-in-an-advert-in-the-ft/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI posted \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/04/earned-media-is-not-a-synonym-for-public-relations/\"\u003e\u0026lsquo;Earned media\u0026rsquo; is not a synonym for public relations\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; late last night. One of the points I made in the post is that a PR campaign may well involve advertising, as odd as the application of the misguided Paid Owned Earned media taxonomy may make people think this might be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd then I stumbled across this beautiful ad by the Friends of the Earth in the Financial Times today, literally identifying elements of a Daily Telegraph article they consider to be flawed or indeed down right incorrect. I would classify this as an attempt by Friends of the Earth to achieve mutual understanding with stakeholders; as public relations.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Daily Telegraph article picked apart by Friends of the Earth in an advert in the FT"},{"content":"\n\u0026ldquo;Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.\u0026rdquo;\nThat\u0026rsquo;s how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content , and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.\nNames have been changed\u0026hellip;\nIncident 1 Anne: \u0026ldquo;So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time.\u0026rdquo;\nMe: \u0026ldquo;So if we\u0026rsquo;re looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us\u0026hellip; the owned stuff that has earned a share – a \u0026lsquo;Like\u0026rsquo;, a RT, a +1 for example.\u0026rdquo;\nAnne: \u0026ldquo;Well that\u0026rsquo;s owned media that people decide they rate. The earned media needs a sort of intervention from the PR team. Er\u0026hellip; well\u0026hellip; yeah, sometimes they\u0026rsquo;ll also craft content they\u0026rsquo;d like to be shared. Designed to be shared I guess. Er\u0026hellip; Hmmm. So you have owned-shared and earned-shared. No, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound right\u0026hellip; And of course sometimes you earn media you didn\u0026rsquo;t set out to earn. Hang on, I think I have a diagram somewhere\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nIncident 2 Me: \u0026ldquo;So the challenge in question is predominantly one of public relations.\u0026rdquo;\nBob: \u0026ldquo;Now hold on just a minute\u0026hellip; there is definitely a strong need for advertising here.\u0026rdquo;\nIncident 3 Claire: \u0026ldquo;So we have the normal delineation of media. Marketing looks after paid and PR looks after earned. Right?\u0026rdquo;\nMe: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m following\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nClaire: [I\u0026rsquo;ve tried hard to get this as close to the actual verbatim] \u0026ldquo;And marketing takes the more static stuff on owned media, you know the stuff we just put out there. But when it\u0026rsquo;s designed to get a response, engagement, like a blog post, then the PR team looks after it. Until it looks like it\u0026rsquo;s a customer service thing. But the customer service people say we should put up some more content that answers the questions before they arise. So sometimes they take it, and sometimes they push a requirement to marketing to update the web content, and sometimes they push back to the Twitter and Facebook team. Unless it\u0026rsquo;s from a blogger, and then our PR agency likes to take that on because that\u0026rsquo;s really earned media isn\u0026rsquo;t it.\u0026rdquo;\nMe: \u0026ldquo;Goodness. The \u0026rsquo;normal delineation\u0026rsquo; eh?! Sounds seamless.\u0026rdquo;\nWowzers So like I wrote in that November post, I can’t be the only one wondering if there’s any real value in this paid - owned - earned taxonomy. In other words, when exactly does it help you design and execute strategy? How does it help design organizational structure and processes?\nIt sure as hell looks to me like it\u0026rsquo;s hindering Anne, Bob and Claire.\nPublic Relations is the planned and sustained effort to influence opinion and behaviour, and to be influenced similarly, in order to build mutual understanding and goodwill (source ). At no point is PR defined in terms of paid, owned or earned media. PR may entail media relations, \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;digital\u0026rsquo;, but media relations isn\u0026rsquo;t a synonym for PR, and neither is earned media.\nWith respect to the second incident above, if advertising could help us achieve our PR objectives, then advertising may well feature in the PR strategy and tactical execution.\nMarketing is the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return (Principles of Marketing, 5th European ed., Kotler et al). Guess what. At no point is marketing defined in terms of paid, owned or earned media.\nInfluence As I assert in The Business of Influence, the ease and effectiveness with which we manage and learn from influence flows is integral to the ways all stakeholders interact with organizations to broker mutually valuable, beneficial relationships.\nI believe that when an organisation becomes influence-centric, when it organizes itself around the Six Influence Flows and not around some misguided media taxonomy, it improves its ability to live up to its mission and pursue its vision.\n[Photo credit: Leo Reynolds ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/04/earned-media-is-not-a-synonym-for-public-relations/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"British Heart Foundation outdoor ad, Leo Reynolds, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/2138006896\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/british_heart_foundation_outdoor_ad-300x200.jpg\" title=\"British Heart Foundation outdoor ad, Leo Reynolds, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/2138006896\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat\u0026rsquo;s how I opened a blog post back in November, \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/11/the-influence-view-of-content-0-1/\"\u003eThe Influence View of Content\u003c/a\u003e\n, and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNames have been changed\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"incident-1\"\u003eIncident 1\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnne: \u0026ldquo;So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMe: \u0026ldquo;So if we\u0026rsquo;re looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us\u0026hellip; the owned stuff that has earned a share – a \u0026lsquo;Like\u0026rsquo;, a RT, a +1 for example.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations"},{"content":"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed _code/12522700\nThe Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We\u0026rsquo;re expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I\u0026rsquo;m up immediately after the \u0026ldquo;Ask the engines\u0026rdquo; panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web\u0026rsquo;s development might take today\u0026rsquo;s SEO practitioners.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the hypothesis for future vistas?\nWell without web search there would be no search engine optimisation, right? (You can see why I get invited to speak at such august gatherings \u0026hellip; pure insight!) And yet the SEO skillset no longer needs the fuel and constant vagaries of public WWW search to keep practitioners in full employ.\nSEO can be considered with ill repute when it\u0026rsquo;s perceived to be about gaming (read \u0026ldquo;fooling\u0026rdquo;) search engine algorithms in order to serve solely the website owner\u0026rsquo;s perceived needs. However, when you view SEO skills as working in partnership with search engines to help deliver the right information to the web user at the right time in the right format, suddenly the reputation is transformed. How incredibly useful!\nMoreover, we are moving beyond WWW search. All sorts of data and information and knowledge repositories are growing fast as the age of Big Data , Big Information and, hopefully, Big Knowledge dawns. Anybody with the facility to help make sense of that data, transforming data into useful information and information into knowledge, has the right skills at just the right time.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/04/future-vistas-for-seo/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed\u003c/a\u003e\n_code/12522700\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Brighton Dome – the front of the queue for Brighton SEO\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Brighton-Dome-225x300.jpg\" title=\"Brighton Dome – the front of the queue for Brighton SEO\"\u003eThe Brighton \u003ca href=\"http://www.brightonseo.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSEO conference\u003c/a\u003e\n is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We\u0026rsquo;re expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I\u0026rsquo;m up immediately after the \u0026ldquo;Ask the engines\u0026rdquo; panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web\u0026rsquo;s development might take today\u0026rsquo;s SEO practitioners.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Future Vistas for SEO"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.\nI hope it goes without saying that I\u0026rsquo;m happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.\nThanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.\nPRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012 View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/04/the-business-of-influence-for-really-big-digital-impact/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s my slidestack for \u003ca href=\"http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/DigitalImpact\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePRSA Digital Impact Conference\u003c/a\u003e\n (#PRSADiConf) today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI hope it goes without saying that I\u0026rsquo;m happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/prsa-digital-impact-conference-april-2012\" title=\"PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;m in New York today at the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Digital Impact Conference . In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to it.\nAnd the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I\u0026rsquo;ve come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts\u0026hellip;\nFirst, most organisations don\u0026rsquo;t yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven\u0026rsquo;t yet wholly adapted to today\u0026rsquo;s social media and digital technologies.\nSecond, we haven\u0026rsquo;t seen anything yet! The rate of change over the next five years will make the last five look like we were taking our sweet time. And that\u0026rsquo;s what fascinates me and informs my presentation. This is the REALLY BIG digital impact!\nWhen I presented at Dreamforce in San Francisco last year, the dominant phrase amongst delegates was Socialize the Enterprise. It\u0026rsquo;s now time to make that happen, and I\u0026rsquo;m hoping we\u0026rsquo;ll have a great #PRSADiConf dialogue this afternoon.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/04/the-really-big-digital-impact-at-prsadiconf/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PRSA Digital Impact Conference\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/prsadiconf.png\" title=\"PRSA Digital Impact Conference\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m in New York today at the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/DigitalImpact/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDigital Impact Conference\u003c/a\u003e\n. In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I\u0026rsquo;ve come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, most organisations don\u0026rsquo;t yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven\u0026rsquo;t yet wholly adapted to today\u0026rsquo;s social media and digital technologies.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf"},{"content":"Aristotle said that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are: ethos, argument by character; logos, argument by logic; and pathos, appeal to the emotions.\nBecause I have the superior mind of a scientist (that\u0026rsquo;s sarcasm btw), I have an overwhelming natural inclination toward logos. And when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, I try it again, despite Einstein\u0026rsquo;s insistence that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.\nTrundling my way to the office on the number 94 Wednesday I read \u0026ldquo;Jay Heinrich\u0026rsquo;s Powers of Persuasion\u0026rdquo; in Business Week magazine in which Mr. Heinrich is described as one of the world’s leading students of Aristotelian rhetoric. This means he\u0026rsquo;s kinda expert at mixing up the ethos, logos and pathos just right.\n\u0026ldquo;I have found that pathos and ethos come first. Add a dash of logos to work in your position, then bring it on home with a dose of pathos.\u0026rdquo;\nI thought I\u0026rsquo;d try it when I got to the office. We had a meeting with a potential investee and my colleague Gabbi Cahane kicked off the meeting with typical intensity. And would you believe it, he appealed to our emotions and character first up, emphasised the underlying rationale, and concluded his contribution with an emotional tug. We\u0026rsquo;ll have a termsheet sorted within the week.\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t quite believe it.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/03/persuasion/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAristotle said that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are: \u003cem\u003eethos\u003c/em\u003e, argument by character; \u003cem\u003elogos\u003c/em\u003e, argument by logic; and \u003cem\u003epathos\u003c/em\u003e, appeal to the emotions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBecause I have the superior mind of a scientist (that\u0026rsquo;s sarcasm btw), I have an overwhelming natural inclination toward \u003cem\u003elogos\u003c/em\u003e. And when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, I try it again, despite Einstein\u0026rsquo;s insistence that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTrundling my way to the office on the number 94 Wednesday I read \u003ca href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-14/jay-heinrichss-powers-of-persuasion\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u0026ldquo;Jay Heinrich\u0026rsquo;s Powers of Persuasion\u0026rdquo; in Business Week magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n in which Mr. Heinrich is described as one of the world’s leading students of Aristotelian rhetoric. This means he\u0026rsquo;s kinda expert at mixing up the \u003cem\u003eethos\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003elogos\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003epathos\u003c/em\u003e just right.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Persuasion"},{"content":"[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\n\u0026ldquo;When is a mobile a tablet?\u0026rdquo; was the high level strategic question (that\u0026rsquo;s sarcasm) that I was debating with our CIPR TV guests this week the minute before we went live.\nWe decided the answer is subjective. It\u0026rsquo;s a tablet at the point you think you look stupid holding it to your ear. (Actually that\u0026rsquo;s not verbatim. We used a more descriptive word than stupid.)\nFortunately, the show itself addresses more important matters. For me, the most important morsel emerged during the conversation about apps, in particular the idea that today\u0026rsquo;s obsession with apps is just a moment in time.\nDid you know that, of the hundreds of thousands out there, the top 50 apps account for 60% of all time spent on apps (Nielsen 2011)? And, in the words of Mobile Marketing Magazine editor David Murphy, many marketers appear to want one for no other reason than everyone else has one. That\u0026rsquo;s hardly strategic thinking.\nDid you know that apps, or native apps to give them their proper title, sit off the WWWW (Wonderful World Wide Web) and all the loveliness the web enables, but rather communicate in their own narrow little ways over the Internet (the network the Web sits on top of)?\nYou will know that native apps have to be developed for each sort of device in turn. Once for Apple devices, again for Android, again for Blackberry. And then there\u0026rsquo;s Windows. And one in eight phones in use in the UK is Symbian.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s the alternative? Well, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, recommends we build web apps instead of native apps.\nA web app is built with open web standards that work across all web capable devices. They don\u0026rsquo;t need to look like they\u0026rsquo;re running in a web browser, and with the emergence in recent years of HTML5, the latest version of the language for web pages, you can achieve many of the things that have previously only been possible with a native app. (More from Sapient London\u0026rsquo;s Paul Bevan on this .)\nThe best example I know of is the FT app. Check it out on your Apple device at http://app.ft.com . Nice.\nThe next time the execution of your communications strategy leads you to think of an app, think web app.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/03/when-is-a-mobile-a-tablet-and-more-useful-questions/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Written originally for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.16th.march.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;When is a mobile a tablet?\u0026rdquo; was the high level strategic question (that\u0026rsquo;s sarcasm) that I was debating with \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2012/03/cipr-tv-mobile-trends-tools-and-practices/\" title=\"CIPR TV – Mobile trends, tools and practices\"\u003eour CIPR TV guests\u003c/a\u003e\n this week the minute before we went live.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe decided the answer is subjective. It\u0026rsquo;s a tablet at the point you think you look stupid holding it to your ear. (Actually that\u0026rsquo;s not verbatim. We used a more descriptive word than stupid.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFortunately, the show itself addresses more important matters. For me, the most important morsel emerged during the conversation about apps, in particular the idea that today\u0026rsquo;s obsession with apps is just a moment in time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"When is a mobile a tablet? And more useful questions."},{"content":"If you\u0026rsquo;re in marketing or public relations you need to \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; mobile. Period. So I was chuffed to be able to host a conversation on CIPR TV yesterday with Simon Liss , Managing Director of We Love Mobile , and David Murphy , Editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine .\nThanks Simon. Thanks David.\nFor information about upcoming CIPR TV shows, simply skip on over to www.cipr.tv .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/03/cipr-tv-mobile-trends-tools-and-practices/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;re in marketing or public relations you need to \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; mobile. Period. So I was chuffed to be able to host a conversation on CIPR TV yesterday with \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/pub/simon-liss/5/13a/1bb\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSimon Liss\u003c/a\u003e\n, Managing Director of \u003ca href=\"http://www.welovemobile.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWe Love Mobile\u003c/a\u003e\n, and \u003ca href=\"http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/david-murphy/1/40/bab\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Murphy\u003c/a\u003e\n, Editor of \u003ca href=\"http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMobile Marketing Magazine\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks Simon. Thanks David.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe width=\"550\" height=\"309\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/LCmrAyJnWkg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor information about upcoming CIPR TV shows, simply skip on over to \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.tv\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.cipr.tv\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV – Mobile trends, tools and practices"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\n\u0026ldquo;Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd so concludes the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Public Relations Defined (#prdefined) initiative. Launched 30th October last year, the initiative has garnered considerable interest, both positive and negative.\nOn the positive front, I have seen considerable interest from practitioners, predominantly but not exclusively in the US as one might expect given the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s geographic domain, grappling with the question of how to define what they do for a living with sincerity. No bad thing, particularly when some practitioners\u0026rsquo; perspective turns out to be, well, a little far off the mark.\nThese include too narrow definitions, making PR synonymous with media relations for example. And lopsided definitions, where the intent is ill-considered to entail exercising one\u0026rsquo;s mouth way more than one\u0026rsquo;s ears. (I\u0026rsquo;ve always liked the maxim that one has two ears and one mouth and should use them in that ratio.) It\u0026rsquo;s a positive outcome that those who held such views have had their assumptions tested by their peers.\nOn the negative front, the initiative attracted some accusations from those who think along the lines of: i) it\u0026rsquo;s bloody obvious; or ii) the profession must be in poor repair if it still has to ask this question in 2012.\nFirstly, it\u0026rsquo;s plain to see from the debate that the answer is not obvious – witness the heartfelt dialogue. Secondly, the profession is younger than many and has just been rocked by the advent of social media, so what\u0026rsquo;s wrong with a bit of self-reflection?\nThe full conclusion to the initiative is published here and reported in the New York Times here .\nFor more background on the definitions around the world of PR and marketing, including the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s, you might like my November 2011 post on the subject .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/03/prsa-defining-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.2nd.march.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd so concludes the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Public Relations Defined (#prdefined) initiative. \u003ca href=\"http://prdefinition.prsa.org/index.php/2011/10/30/about-the-prsa-public-relations-defined-initiative/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLaunched 30th October\u003c/a\u003e\n last year, the initiative has garnered considerable interest, both positive and negative.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the positive front, I have seen considerable interest from practitioners, predominantly but not exclusively in the US as one might expect given the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s geographic domain, grappling with the question of how to define what they do for a living with sincerity. No bad thing, particularly when some practitioners\u0026rsquo; perspective turns out to be, well, a little far off the mark.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"PRSA, defining PR"},{"content":"[Originally written for The Guardian Media Network .]\nIf media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.\nYou have been influenced when you think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think it now that influence is the hot word.\nThe capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a good use of the communicator\u0026rsquo;s time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.\nThe focus on making sure you\u0026rsquo;re influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.\nInfluence is complex, and I mean that in the full \u0026ldquo;complexity science\u0026rdquo; sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic.\nHuman objects could be the population of Cairo, the 99%, sports fans in a sports stadium, people who like photos of cats, your customers, or your employees; in fact, any collection of people interacting with each other, influencing each other.\nA characteristic of complexity is that studying the individual rarely betrays anything about the phenomena. You can\u0026rsquo;t learn much about the termite mound by studying the individual termite, or the traffic jam by studying the car.\nThink about it. Take almost any of your recent thoughts or actions and try and decipher how in fact that thought or action came to be; what did you take into account, consciously and unconsciously, over what timescale? You soon begin to appreciate that your thoughts and actions are outputs of a complex system. You are reconciling multiple inputs, multiple influences.\nComplexity science remains a work in progress, and related fields include systems theory, chaos theory, network science, and more specifically to our focus here, subsets of network science called social network analysis and link analysis.\nCompanies such as Klout , PeerIndex and PeopleBrowsr all pursue social network analysis and link analysis of social media, arriving at a purported score of an individual\u0026rsquo;s influence – Klout, PI score and Kred respectively. Klout claims to be \u0026ldquo;the standard for influence\u0026rdquo;, PeerIndex tempts you with \u0026ldquo;own your own influence\u0026rdquo;, and PeopleBrowsr claims to \u0026ldquo;assemble the collective intelligence, identify its most influential people, and make them accessible for analysis and engagement.\u0026rdquo;\nIn my opinion, complexity and network science will continue to unearth insights of important commercial and societal value, but I\u0026rsquo;m considerably less enamoured about seeming to translate today\u0026rsquo;s analytical capabilities into some kind of a score of an individual\u0026rsquo;s influence. Right now, we have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behaviour, without falling into some kind of last-click attribution trap, so how then can we pretend to score an individual\u0026rsquo;s likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with apparent Newtonian simplicity? We\u0026rsquo;ve barely even attempted to correlate proxies for influence, assuming that universal correlates even exist.\nToday, these scores are apportioned in such naive fashion that your so-called influence changes following a fortnight offline. Being a Facebook \u0026ldquo;early-unadopter\u0026rdquo; myself seriously impairs any score I might be attributed. That\u0026rsquo;s not a complaint, just an observation with which the scoring companies concur.\nPerhaps these companies attempt a measure at online popularity, or perhaps online authority, or more exactly the likelihood to have one\u0026rsquo;s online output shared/forwarded, but not one\u0026rsquo;s influence. Nor indeed one\u0026rsquo;s trustworthiness. PeopleBrowsr appears to be the most forthright in addressing these distinctions.\nAs mentioned in my book, The Business of Influence, Dr Duncan Watts isn\u0026rsquo;t beloved of marketers. He\u0026rsquo;s applied his physics degree and doctorate in theoretical and applied mechanics to the study of information contagion. In a summary of his work, a Fast Company article from February 2008, Is the Tipping Point Toast? , he is quoted as saying: \u0026ldquo;Influentials don\u0026rsquo;t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.\u0026rdquo; He continues: \u0026ldquo;If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one – and if it isn\u0026rsquo;t, then almost no one can.\u0026rdquo;\nHe isn\u0026rsquo;t beloved apparently because this is interpreted to be bad news for marketers; and I guess therefore for those companies claiming to identify these influentials to the marketers and communicators.\nOverall, it seems that each of us is more influenced by the 150-odd nearest to us than by the other six or so billion combined. Influence is truly complex. And this is a considerable challenge – and opportunity – to marketing and public relations firms. So far, many have claimed to be able to identify the influentials, get to know them, and influence them. They are effectively claiming to be the influencer of influencers, a sort of influencer-in-chief if you like.\nHowever, successful marketing and PR consultants of the 21st-century will avoid such simplistic thinking, such hyperbole, and recognise complexity and navigate it appropriately.\nAs for the analysis firms, long may we have the for-profit motive to explore complexity science and network science, let\u0026rsquo;s just not mis-sell its capabilities along the way.\nPhilip Sheldrake is the author of The Business of Influence, Wiley, 2011. He is a founding partner of Meanwhile, the venture marketers, and chairs the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s social media measurement group. He blogs at philipsheldrake.com ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/02/the-complexity-of-influence-is-a-challenge-and-an-opportunity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for \u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/feb/15/complexity-influence-challenge-opportunity\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Guardian Media Network\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Guardian Media Network\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Media-Network-e1329601368232.gif\" title=\"Guardian Media Network\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou have been influenced when you think something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think it now that influence is the hot word.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a good use of the communicator\u0026rsquo;s time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe focus on making sure you\u0026rsquo;re influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInfluence is complex, and I mean that in the full \u0026ldquo;complexity science\u0026rdquo; sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nThis week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I\u0026rsquo;ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small.\nBut there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that\u0026rsquo;s my term for it.\nI define machined media as content that\u0026rsquo;s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year\u0026rsquo;s CIPR Social Media conference.\nMachined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn\u0026rsquo;t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much.\nBut semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp.\nI used \u0026lsquo;semi-machined\u0026rsquo; to describe an article that\u0026rsquo;s partially written by machine and requires a human to finish it off. It\u0026rsquo;s not uncommon in sports coverage for example. The computer system can establish which teams are playing, who makes it onto the pitch, who is substituted, who scores and when, simply by following the online commentary and associated digital outputs. These snippets can then be pre-filled for the journalist to join the dots and add some emotional context.\nPure machined media gives the software complete autonomy.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all powered by semantic technologies and the BBC is possibly the best exponent of all media organisations today. Some of the BBC articles (or \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; more blandly) you\u0026rsquo;ll read about the Olympics this summer will make it into the world sans midwife.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s that got to do with social media you ask?\nWell, this is social media, just with some machines joining in the socialising. It\u0026rsquo;s not the first entrant of machines into the realm; think about how you find out what\u0026rsquo;s trending? A machine had to step in to wring that out for you. And then many of you will have used services like Zemanta too.\nEnter \u0026lsquo;machined media relations\u0026rsquo;. If media relations has involved you ensuring journalists and other (human) commenters have access to your story and perspective on things, then machined media relations entails you ensuring that information is published and readily available to the machines. Ready for that?\nBest regards, Philip.\nThe Human:Machine input to this article is 100:0.\nThe human who is not a spokesperson for the CIPR.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/02/social-media-week-something-missing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for the \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.17th.february.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I\u0026rsquo;ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that\u0026rsquo;s my term for it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI define machined media as content that\u0026rsquo;s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year\u0026rsquo;s CIPR Social Media conference.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMachined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn\u0026rsquo;t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social Media Week – something missing"},{"content":"Yes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.\nI first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a 2007 blog post suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I\u0026rsquo;m an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a Copyright Tribunal Interim Decision . [The square brackets below reference this decision.]\nThe NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, Meltwater . Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.\nThe result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision\u0026hellip; do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.\n[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]\nNow the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)\nDespite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is.\nHere’s what the decision says about the description of the content forwarded by Meltwater to its customers: \u0026ldquo;The description consists of the headline plus the text extract. Mr Carr [QC for Meltwater] referred to the text extract as a ‘snippet’. The term was being used to minimise its significance but for present purposes we are not concerned with that.\u0026rdquo; [55]\nNo, the term was not being used for such reason. The term was being used because it’s the term used ! As in fact the Decision appears to recognise later [127].\nInterestingly, the Tribunal dismisses the similarity of a Meltwater service with Google Reader: “It seemed to us to be of peripheral relevance and we will ignore Google Reader.” [59] So just like that, the Tribunal ignores RSS readers. Hey guys, the last S there stands for syndication, as in the circulation of potentially copyright material. Kinda relevant?\nOne of my favourite asides from the Tribunal is this: “All three providers allow the emails sent to be forwarded on to other people.” [68]\nThe ‘three providers’ are Google, Meltwater, and traditional media monitoring companies, and I just love the idea that any of them could disallow forwarding of the emails they send. How might they do that exactly?\nBut the last point here on the Tribunal’s technical naivety is central to one of the major ramifications of this whole caboodle. On discussing whether Google News and Google Alerts should require a business license for business use, it writes:\n“One could have taken the view that Google was a purely consumer service and therefore somehow no question of business use arose but, as we have found, it is plain that there is business use of Google News and Google Alerts. … Moreover we do not regard the argument that this licensing would not be practical as realistic. There would be all kinds of ways of addressing that if there was a will to do it. The Alerts service would be very straightforward to deal with since it only works once a user has given Google an email address to which Google should send the alerts.” [129]\nThe idea that the Tribunal thinks we all have one email address and that such addresses are easily categorised as business or non-business in nature makes me laugh, and cry. The Tribunal is clearly wrong here. There are not “all kinds of ways” of addressing this bar state level Internet monitoring for this purpose, which surely goes way beyond the intended consequences of copyright law. (We\u0026rsquo;re getting into the realms of the serious side-effects of ACTA here.)\nMuch of this Tribunal hearing pivoted on ascertaining whether Meltwater was more like Google, or more like the ‘traditional’ press monitoring companies. Like Google, Meltwater does not employ human filters of its analyses. Like the traditional companies, Meltwater charges for its services (although, as the Decision notes, Google is not a charity). And so the list goes on, for very many pages of the decision.\nMeltwater has therefore forced the NLA’s hand. Previously, the NLA had weaseled out of any implication that they should license Google and Google’s end-users, but by Meltwater pointing out the similarities in its services to those of Google, the NLA’s members had to give it the mandate to pursue Google:\n“Before the High Court the NLA had stated that it had no mandate to license users of Google News. However it emerged before us that the NLA has been mandated to license systematic use of Google News / Google Alerts by commercial end users. Although it has not yet done so, the NLA intends to seek to require licences from commercial end users of Google Alerts who forward on the emails received within their businesses.” [96]\nThe important term there is “who forward on the emails”. Why police just the forwarding of emails? And that’s a question the Tribunal raises:\n“The NLA argues, while a member of the public is obviously entitled to visit a newspaper’s website and read what is there and in the course of doing that make copies of what is on the site, commercial use of the newspapers’ websites is not permitted. \u0026hellip; However it does not explain why the NLA has no mandate to license normal business use of Google News and Google Alerts. It is hard to see how the logic of the NLA’s position can avoid a conclusion that such use is not presently permitted either albeit that it takes place.” [128]\n“As we understand it the NLA’s position is that commercial use of Google News and Google Alerts is not licensed. That is why the NLA have a mandate to license aspects of the Google News and Google Alerts service (i.e. link forwarding). However it does not explain why the NLA has no mandate to license normal business use of Google News and Google Alerts. It is hard to see how the logic of the NLA’s position can avoid a conclusion that such use is not presently permitted either albeit that it takes place.” [128]\nAnd so there we have it. Media companies around the world have struggled with business models since the advent of ubiquitous Internet connectivity, but for UK media companies the NLA is riding to the rescue. The NLA has no choice now but to secure a license from every single UK business who might, during the course of their business, stumble across its members’ copyright material online, or indeed run the risk of having anyone forward a link to such material in an email. God forbid. I mean really, how dare someone invent these naughty hyperlinky-thingummies.\nThere’s a reason the government commissioned the May 2011 review of the state of UK intellectual property law, the Hargreave\u0026rsquo;s report . It concludes that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth. The NLA appears to be a fine exemplar. For my part, I’d rather the NLA championed the Hargreave’s report’s conclusions and sought ways to advance copyright law than invest its time and energies tying the UK media and web communities in 20th Century knots.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s the news for all UK business. Any news for the PR profession?\nWell firstly, the Tribunal\u0026rsquo;s interim decision has placed some caps on the NLA\u0026rsquo;s tariffs and future increases, and I discuss these with JP in the interview referred to above. More tangentally, each and every PR consultant could soon get a bit more famous.\nIn a previous ruling , Justice Proudman insists [143-7] that just because a webpage might not clearly identify the author in machine readable format Meltwater\u0026rsquo;s obligation to determine and attribute the author is not waived. Identification is not subject to technical possibility she states, but to reasonable human possibility apparently, despite Meltwater’s business being predicated on automation (and Google’s come to that).\nSection 9 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) asserts a definition for author: \u0026ldquo;In this Part ‘author’, in relation to a work, means the person who creates it.\u0026rdquo;\nThis made me think of all those staff writers whose work is then attributed to a star journalist. Then I thought \u0026lsquo;churnalism \u0026rsquo; and the increasing trend of publications / journalists to cut and paste from press releases such that the signficant part of the resulting \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; was actually created by the PR exec. I wonder, if the CDPA is considered so uncompromising in its requirement to attribute the author as Justice Proudman suggests, despite the link to the article in question, whether the media isn’t equally obliged to interpret its definition of author with equal gravitas?\nExpect to see NLA members’ “work” attributing PR execs some time soon.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/02/uk-businesses-will-have-to-pay-a-uk-media-license-copyright-tribunal-implications/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eYes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a \u003ca href=\"../2007/10/nla-agency-or-anachronism/\"\u003e2007 blog post\u003c/a\u003e\n suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I\u0026rsquo;m an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a \u003ca href=\"http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ct11409-140212.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCopyright Tribunal Interim Decision\u003c/a\u003e\n. [The square brackets below reference this decision.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, \u003ca href=\"http://www.meltwater.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMeltwater\u003c/a\u003e\n. Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"JP Glittenberg\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/glittenberg.jpg\" title=\"JP Glittenberg\"\u003eThe result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision\u0026hellip; do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]\nI delivered the inaugural CIPR Strategic Management Series presentation this week on the Influence Scorecard . We explored the future developments of social media, related information technologies and business strategy development and execution, all three of which are massively transformed in the past decade and a half, and continue to change rapidly.\nAnd we discussed what\u0026rsquo;s encompassed exactly by the increasingly heard phrase, \u0026ldquo;socializing the enterprise\u0026rdquo;.\nThe following question, asked during the Q\u0026amp;A part of the evening, is perfectly formed to offer up a slice through the future as I see it: \u0026ldquo;What does all this mean for PR agencies?\u0026rdquo;. Let\u0026rsquo;s set the scene\u0026hellip;\nNo organization is an island. Everything an organization does occurs in the context of a changing world, in a dynamic interplay with every entity around it. This has always been the case, but social media is taking the friction out of the system and related technologies contribute further to the data / information flood. This rapidly changing landscape demands a Darwinian type response; only the fittest will survive let alone thrive.\nOrganizations must cultivate a sensitivity to the new dynamic and sharpen their ability to interpret and respond to the myriad communication flows issuing from all sides. In biomimetic terms, we\u0026rsquo;re talking about the fitness for purpose of the organization\u0026rsquo;s ears, eyes and mouth.\nGiven the growing criticality of such senses then, perhaps you\u0026rsquo;ll agree that I\u0026rsquo;m not taking too big a step in forecasting that organizations will increasingly find it unviable to outsource them.\nAn agency account executive is somewhat isolated from the client\u0026rsquo;s culture, buzz, tone, knowledge, etc. They\u0026rsquo;re not at the water cooler. They\u0026rsquo;re not tapped in to the client\u0026rsquo;s intranet. Hell, they\u0026rsquo;re often not even full time, spread as they often are across three, four, five clients. Such agency becomes simply unworkable. Come the end of this decade, PR agency is dead.\nBut organizations need help in making this transition, in growing these heightened capabilities. Step up the PR consultancy, adept at designing and embedding the processes required. It oversees the client\u0026rsquo;s in-house team, or its own embedded team, developing skills, systems and capabilities, and enhancing the understanding of public relations, what it can achieve and its role in business strategy.\nThe PR agency is dead. Long live the PR consultancy.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/02/the-pr-agency-is-dead-long-live-the-pr-consultancy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written for the \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/the.pr.agency.is.dead..long.live.the.pr.consultancy\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI delivered the inaugural \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/events-awards/sms-2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Strategic Management Series\u003c/a\u003e\n presentation this week on the \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" title=\"Public Relations Defined – the anatomy of a candidate definition, ver 0.2\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n. We explored the future developments of social media, related information technologies and business strategy development and execution, all three of which are massively transformed in the past decade and a half, and continue to change rapidly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd we discussed what\u0026rsquo;s encompassed exactly by the increasingly heard phrase, \u0026ldquo;socializing the enterprise\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe following question, asked during the Q\u0026amp;A part of the evening, is perfectly formed to offer up a slice through the future as I see it: \u0026ldquo;What does all this mean for PR agencies?\u0026rdquo;. Let\u0026rsquo;s set the scene\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The PR agency is dead. Long live the PR consultancy."},{"content":" The PR industry view and ‘Big Ask’ - Philip Sheldrake , uploaded by Gorkana Group on Vimeo .\nAMEC – the international Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication – launched its social measurement consultation exercise with European members and in-house and agency PR professionals on November 17th 2011 at the \u0026lsquo;Big Ask\u0026rsquo; conference. I spoke at the conference and the videos of the day have just been posted to Vimeo. In the egocentric nature that is personal blogging, I\u0026rsquo;ve embedded the video of me above, and videos of the other speakers can all be found here .\nAMEC aims to develop global social media measurement standards by June 2012, and I\u0026rsquo;m also contributing to / hanging on to the coat tails of a similar initiative driven by I-COM – the International Conference on Online Media Measurement.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s probably not too much of a generalisation to say that AMEC has grown out of the \u0026lsquo;unpaid media\u0026rsquo; community, and I-COM from the \u0026lsquo;paid media\u0026rsquo; community. While I\u0026rsquo;ve argued here that this distinction is now pointless , it is responsible for incredibly different perspectives and attitudes; in fact sometimes laughably so. I\u0026rsquo;ll know when we\u0026rsquo;re making progress on social media measurement when this division recedes and my amazement dissolves. It\u0026rsquo;s noteworthy that both efforts have begun earnestly to engage the other \u0026lsquo;media types\u0026rsquo;.\nHope you like the video.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/01/social-media-measurement-amecs-big-ask/","summary":"\u003ciframe src=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/34833643?title=0\u0026amp;byline=0\u0026amp;portrait=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/34833643\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe PR industry view and ‘Big Ask’ - Philip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n, uploaded by \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/gorkanagroup\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGorkana Group\u003c/a\u003e\n on \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eVimeo\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://amecorg.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n – the international Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication – launched its social measurement consultation exercise with European members and in-house and agency PR professionals on November 17th 2011 at the \u0026lsquo;Big Ask\u0026rsquo; conference. I spoke at the conference and the videos of the day have just been posted to Vimeo. In the egocentric nature that is personal blogging, I\u0026rsquo;ve embedded the video of me above, and videos of the other speakers can all be found \u003ca href=\"http://vimeopro.com/gorkanagroup/socialmediameasurement\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social media measurement – AMEC's 'Big Ask' European consultation"},{"content":"[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup ]\nWhat does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;five pillars\u0026rdquo; , you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that\u0026rsquo;ll work. Not.\nAnd yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there\u0026rsquo;s the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.\nThis week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, spotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson\u0026rsquo;s interest in Wikipedia and PR practice . He found Watson\u0026rsquo;s contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page:\n\u0026ldquo;I suspect a number of PR firms have edited entries for their clients potentially breaching conflict of interest rules. I am going to write to the trade bodies to ask that they work with Wikipedia to issue guidelines.\u0026rdquo;\nFor those of you unfamiliar with Tom Watson MP, he played a significant role in exposing the News International phone hacking scandal according to Wikipedia , and wants to \u0026ldquo;crack open the lobby cartel \u0026rdquo;.\nAt more or less the same time, CIPR Social Media panel member Marshall Manson emailed the panel to point us to his colleague Phil Gomes\u0026rsquo; open letter to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales pleading for dialogue \u0026ldquo;about how communications professionals and the Wikipedia community can/must work together.\u0026rdquo;\nAll this ties nicely into the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s current #prdefined debate too.\nIf you think PR is one-way persuasion, then get on Wikipedia and edit away despite Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s rules and simple guidelines for PR representatives . You\u0026rsquo;d also have to dump any regard for ethics in your PR definition however, particularly if you try to make such edits anonymously.\nIf you think PR is ethical two-way communication seeking to achieve mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics, then you respect Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s rules and others\u0026rsquo; points of view. Your ultimate goal is to help achieve the organisation\u0026rsquo;s goals, so you cannot claim a NPOV. Period.\nIn which case the place to jump in is on the Wikipedia talk pages , and not the main entry itself (excepting the simple guidelines above). Simple as.\nThis raises the question, what if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t get the immediate results I\u0026rsquo;d like to see on the Wikipedia entry in question? And I\u0026rsquo;m afraid the answer right now is, tough. You have to continue to engage with the Wikipedians until one takes interest; and perhaps the best way to win a Wikipedian\u0026rsquo;s respect is to be a good Wikipedian yourself.\nThe CIPR has run training sessions on Wikipedia for a couple of years, debuting with the 2010 Social Summer series, and a statement has been issued today in response to the MP\u0026rsquo;s concerns . Check it out.\nWishing you a prosperous 2012.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2012/01/reputation-and-wikipedia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Originally written \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/friday.roundup.6th.january.2012\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efor the CIPR Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does the Wikipedia entry for your organisation / client / brand say? What about brand references in other entries? All cosy on the Wikipedia front? And recognising that a neutral point of view (NPOV) is \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5P\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eone of Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;five pillars\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n, you have resisted editing anything where your neutrality is questionable. Right?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s face it, Wikipedia is amazing. I had the pleasure of attending the Wikipedia 10th birthday party in London last year and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t the only one there who admitted to not appreciating Wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s potential back in the day. Seriously? A website anyone can edit?! Yeah right, that\u0026rsquo;ll work. Not.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet today Alexa ranks Wikipedia the sixth most popular site on the web. Search for a company or brand in Google or Bing and there\u0026rsquo;s the Wikipedia entry tempting you with its neutrality, familiarity and ease of use. The Wikipedia community plays a significant role in brand reputation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis week, one of my favourite Conversation contributors, Stuart Bruce, \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/stuart.bruce/wikipedia-and-pr-have-got-to-work-it-out\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003espotted Member of Parliament Tom Watson\u0026rsquo;s interest in Wikipedia and PR practice\u003c/a\u003e\n. He found Watson\u0026rsquo;s contribution, Wednesday, to a Wikipedia talk page:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Reputation and Wikipedia"},{"content":"CIPR TV goes from strength to strength. As part of the hosting team, I had the pleasure this week to host an extended show – sort of a two-for-one.\nCIPR TV is only possible courtesy of the team at Markettiers4dc , and it was about time we invited Howard Kosky, Markettiers4dc founder and chairman, on the show. Howard walks us through how the broadcast landscape has transformed over the past decade and a half, and gives viewers some tips for the top and pitfalls to avoid. In fact, when you consider the role broadcast plays in the public relations mix, I can\u0026rsquo;t believe we haven\u0026rsquo;t addressed the topic before!\nAs you may have read in my last post , Dr. Jon White has undertaken some research this year on behalf of the CIPR looking at how the profession might evolve this decade. During the show, Jon explains the drivers of this research, how it was conducted, and some of the outcomes and recommendations. If you want to understand why Jon talks about PR becoming irrelevant in this timescale, then you better watch the video above! The full \u0026lsquo;PR 2020\u0026rsquo; report is published on the CIPR website .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/12/cipr-tv-with-howard-kosky-on-broadcast-pr-and-with-dr-jon-white-on-pr-2020-the-future-of-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eCIPR TV goes from strength to strength. As part of the hosting team, I had the pleasure this week to host an extended show – sort of a two-for-one.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/pzUYBEm-E6w\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCIPR TV is only possible courtesy of the team at \u003ca href=\"http://www.markettiers4dc.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarkettiers4dc\u003c/a\u003e\n, and it was about time we invited Howard Kosky, Markettiers4dc founder and chairman, on the show. Howard walks us through how the broadcast landscape has transformed over the past decade and a half, and gives viewers some tips for the top and pitfalls to avoid. In fact, when you consider the role broadcast plays in the public relations mix, I can\u0026rsquo;t believe we haven\u0026rsquo;t addressed the topic before!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV with Howard Kosky on Broadcast PR and with Dr. Jon White on PR 2020, the future of PR"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m typing this post sitting on the front row at the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s PR 2020 event at Russell Square HQ. To my left, Stephen Waddington . To my right, Julio Romo . On stage we have CIPR CEO, Jane Wilson , Dr. Jon White , and ComRes Marketing Manager, Simon Thwaites.\nComRes annual survey ComRes conducts an annual review of key market stats for the UK PR industry, and Simon is running through that right now. Interestingly, in light of the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s current Defining PR initiative, which the CIPR supports, only 44% of ComRes poll respondents agreed with the statement \u0026ldquo;My friends and family understand what I do for a living.\u0026rdquo;\nComRes finds that the most common PR functions undertaken in practice are: strategic planning, media relations, online reputation management.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not entirely clear how helpful this finding is when the terms are pretty vague. Think about it – do you know a practitioner who would claim to be doing anything that wasn\u0026rsquo;t strategic? And aren\u0026rsquo;t all meetings somewhat to do with planning; QED, lots of strategic planning! Not quite how I\u0026rsquo;d describe strategic planning, but you can see how these things can be interpretted in sloppy fashion.\nAnd if definitions of public relations often reference reputation, and with that web thing being really important, we must be doing lots of online reputation management. Right?\nMmmm.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve skipped over some of the other ComRes findings presented this afternoon, and will insert a link here as soon as the stack is online. It\u0026rsquo;s worth a butchers despite my negative take here.\nI hope we\u0026rsquo;ll learn more from Dr. Jon White\u0026rsquo;s research\u0026hellip;\nPR 2020 Jon\u0026rsquo;s research is based on scenario planning, reviewing the best case outcome, the worst case outcome, and the most likely outcome on a range of critical issues. He ran workshops all around the UK over the summer months, where practitioners led and explored these scenario plans, and I very much enjoyed participating in the London session.\nSome panel information:\n106 participants in 15 national, regional and special interest group meetings 28% male / 72% female 48% consultancy. Jon pulls out this quote from a session with the CIPR Midlands group, 1 August 2011:\nAre we fearful of the best case scenario? Working towards the best case scenario means becoming transparent, accountable and better at what we do.\nIn my words, professional PR practice is bloody hard work!\nBy 2020, the research finds that a successful practice will be:\nClear on what public relations is, and the benefits it can deliver Strongly led Respected Established as a senior management discipline Leading on innovation My goodness, Jon has just said there were 60 most-likely scenarios, including:\nSome movement towards more professional practice Practice remains ill-defined, \u0026lsquo;fuzzy\u0026rsquo;, an element in marketing Reputation much the same Little progression on measurement. Damn, the last one cuts like a knife. I\u0026rsquo;m wondering how well known the Influence Scorecard will be by 2020?\nTen recommendations for action Encouragement to the Institute to provide leadership and meet expectations for its leadership Education and training for PR practice need to be taken to higher levels, which will involve greater collaboration with education and PR Practitioners need greater confidence in what they do, and should lead practice development by example There is a need for clearer thinking and guidance on measurement and evaluation Codes of conduct should be strengthened Practitioners need to move faster to develop their knowledge of digital communication There is a need for better definitions of PR and what it is to achieve Change should be embraced Industry bodies should commit to R\u0026amp;D There is a need to synchronise experience and fresh talent, and to celebrate young people in practice. The full report is now available on the CIPR website . I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to diving in to the full 90-odd pages!\nAnd you can read Stephen Waddington\u0026rsquo;s post here .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/12/public-relations-today-and-by-2020/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m typing this post sitting on the front row at the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s PR 2020 event at Russell Square HQ. To my left, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/wadds\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStephen Waddington\u003c/a\u003e\n. To my right, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/twofourseven\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJulio Romo\u003c/a\u003e\n. On stage we have CIPR CEO, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/ceo_cipr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJane Wilson\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/drjonwhite\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDr. Jon White\u003c/a\u003e\n, and ComRes Marketing Manager, Simon Thwaites.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"comres-annual-survey\"\u003eComRes annual survey\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eComRes conducts an annual review of key market stats for the UK PR industry, and Simon is running through that right now. Interestingly, in light of the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s current \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/11/public-relations-defined-%E2%80%93-the-prsa-invites-you-to-help-set-a-new-definition-of-pr/\"\u003eDefining PR\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/em\u003e initiative, which the CIPR supports, only 44% of ComRes poll respondents agreed with the statement \u0026ldquo;My friends and family understand what I do for a living.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Public Relations, today and by 2020"},{"content":"This post specifically responds to a post by Eric Bryant , Director of Gnosis Arts , \u0026ldquo;an experience-driven public relations firm focusing on tech, social media \u0026amp; nonprofit PR\u0026rdquo; in the US. In the post, Eric addresses the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Defining PR initiative (see my last two blog posts) and asserts that the definition of anything is simply a function of how the term is used.\nHe writes:\n\u0026ldquo;We chose this definition because we think it expresses what is both essential to public relations practice, as well as what distinguishes it from other management functions. Our definition also takes into account what most PRs do, most of the time, in carrying out their job duties.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd his company\u0026rsquo;s definition is:\n\u0026ldquo;Public relations is the practice of producing publicity (excluding promotional materials and paid advertising, which typically fall under the purview of Marketing); managing media relations and communications (typically among members of the Fourth Estate); and managing reputation.\u0026rdquo;\nFirst up, let me thank Eric for tweet-alerting me to his post. I particularly appreciate his diligent explanation of the definition, too often omitted by the more slapdash.\nHis firm\u0026rsquo;s definition melds two \u0026lsquo;what\u0026rsquo;s and one \u0026lsquo;why\u0026rsquo;, reputation, justifying it on the basis of Wittgenstein\u0026rsquo;s notion of \u0026ldquo;meaning as use\u0026rdquo; (ie, definitions are lent simply by the way a word or phrase is commonly used). While Wittgenstein\u0026rsquo;s approach to language has its advocates, I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely clear it\u0026rsquo;s helpful here, for two reasons.\nFirstly, if we are to define PR in accordance with general parlance, whose general parlance are we to adopt?\nThe tabloid press (who make PR a synonym for \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo; – not least because that\u0026rsquo;s how some practice it)? The dyed-in-the-wool media relations pro? The agency head? The institutes / associations? Academia? Wittgenstein would answer, I believe, that it depends who\u0026rsquo;s using the term and with whom, but I believe the PRSA is seeking a little more universality than that. Not only that, but with the world connected in ways Wittgenstein couldn\u0026rsquo;t have envisaged, universal definitions – or at least international rather than regional – can only be useful here.\nSecondly, I think I\u0026rsquo;m right in assuming the PRSA is not just wishing to capture the moment, the meaning as it\u0026rsquo;s used right now (and it\u0026rsquo;s a good moment or two since the association last set a definition – 1982), but to find something that at least stands the test of time for a few years to come. Perhaps even one that sets a standard they hope all practitioners will rise up to meet.\nGnosis\u0026rsquo; definition uses the word \u0026ldquo;practice\u0026rdquo; for example, which the Oxford English dictionary defines as (apologies Wittgenstein): \u0026ldquo;the carrying out or exercise of a profession\u0026rdquo;. And profession: \u0026ldquo;a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification\u0026rdquo;.\nSo it appears Gnosis is aligned with the PRSA in believing that public relations is a profession (that makes at least three of us), and therefore, just as we find with any profession out there – doctor, lawyer, engineer – one sincerely hopes that there is some body setting the benchmark, setting the minimum standard of what it means to practice that profession. Step up PRSA, CPRS, CIPR, or whoever represents the profession and its standing in society in your neck of the woods.\nIn other words, NOT what any old practitioner purports it to be or how they think it\u0026rsquo;s done or indeed what they do.\nSo if we agree that Wittgenstein\u0026rsquo;s stance is inappropriate here, we\u0026rsquo;re left wondering what our motivations are in seeking a definition. They could be selfish – what definition could we charge most for in practice? They could be altruistic – what does the world need from us most right now? Interestingly, if we take the matching of supply and demand as a given fundamental of capitalism, the answer to these two questions should align in the long-run. Moreover, the answer to the second of these questions isn\u0026rsquo;t as staight forward as it might seem.\nLastly, I contend that a good definition of a profession focuses more on the \u0026lsquo;why\u0026rsquo; not the \u0026lsquo;how\u0026rsquo;, if only because the \u0026lsquo;how\u0026rsquo; is more susceptible to political, economic, social and technological forces than the \u0026lsquo;why\u0026rsquo;.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/why-the-meaning-of-pr-shouldnt-be-left-to-circumstance/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis post specifically responds \u003ca href=\"http://www.profnetconnect.com/gnosisarts/blog/2011/11/24/prdefined:_prsas_new_initiative_to_%28re%29define_what_public_relations_is\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eto a post by Eric Bryant\u003c/a\u003e\n, Director of \u003ca href=\"http://www.gnosisarts.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGnosis Arts\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u0026ldquo;an experience-driven public relations firm focusing on tech, social media \u0026amp; nonprofit PR\u0026rdquo; in the US. In the post, Eric addresses the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Defining PR initiative (see my last two blog posts) and asserts that the definition of anything is simply a function of how the term is used.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe writes:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;We chose this definition because we think it expresses what is both essential to public relations practice, as well as what distinguishes it from other management functions. Our definition also takes into account what most PRs do, most of the time, in carrying out their job duties.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd his company\u0026rsquo;s definition is:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Public relations is the practice of producing publicity (excluding promotional materials and paid advertising, which typically fall under the purview of Marketing); managing media relations and communications (typically among members of the Fourth Estate); and managing reputation.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst up, let me thank Eric for tweet-alerting me to his post. I particularly appreciate his diligent explanation of the definition, too often omitted by the more slapdash.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis firm\u0026rsquo;s definition melds two \u0026lsquo;what\u0026rsquo;s and one \u0026lsquo;why\u0026rsquo;, reputation, justifying it on the basis of \u003ca href=\"http://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWittgenstein\u0026rsquo;s notion of \u0026ldquo;meaning as use\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n (ie, definitions are lent simply by the way a word or phrase is commonly used). While Wittgenstein\u0026rsquo;s approach to language has its advocates, I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely clear it\u0026rsquo;s helpful here, for two reasons.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why the meaning of PR shouldn't be left to circumstance"},{"content":" [Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]\nFollowing the momentum the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s #prdefined initiative is achieving, and the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s statement of support , I thought I\u0026rsquo;d take a deeper dive into current definitions, and throw one in the mix myself.\nI reproduced the section of my book that addresses the definitions of marketing and PR in my last post , and since then I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to have some insightful conversations, on- and off-line, with Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor, Jon White, David Phillips and Terry Flynn.\nIs it worth it? There has been some valid criticism of the PRSA initiative pivoting around the question: shouldn\u0026rsquo;t we invest time and energy in improving practice to live up to current definitions than review those definitions we already have? The counter to this argument is apparent for those tracking the thousands of comments on line; it appears that more than a few practitioners indirectly criticised by those holding this point of view are actually questioning their own appreciation of public relations, if not actively revising it.\nCIPR definition PR is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.\nMy favourite definition, no word of a lie! I obviously love the reference to influence, but also the apparently unique and skilful avoidance (intended or otherwise) of communication, thereby emphasising the objective not the means. But when \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo;, as is increasingly the case with the radical transparency lent by social media, reputation is built by everything an organisation does (or indeed does not do), not just what the PR team does; every one must be involved in \u0026ldquo;looking after\u0026rdquo; reputation.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;d also like to see a definition that recognises the need to analyse the mutual understanding or influence flows between stakeholders themselves, and indeed competitors, not just the back and forth between organisation and stakeholder. This applies to all the current definitions I\u0026rsquo;ve seen.\nCPRS definition Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communications, to achieve mutual understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest.\nI have a high regard for this definition, particularly the reference, controversial as it proved, to the public interest. But to my mind \u0026ldquo;management\u0026rdquo; evokes \u0026ldquo;control\u0026rdquo; inappropriately, and is \u0026ldquo;communications\u0026rdquo; the only way to achieve the ends?\nPRSA definition 1982 current definition – public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.\nConcise but, as Dorothy Crenshaw asks on her blog , \u0026ldquo;done any mutual adapting lately?\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s been widely commented that the PRSA\u0026rsquo;s definition is looking a little dated. Most glaringly, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really frame an outcome and so it fails to lend PR a raison d\u0026rsquo;être. The PRSA attempted a redefinition in 2003, although this was never ratified:\n2003 beta – Public Relations is the professional discipline that ethically fosters mutually beneficial relationships among social entities.\nAgain, it\u0026rsquo;s obvious the PRSA loves concision, but this comes across a bit vague to me and \u0026ldquo;social entities\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t scream plain English. But then again, I talk about \u0026ldquo;influence flows\u0026rdquo;.\nExcellence study definition A management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its publics.\nIs two-way communication the only thing that helps foster mutually beneficial relationships? Can you reach mutual understanding without it being beneficial to all parties per se? And as I mentioned above, it too suffers I think from not really encompassing the complexity of today\u0026rsquo;s influence flows in not referencing the importance of stakeholders influencing one another for example.\nA new candidate definition To address the criticisms above, in my opinion a draft candidate definition must:\nRecognise that reputation is a responsibility of everyone in an organisation, with the public relations professional providing leadership, structure, policy and guidance Emphasise the objective, the raison d\u0026rsquo;être, rather than the means Reference all six influence flows, as I call them; so a bit meatier than \u0026ldquo;two-way\u0026rdquo; Try to avoid reference to management. And, like the definitions above, it should emphasise mutual understanding. So all that\u0026rsquo;s left now is to write it!\nWhy not submit your definition before the deadline a week today? There have been over 500 contributions already! The PRSA submission form can be found here .\nYou may, like me, deduce from the restrictive format of the submission form that the PRSA is intent on maintaining a brevity in its new definition, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think this works. The PRSA\u0026rsquo;s Keith Trivitt has accepted that they\u0026rsquo;ll have to recognise the validity of other contributions, perhaps in the comment section of its microsite for example.\nObviously, after all this, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t resist having a go at a definition. You can view my effort here and I\u0026rsquo;d love to know what you make of it.\nUpdate 1st December 2011 Delighted to attract the following two tweets. Thank you.\n@KeithTrivitt Keith Trivitt @Sheldrake\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Anatomy of a Candidate Definition\u0026rdquo; of #PR has blown my mind. ow.ly/7Kr5Z Incredible what he has come up with.\n@Fiskey Rosanna Fiske Have to say, in true @Sheldrake style, this is pretty fab for PR. \u0026ldquo;Anatomy of a Candidate Definition\u0026rdquo; http://ow.ly/7Kr5Z #PRDefined\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/public-relations-defined--the-anatomy-of-a-candidate-definition-ver-0-2/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://prdefinition.prsa.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PRSA PR Defined\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/prsa_prdef.jpg\" title=\"PRSA PR Defined\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFollowing the momentum the \u003ca href=\"http://prdefinition.prsa.org/index.php/2011/10/30/about-the-prsa-public-relations-defined-initiative/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePRSA\u0026rsquo;s #prdefined\u003c/a\u003e\n initiative is achieving, and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/news-opinion/press-releases/104852/cipr-supports-prsa-pr-defined-initiative\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u0026rsquo;s statement of support\u003c/a\u003e\n, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d take a deeper dive into current definitions, and throw one in the mix myself.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI reproduced the section of my book that addresses the definitions of marketing and PR in \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/11/public-relations-defined-%E2%80%93-the-prsa-invites-you-to-help-set-a-new-definition-of-pr/\"\u003emy last post\u003c/a\u003e\n, and since then I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to have some insightful conversations, on- and off-line, with Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor, Jon White, David Phillips and Terry Flynn.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"is-it-worth-it\"\u003eIs it worth it?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere has been some valid criticism of the PRSA initiative pivoting around the question: shouldn\u0026rsquo;t we invest time and energy in improving practice to live up to current definitions than review those definitions we already have? The counter to this argument is apparent for those tracking the thousands of comments on line; it appears that more than a few practitioners indirectly criticised by those holding this point of view are actually questioning their own appreciation of public relations, if not actively revising it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"cipr-definition\"\u003eCIPR definition\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePR is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy favourite definition, no word of a lie! I obviously love the reference to influence, but also the apparently unique and skilful avoidance (intended or otherwise) of communication, thereby emphasising the objective not the means. But when \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo;, as is increasingly the case with the radical transparency lent by social media, reputation is built by everything an organisation does (or indeed does not do), not just what the PR team does; every one must be involved in \u0026ldquo;looking after\u0026rdquo; reputation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Public Relations Defined – the anatomy of a candidate definition, ver 0.2"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s how the corresponding blog post by the PRSA describes its \u0026ldquo;Public Relations Defined\u0026rdquo; initiative:\nAs part of its mission to advance the public relations profession and professional, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has introduced a new initiative to modernize the definition of public relations and increase its value. As the digital age has caused significant shifts in how organizations communicate internally and externally, a question frequently asked by the public, media and practitioners is, \u0026ldquo;What is public relations?\u0026rdquo;\nThe PRSA explains the initiative in these simple terms:\nRecent discussions, blog posts , tweets and mainstream articles have suggested that (1) public relations professionals (and, thus, the audiences we serve) continue to struggle with the question: \u0026ldquo;What is PR?\u0026rdquo;; (2) many industry professionals are unhappy with the current definitions; and (3) no one definition is considered \u0026ldquo;the\u0026rdquo; de facto industry definition.\nWhat more justification do we need?\nWhile my book The Business of Influence sets out to be a rethink of the \u0026lsquo;influence disciplines\u0026rsquo;, it starts by reviewing current definitions of marketing and PR. \u0026ldquo;Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we\u0026rsquo;re all at A to begin with.\u0026rdquo;\nIn hoping to contribute to the renewed debate, I\u0026rsquo;ve reproduced the book\u0026rsquo;s definitions section here. Now all I need to do is work out if the PRSA will be open to a definition leaning on the Influence Scorecard and the role of Chief Influence Officer. What do you think?\nMarketing and public relations [pp 5-11, Chapter 1, The Business of Influence ]\nMost readers of this book will be working in, studying, teaching or researching marketing and/or PR. Others will be working in other disciplines central to influence, such as sales and customer service, or senior management figures or management consultants keeping up with the latest ideas. Regardless, I hope you won\u0026rsquo;t mind if we invest some time defining both marketing and PR. Why? Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we\u0026rsquo;re all at A to begin with. Moreover, experts don’t agree . . .\nMarketing In its 2009 paper, Marketing and the 7Ps [PDF link], the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines marketing as \u0026rsquo;the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably\u0026rsquo;. The paper continues:\n\u0026hellip; the customer is at the heart of marketing, and businesses ignore this at their peril.\nIn essence, the marketing function is the study of market forces and factors and the development of a company\u0026rsquo;s position to optimise its benefit from them. It is all about getting the right product or service to the customer at the right price, in the right place, at the right time. Both business history and current practice remind us that without proper marketing, companies cannot get close to customers and satisfy their needs. And if they don\u0026rsquo;t, a competitor surely will.\nHowever, the CIM recognized in its 2007 Tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s World paper [PDF link] that its definition harks back to 1976 and could do with an update. The paper identifies a number of reasons why a revision may be needed, including:\nThe discipline has become more sophisticated, possibly demanding subdivision into three broad paths: science, arts and humanities The idea that marketing is no longer a separate role but something everyone in an organization does to a greater or lesser degree The technology revolution has altered the dynamic between an organization and its customers, increasing the power of the customer (the rebalancing we referred to earlier in this chapter) The fragmentation of media and the increasing resistance of audiences to marketing communications The increasing need for numeracy and research fluency The role of people management in the marketing skill set. While the following definition was mooted in the paper, the CIM does not yet appear to have officially adopted it, or one based on it:\nThe strategic business function that creates value by stimulating, facilitating and fulfilling customer demand.\nIt does this by building brands, nurturing innovation, developing relationships, creating good customer service and communicating benefits.\nWith a customer-centric view, marketing brings positive return on investment, satisfies shareholders and stakeholders from business and the community, and contributes to positive behavioural change and a sustainable business future.\nThe definition given in what many consider the seminal marketing textbook, Principles of Marketing [ISBN: 9780273711568], is:\nBroadly defined, marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. In a narrower business context, marketing involves building profitable, value-laden exchange relationships with customers. Hence, we define marketing as the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.\nThe American Marketing Association did, however, find itself a new definition in 2007, but to fairly widespread derision:\nMarketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.\nFrom my reading various reactions I can say that Mike Smock\u0026rsquo;s blog post, \u0026lsquo;Everything that is wrong with marketing can be found in AMA’s new definition ,\u0026rsquo; appears to best capture the mood of those critical of the new definition. The primary criticism appears to be that, unlike CIM\u0026rsquo;s current and drafted definitions – or indeed that provided in Principles of Marketing – the AMA fails to be explicit about marketing\u0026rsquo;s role in contributing to the achievement of a for-profit organization\u0026rsquo;s financial objectives.\nThe bit about \u0026lsquo;society at large\u0026rsquo; also appears to have ruffled feathers as being too distanced from the cut and thrust of business, but from my perspective it\u0026rsquo;s just one sign of many that marketing fancies itself as the guardian of all things in public relations. The CIM draft definition includes \u0026lsquo;developing relationships\u0026rsquo;. The CIM paper, Marketing and the 7Ps, lists PR under the fourth marketing \u0026lsquo;P\u0026rsquo;, promotion. And its paper, Tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s World, clearly references PR to mean spin (spin a yarn, make up a story) rather than anything public relations experts would recognize.\nPublic relations I discuss PR with many people in my professional life and find that the majority only have a tenuous grasp of what PR actually encompasses, and many others simply have no idea or, worse, have it wrong. And, as we\u0026rsquo;ve seen, that includes professional marketers.\nBelieve it or not, I\u0026rsquo;ve met people who think PR stands for press release. And perhaps I should get over myself, but I have never liked the turn of phrase \u0026rsquo;to PR\u0026rsquo; something. But by far the most common mistake I find is considering PR to be synonymous with media relations – journalist lunches and column inches.\nI often start by telling people what PR is not. PR is not marketing. PR is not promotion (coupons, offers, etc.). For more on \u0026lsquo;what PR is not\u0026rsquo;, I found a similar list by Bill Sledzik on his blog ToughSledding [this URL is changed from when my book went to press].\nThe PR role encompasses aspects of publicity and many people referred to as PR practitioners invest much of their time wielding the tools of publicity: press releases, pitches, interviews, etc. (indeed, this aspect has been referred to as \u0026lsquo;marketing public relations\u0026rsquo;, which either confuses the matter or clarifies it, depending on your point of view ). James Grunig\u0026rsquo;s and Todd Hunt\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;4 Models\u0026rsquo;, first presented in 1984 [Managing Public Relations, ISBN: 9780030583377], describe four views of public relations, the first of which is publicity or \u0026lsquo;press agentry\u0026rsquo;. The second is known as the public information model, the third asymmetric persuasion, and the fourth the two-way symmetrical model.\nThe renowned Excellence study [Excellent public relations and effective organizations, ISBN: 9780805818185] emphasized the fourth model and defined PR as:\na management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its publics.\nThe Public Relations Society of America puts it simply :\nPublic relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.\nTerry Flynn, Fran Gregory and Jean Valin actually set up a wiki to record various definitions and collaborate on consolidating a new definition for adoption at the Canadian Public Relations Society national board meeting February 2009:\nPublic relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communications, to achieve mutual understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest.\nAnd according to the UK\u0026rsquo;s Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR):\nPR is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.\nIn a conversation with me, Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor, CIPR President 2010, extended this definition by stressing the role that public relations must play at board level, helping to explore, define, plan and execute strategy. She particularly underlined its role with respect to reputational risk and opportunity, and good governance.\nNote the consistent recurrence of reference to mutuality. Although this is invoked in slightly different ways, I take it to mean all parties having respect and understanding for others\u0026rsquo; points of view and working together to increase that respect and understanding. Of course, any organization may interact with two or more publics that disagree vehemently between themselves, meaning that the organization cannot be reconciled to all publics. Mutuality, however, doesn’t require reconciliation, but rather continued dialogue with the intent to understand and be understood.\nSuch emphasis on mutuality is core to the fourth model. And in words from Chapter 1 of the book summing up the findings of Grunig et al.’s Excellence study: \u0026lsquo;As a result of good public relations, both management and publics should behave in ways that minimize conflict or manage conflict effectively.\u0026rsquo;\nTwo-way symmetric public relations relies on honest and open two-way communication and mutual give-and-take rather than one-way or asymmetric persuasion. It requires a management philosophy that recognizes that no organization stands alone but must instead adjust and adapt what it does and how it does it in order to align itself with its publics on the basis that this can only help not hinder the organization to achieve its objectives.\nThe Cluetrain Manifesto was the right way to say the right things at the right time, but it appears that its authors took their lead in part from the two-way symmetrical model and Patrick Jackson\u0026rsquo;s compelling ability to convey the theory in practical terms in the pr reporter newsletter and other media. And they, in turn, on the prior perspectives of Edward Bernays (the original PT Barnum style publicist) and Albert Sullivan in the 1950s and 1960s.\nFor his part in asserting how his models apply in the digital age, Grunig re-endorses the two-way symmetrical model .\nIt\u0026rsquo;s worth then finishing this section on public relations with an extract from the preface of the Excellence book. This concluded the Excellence team\u0026rsquo;s 15 years of study, so I take its findings seriously:\nIn a nutshell, we show that the value of public relations comes from the relationships that communicators develop and maintain with publics. We show that reputation is a product of relationships and that the quality of relationships and reputation result more from the behavior of the organization than from the messages that communicators disseminate. We show that public relations can affect management decisions and behavior if it is headed by a manager who is empowered to play an essential role in the strategic management of the organization. In that role, communicators have their greatest value when they bring information into the organization, more than when they disseminate information out of the organization \u0026hellip;\nWe show that communicators can develop relationships more effectively when they communicate symmetrically with publics rather than asymmetrically.\nSo there we have it. The definitions of marketing and PR are contentious. They vary, overlap and contradict. These are not exactly ideal foundations on which to move forward, but as this isn\u0026rsquo;t a philosophical treatise we don\u0026rsquo;t require ideals; it\u0026rsquo;s only important that we understand the current landscape.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/public-relations-defined--the-prsa-invites-you-to-help-set-a-new-definition-of-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s how the \u003ca href=\"http://prdefinition.prsa.org/index.php/2011/10/30/about-the-prsa-public-relations-defined-initiative/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ecorresponding blog post by the PRSA\u003c/a\u003e\n describes its \u0026ldquo;Public Relations Defined\u0026rdquo; initiative:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs part of its mission to advance the public relations profession and professional, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.prsa.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePublic Relations Society of America\u003c/a\u003e\n (PRSA) has introduced a new initiative to modernize the definition of public relations and increase its value. As the digital age has caused significant shifts in how organizations communicate internally and externally, a question frequently asked by the public, media and practitioners is, \u0026ldquo;What is public relations?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe PRSA explains the initiative in these simple terms:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRecent discussions, \u003ca href=\"http://soulati.com/blog/what-is-pr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eblog posts\u003c/a\u003e\n, tweets and \u003ca href=\"http://www.economist.com/node/17722733?story_id=17722733\u0026amp;CFID=151713722\u0026amp;CFTOKEN=36083756\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003emainstream articles\u003c/a\u003e\n have suggested that (1) public relations professionals (and, thus, the audiences we serve) continue to struggle with the question: \u0026ldquo;What is PR?\u0026rdquo;; (2) many industry professionals are unhappy with the current definitions; and (3) no one definition is considered \u0026ldquo;the\u0026rdquo; de facto industry definition.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat more justification do we need?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile my book \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n sets out to be a rethink of the \u0026lsquo;influence disciplines\u0026rsquo;, it starts by reviewing current definitions of marketing and PR. \u0026ldquo;Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we\u0026rsquo;re all at A to begin with.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn hoping to contribute to the renewed debate, I\u0026rsquo;ve reproduced the book\u0026rsquo;s definitions section here. Now all I need to do is work out if the PRSA will be open to a definition leaning on the Influence Scorecard and the role of Chief Influence Officer. What do you think?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Public Relations Defined – The PRSA invites you to help set a new definition of PR"},{"content":"[Version 0.1 \u0026laquo; work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as a PDF if that suits you better.]\nPrécis Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.\nThe 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 .\nDefinition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.\nDefinition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.\nPaid Owned Earned With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy:\nPaid – Pay others to have your message on their media. Owned – This media is (actually or effectively) mine. I can publish what I like. Earned – Media relations, stakeholder conversations and user-generated content. History This taxonomy evolved from a traditional regard for media. From what I can tell, Nokia was an early pioneer of this taxonomy, albeit expressing it as Owned, Bought and Earned .\nA Forrester blog post by Sean Corcoran summed up the situation at the end of 2009 and Forrester published research defining each of the three media types and providing interactive marketers with prescriptive advice on how to best apply them.\nEdelman’s Dave Fleet proposed extending Corcoran’s model with a fourth category, becoming Paid, Owned, Earned and Social Media . This doesn’t work for me simply because it’s increasingly difficult to find any media without a social component.\nMcKinsey proposed two other categories: Paid, Owned, Earned, Sold and Hijacked . I couldn’t see the basis for Sold as it’s just Paid viewed from the other side of the contract. And hijacked is earned – you earned it, just not in the way you’d envisaged!\nMost recently, Brian Solis has attempted an extension: Paid, Owned, Earned, Promoted and Shared . However (and perhaps I’m just anal when it comes to my expectations of a rational taxonomy) I consider Promoted to be a form of Paid, and Shared a hybrid of Owned and Earned.\nRelevance I can’t be the only one wondering however if there’s any value in this taxonomy. When did you last hear of a marketing and PR strategy that was lent significant value by this taxonomy? Compared to approaches prior to the taxonomy’s existence? Infrequently, or perhaps not once?\nWhilst I appreciate McLuhan’s “the medium is the message ”, the content of course is also the message, and I believe it’s appropriate to move away from this limited taxonomy of media and try to develop a more useful Influence View of Content.\nThe Influence View of Content This is a work in progress and its validity will rest on the level of interest, application and collaboration it stimulates; ie, the influence it has.\nDefinition: Content – published information. For the purposes here, I consider a social sharing action to be (re)publishing in so much as the act raises the content to others’ attention.\nIn forming the Influence View of Content I consider two questions:\nQ1. What might influence the creation of content?\nQ2. Is the intent to exert influence central to the creation of every single piece of content?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s address each now.\nQ1. What might influence the creation of content? Candidate primary (supertype) influences:\nEmotion – I want to express my feelings Pursuit of organisational objective – eg, I think creating the content could have commercial benefit to my for-profit organisation Professional interest – related to what I do for a living (but not necessarily in direct pursuit of an organisational objective) Personal interest – but not necessarily emotional Self-identity – content to reinforce how I’d like others to see me Status information – eg, the flight is boarding at Gate 42 Public information – eg, anti-smoking health advice leaflet Education – the content serves an educative purpose Artistic – artistic expression Boredom – content for self-stimulation Machined – content that is automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans (ie, making sense of ‘big data’ for us). Rational? These influences are not mutually exclusive. Emotion could be a subtype of personal interest for example, but then not every emotional impetus could be described in terms of being of personal or professional interest. And George Orwell would have it that “all art is propaganda” of course.\nUltimately, each supertype influence must stand alone in at least one context of content creation.\nA BIT ABOUT EMOTION AND PERSONAL HAPPINESS\nAristotle argued that it was in our interest, given our deeply social nature, to participate in civic life in order to fulfil ourselves.\nJefferson followed this through when he wrote the American constitution and interpreted it as the ‘pursuit of happiness’. Is this pursuit a subtype of Emotion or Personal Interest?\nA BIT ABOUT SELF-IDENTITY\nElizabeth Shove and Alan Warde note that social theorists maintain “people define themselves through the messages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display. They manipulate and manage appearances and thereby create and sustain a ‘self-identity’.”\nBut does influence on others have to be exerted to accomplish the purpose of creating a self-identity, or is it sufficient for the content creator to simply believe others have been influenced accordingly? Does self-identity simply require self-influence?\nA BIT ABOUT BOREDOM\nShove et al note some social-psychological accounts of consumption explain that people seek new products and new pleasures because they need stimulation. Playing new games, trying out new items, exploring new material objects, and learning new tastes are ways of averting boredom, as is creating content in the process. The facilities of the many apps and widgets people try are testament to this need.\nA BIT ABOUT MACHINED MEDIA\nMachined media is related to the definition of the Semantic Web , when the Web becomes a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. While some initial human direction is needed, the intelligent agent undertaking the discovery and content creation is then essentially autonomous. The degree of autonomy will indicate whether machined media is a supertype influence, or servant subtype.\nOther candidates I have identified the following but consider them to be subtypes of the supertype influences above:\nPayment – eg, payment in pursuit of organisational objectives Collaboration – to work together; but why? Association – eg, brand association; but why? For a “cause” – eg, environmentalism; personal or professional interest? News worthiness – too generic to be useful imho. Q2. Is the intent to exert influence central to the creation of every single piece of content? Or in other words, when might you create content that seeks no influence? And in such circumstances, what then is the purpose of its creation?\nIf we take it that whenever content is intended for others it must be seeking to affect the other – to influence them to think or feel or do something – then perhaps the only time content is created without influence in mind is when the content is created for one’s personal needs or desires alone?\nImportantly for our application here, the instances of content creation not seeking influence appear few.\nART\nGeorge Orwell’s assertion aside, perhaps some art is simply personally satisfying; content created simply for no other reason than it can be created.\nIDEAS IN PROGRESS\nOne might argue that content in private draft format – as embryonic ideas, as works in progress – is not designed to influence others. But then this is just one step removed in terms of influence; it’s building up to it.\nIn conclusion. The Influence View of Content has been in my head as a work in progress, and following conversations with those thanked below it is now a work in progress seeking influence, created for reasons of personal interest and the pursuit of organisational objectives. I hope it might prove useful before we might ever call it finished.\nThe ease and effectiveness with which we manage and learn from influence flows is integral to the ways all stakeholders interact with organizations to broker mutually valuable, beneficial relationships.\nAs most content exerts influence, every influence professional must seek to understand what influenced the creation of relevant content, and might then influence it in future.\nThanks. David Phillips, Jay O’Connor, Gabbi Cahane, Andrew Bruce Smith, Mark Pinsent.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/the-influence-view-of-content-0-1/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Version 0.1 \u0026laquo; work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Influence-view-of-content-v0.1.pdf\"\u003ea PDF\u003c/a\u003e\n if that suits you better.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"précis\"\u003ePrécis\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCategorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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 \u003ca href=\"http://eulerpartners.com/influence-scorecard/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard framework\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDefinition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDefinition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"paid-owned-earned\"\u003ePaid Owned Earned\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than 'paid, owned, earned'"},{"content":"[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]\nThere will be an economic recovery and best practice public relations will play its part.\nEconomists may not agree on the how, but they are agreed on the what – we need economic growth. And economic growth comes from organisations that are more productive, and productivity is partly driven by improving mutual understanding between the organisation and its stakeholders – ie, the excellence model of PR.\nAn organisation that better understands all stakeholders will be more sensitive to its market and more agile and appropriate in its response.\nLast week, the UK government announced an initiative with twenty six major organisations \u0026ldquo;working together to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment\u0026rdquo;. The programme, midata, \u0026ldquo;will give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is a world first as far as I know, although the prospect has been discussed for several years. It\u0026rsquo;s often referred to as vendor relationship management (VRM), the other side of the CRM coin if you like.\nWill your organisation join this revolution in customer data? Will you play your part in the economic recovery?\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\nP.S. If you\u0026rsquo;re a CIPR member or fellow, don\u0026rsquo;t forget to vote for the President 2013 / President-Elect 2012 by midday 18th November. Check out the Presidential Debate on CIPR TV .\nP.P.S. I write the Roundup in my own capacity. I am not a spokesperson for the CIPR.\nElection Post for CIPR President Elect 2012 - Lionel Zetter FCIPR by Philip Morgan of Chartered Institute of Public Relations\nThis is the third and final blog post in a series of posts in which each candidate in the election for CIPR President-Elect, which is currently being contested, can post on the CIPR Conversation.\nToday\u0026rsquo;s candidate is Lionel Zetter FCIPR.\nWhy I want to be a two time President\nThe great thing about banging your head against a brick wall is the sheer relief when you stop doing it. Most Presidents hand over the (mythical) chain of office with a sigh of relief. I didn’t – I enjoyed my year as President, and I would love to do it again. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Apps Potential for Creative Content Marketing by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the numerous ways that marketers are connecting with their customers and prospects via mobile devices \u0026ndash; smartphones and media tablets. Mobile apps that utilize a digital magazine (or eZine) format are particularly interesting, because they offer the potential to enable new forms of multimedia publishing.\nGranted, substantive editorial content development is very labor intensive, but I believe that it\u0026rsquo;s more likely to engage a marketer\u0026rsquo;s target stakeholders than the typical mobile advertising campaign. More\u0026hellip; Your customers will share their experiences and they will influence the decisions of others by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nIn The End of Business as Usual, I review in detail how markets are evolving and what businesses need to do to earn relevance among a different breed of consumer. For those who struggle to make the case within their business or organization, to not just engage consumers online, but evolve business philosophies, practices, and systems, to truly matter, this is your guide.\nIn the end, your customers will share their experiences and they will influence the decisions of others. Shared experiences contribute to a collective reality that differs from how you market and sell your brand today. More\u0026hellip; The UK takes a step closer to Streams Banks – your personal data nirvana by Philip Sheldrake of Meanwhile\nA year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of The Business of Influence about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:\nI consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.\nShould I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – More\u0026hellip; Should Occupy Wall Street Occupy The Minds of Businesses \u0026amp; Is Corporate Social Responsibility Really A Viable Answer? by Jonathan McGinley of Freelance\nThe Occupy Wall Street protests have hit the media headlines and some would argue have the potential to fast become an unwanted headache for both corporate businesses and governments at a time of economic instability. At the time of writing this article the movement has a presence in many cities worldwide including New York, Berlin and St Pauls Cathedral in London.\nThe growth of the movement globally within a relatively short space of time is certainly both impressive and striking. Yet should we really be surprised? After all, the phenomenon of anti capitalism activism in itself is not new. More\u0026hellip; The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #624: November 7, 2011 by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nContent summary:FIR Interview with Chris Boyer posted; Dell B2B Social Media Huddle in London on November 3: podcasts coming soon; Shel was at BlogWorld Expo; News That Fits: Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011 report; Fortune 500 social media adoption report; Ragan promo; Dan York reports on “cloaking” as a way to game SEO, and more; marketing fails to resonate with shoppers says global Havas consumer survey; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on Holmes Report Think Tank Live Singapore, and more; More\u0026hellip; 8 reasons why word of mouth is so powerful by Andy Green of andygreencreativity\n1. People rate w-o-m as their most potent source of new business or reliable information. You know the scene: You are making a choice or dealing with an unfamiliar problem. You are not sure what to do. It could be a major purchase, or even just deciding what film to see. You ask a friend, or the friend tells you: “It’s supposed to be good.” A recommendation that probably determines your decision.\n2. Lack of a direct, positive experience is usually the single greatest factor holding back any decision from greater and faster acceptance. More\u0026hellip; Google+ for businesses: a shop front without customers? by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI’m not going to write a blog post about how to create a Google+ page. Plenty of other bloggers have covered that off.\nWhat I am going to do is ask you to stop and think before you start creating your page. Ask yourself if your customers are on Google+? If not why would you want to create a profile on yet another network?\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a strong case to be made for media businesses seeking to syndicate content and scoop up clicks to be first to Google+. Tech titles eWeek Labs, SlashGear, and TechRadar have already signed-up. More\u0026hellip; Page One: Inside The New York Times by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nStop what you are doing right now. Head to iTunes and rent a copy of Page One: Inside The New York Times.\nThe movie tells the story of the fragmentation of media over a 12-month period spent in the news room at The Times.\nIts not going to win any Pulitzer Prizes for reporting or storytelling but there are some wonderful moments as it fronts up to the issues that traditional news organisations are facing as ad revenue declines and audiences move from print to digital editions.\nTimes\u0026rsquo; staffer David Carr debates the future of media on televised panel with Michael Wolff creator of the news aggregator Newser. More\u0026hellip; Why I love Instagram by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nIt\u0026rsquo;s rare that I get really, really excited about a new social network, but that\u0026rsquo;s happening to me with Instagram. My friend Ann Handley introduced me to it last month and I am loving it. Since there are already ten million Instagram users, I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not an early adopter, so forgive me if you\u0026rsquo;re already an Instagram pro.\nInstagram is a photo sharing iPhone application that makes it easy and fun to manipulate a photo with various filters and turn it into instant art. Then with a few clicks, you can share your photo with a caption via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. More\u0026hellip; My Video Interview with Brian Solis at PR Directions 2011 by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nAt the recent Public Relations Institute of Australia’s PR Directions national conference in Sydney I had the opportunity to catch up with best-selling author and renowned new media thinker Brian Solis following his opening keynote address.\nI wrote about the presentation here: Brian Solis on Branded Journalism and the \u0026lsquo;Connected Consumer\u0026rsquo;.\nThe video was shot by Burning House Productions on behalf of the PRIA. More\u0026hellip; Blog like a baby…! by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nBabies know what you are thinking. New research shows that at around 10 months, young infants can detect if someone has changed their mind. Before they can walk or talk, babies can see inside your mind. So why does this happen? Why is it that trying to get to grips with what is going on in someone else’s head is more important to our development than learning to speak or getting up on our own two feet? According to the researchers who did this study, “beliefs guide behavior, but it would be difficult to explain another person’s behavior without explaining his or her mental state.” More\u0026hellip; The Rules of Smarter Engagement by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nTo celebrate the release of my new book, The End of Business as Usual, I recently hosted a discussion on behalf of Vocus on how businesses should rethink a marketing-driven social media approach by not just engaging, but activating a market-driven strategy defined by smarter, more meaningful engagement.\nMore than 1,000 people attended the event and while I tried to answer every question, many were left unaddressed because of time constraints. This post tackles some of the recurring questions we received on Twitter. More\u0026hellip; Daisy Girl: the advert that changed political advertising by Mark Pack of MHP Communications\nWhen I was doing my round-up last year of five of the best political adverts from around the world, I included Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Girl advert from 1964. Despite only being aired once, it has had a huge impact – both because of its power at the time and because of the way others since copied the use of a short, emotional story in preference to a long, factual presentation.\nA new book is coming out about the Daisy Girl advert and its author, Robert Mann has been writing about the origins and impact of the Daisy Girl advert: More\u0026hellip; \u0026lsquo;There\u0026rsquo;s Magic in Them There (Google+) Hills\u0026rsquo; by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nAlthough only a few months old, the Google+ social network has won a couple of heavy hitting fans in the form of Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki.\nSpeaking in tandem at last week’s BlogWorld 2011 in Los Angeles, both Brogan and Kawasaki enthused about the potential of Google+ for business.\nIn answering the inevitable comparison between Google+ and Facebook, Kawasaki said Facebook was for friends and family while Google+ was all about new relationships built on shared passions.\nUnder criticism\nKawasaki, who often comes under criticism for using Twitter as an automated ‘push’ More\u0026hellip; State of Social Report 2011 by Econsultancy by Stuart Bruce of Stuart Bruce Associates\nToday Econsultancy published its new State of Social Report 2011. It makes interesting reading. Thanks to Econsultancy I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview and was able to provide some comments on its findings. I\u0026rsquo;ve published my comments at the end of this report, but if you\u0026rsquo;re responsible for any aspect of social media strategy or management then I\u0026rsquo;d recommend you head over to the Econsultancy site and buy a copy, it\u0026rsquo;s only £250 or you can join for £295 and get access to all of Econsultancy\u0026rsquo;s reports. More\u0026hellip; The World According to Peter Shankman by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nOne of the better presentations (and there were many) at BlogWorld Los Angeles 2011 was Peter Shankman\u0026rsquo;s keynote. Shankman (below) is best known as the founder of an online service called HARO (\u0026lsquo;Help A Reporter Out\u0026rsquo;).\nHe is an absolute showman, but at his heart he’s an entrepreneur who intuitively understands PR and marketing in today’s hyper-connected social age. Here are some of the tips Shankman dangled in front of the packed BlogWorld crowd.\nEveryone talks about having a back-up plan for when you fail. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/your-vital-role-in-the-economic-recovery/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere will be an economic recovery and best practice public relations will play its part.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEconomists may not agree on the how, but they are agreed on the what – we need economic growth. And economic growth comes from organisations that are more productive, and productivity is partly driven by improving mutual understanding between the organisation and its stakeholders – ie, the excellence model of PR.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn organisation that better understands all stakeholders will be more sensitive to its market and more agile and appropriate in its response.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLast week, the \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-uk-takes-a-step-closer-to-streams-banks--your-personal-data-nirvana\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eUK government announced\u003c/a\u003e\n an initiative with twenty six major organisations \u0026ldquo;working together to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment\u0026rdquo;. The programme, midata, \u0026ldquo;will give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a world first as far as I know, although the prospect has been discussed for several years. It\u0026rsquo;s often referred to as vendor relationship management (VRM), the other side of the CRM coin if you like.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWill your organisation join this revolution in customer data? Will you play your part in the economic recovery?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Your vital role in the economic recovery"},{"content":"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.\nYou can watch the video here and you\u0026rsquo;ll find the candidates\u0026rsquo; election statements on the CIPR website .\nVoting for the President-Elect 2012 / President 2013 closes midday Friday 18th November.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/the-cipr-presidential-debate/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou can watch the video here and you\u0026rsquo;ll find the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/about-us/cipr-election-2011/cipr-president-elect-candidate-statements-0\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ecandidates\u0026rsquo; election statements on the CIPR website\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVoting for the President-Elect 2012 / President 2013 closes midday Friday 18th November.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The CIPR Presidential Debate"},{"content":"A year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of The Business of Influence about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:\nI consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.\nShould I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation – the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms, which may entail my negotiating different terms or choosing not to buy that specific product or service.\nTo me, a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others is nothing short of dystopia. Of course, the situation I describe above is far from where we find ourselves today and I make the case that influence professionals should be helping to lead the charge toward empowering the customer – past, present and future. As such, the chapter continues to lay out a potential privacy framework, introducing Streams Banks:\nIt’s the moniker I’ve given the service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualize it all.\nA streams bank archives the minutiae of your life, if you so wish. The service may offer suggestions or advice in decision-making, and perhaps it may even be relied upon to make certain decisions for you autonomously.\nWhat on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..\nImagine that you’re a mobile telephone network operator. Right now, you own the data describing the customer’s use of your network. What competitive advantage might be had by reversing that situation, by transferring ownership to the customer – on the condition of service of course that you can have access to their data in order to determine billing and associated aspects of your service provision? And what if you gave the customer the tools to learn about her data, to download it and share it with whomever she wished. What might she learn about herself and her family? How might this data be mashed up? How much easier would it be to source the perfect tariff for the next year given the opportunity to share last year’s data? If you think that sounds bad for business you’re effectively saying that opacity is good. History has shown that walled gardens and other protective practices eventually crumble in competitive telephony markets.\nWell, it seems this day is dawning.\nThe UK government has just announced that a voluntary group of 26 major organisations are coming together to deliver a vision known as midata, and the full press release is included verbatim below. This is simply fantastic news, although it\u0026rsquo;s worth pointing out the massive gap that still needs to be closed between the definition of midata as it stands today and my Streams Banks vision\u0026hellip;\nmidata still treats the data as \u0026lsquo;owned\u0026rsquo; by the organisations – they are simply releasing the data \u0026ldquo;back to consumers\u0026rdquo;. The Streams Bank outcome envisages that the data is owned by the individual who may cede rights to the organisation, as desired or required by the delivery of the particular product or service. A subtle difference perhaps, but with wide ramifications.\nThis announcement is as much a great day for the UK as the Digital Economy Act wasn\u0026rsquo;t.\nGovernment, business and consumer groups commit to midata vision of consumer empowerment 03 November 2011 12:00\nDepartment for Business, Innovation and Skills (National) The Government today announced a ground-breaking partnership with 26 major organisations that will see them working together to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment.\nThe businesses, consumer bodies and regulators involved are all committed to working with Government to achieve its vision for midata, launched today. And all are endorsing the key principle that data should be released back to consumers.\nmidata is a voluntary programme the Government is undertaking with industry, which over time will give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format. Individuals will then be able to use this data to gain insights into their own behaviour, make more informed choices about products and services, and manage their lives more efficiently.\nToday’s announcement marks the first time globally there has been such a Government-backed initiative to empower individuals with so much control over the use of their own data.\nThe overall aim of midata is to benefit the economy, by stimulating innovation and growth, as well as companies and consumers:\nFor the economy - midata will encourage sustainable economic growth by boosting competition between companies in terms of value and service, and driving innovation.\nFor business - midata will create opportunities for businesses through improved dialogue with consumers and increased trust, and the opportunity to provide innovative new personal information services and tools.\nFor consumers - midata will allow consumers to access their data in a safe and secure way and make better decisions reflecting their personal wants and needs. New services made possible by midata will further assist consumers, whether it be in getting the best deal on their mobile phone contract or energy tariff, or managing their lives more efficiently.\nLaunching the midata vision, Consumer Affairs Minister, Edward Davey said: “Currently, most consumer data is held by service providers, meaning only one side of the customer-business relationship is empowered with the tools of information management. midata seeks to redress that balance.\n“This is the way the world is going and the UK is currently leading the charge. We see a real opportunity here, but others, including the US and EU, are also showing real interest in the programme and the economic benefits it can deliver. So if we want to continue leading the way, we need to develop a platform upon which the innovation and services that drive growth can be built. midata aims to do just that.\n“I’m delighted that so many organisations are supporting our vision and I look forward to working with them closely as the programme progresses.”\nThe midata programme marks a non-regulatory approach to consumer empowerment and is in keeping with the Government’s broader focus on transparency and openness.\nThe next step will include setting time lines and developing online \u0026lsquo;personal data inventories\u0026rsquo; (PDIs) in each sector, which will describe the types of data an organisation holds about each customer.\nProtocols will also be established to handle any issues relating to privacy, data security and consumer protection.\nmidata is also working with companies to develop common approaches that will allow customers to access their data including their contact details, current tariffs and contracts, etc and update basic information about themselves.\nThe PDI and access work will precede the release of data back to customers in an electronic format. The goal is to enable the first releases in the first half of 2012.\nNotes to editors 1. Businesses and organisations that have so far committed to working in partnership with Government to achieve the midata vision are:\n- Avoco Secure\n- billmonitor\n- British Gas\n- Callcredit\n- EDF Energy\n- E.ON\n- Garlik\n- Google\n- Lloyds Banking Group\n- MasterCard\n- Moneysupermarket.com\n- Mydex\n- npower\n- RBS\n- Scottish Power\n- Scottish Southern Energy\n- The UK Cards Association\n- Three\n- Visa\n2. The following consumer groups and regulators are working with midata to represent consumers\u0026rsquo; interests and concerns. As well as working towards potential benefits, their input plays an important role in identifying potential risks and helping determine how these can be addressed:\n- Citizens Advice\n- Communications Consumer Panel\n- Consumer Focus\n- Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)\n- OFCOM\n- Office of Fair Trading (OFT)\n- Which?\n3. The Government set out its plans for midata in the consumer empowerment strategy Better Choices: Better Deals, published in April 2011: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/consumer-issues/consumer-empowerment 4. At the recent energy summit (17 October), energy companies agreed to participate in work to enhance the switching process, with a next generation online method of enabling customers to check and change to the best deal for them.\n5. BIS\u0026rsquo;s online newsroom contains the latest press notices, speeches, as well as video and images for download. It also features an up to date list of BIS press office contacts. See http://www.bis.gov.uk/newsroom for more information.\nThe Government’s vision for midata Consumer Data Empowerment midata is a voluntary partnership between the UK Government, businesses, consumer groups, regulators and trade bodies to create an agreed, common approach to empowering individuals with their personal data.\nmidata recognises and supports the principle of individuals using their own customer information to gain an insight into their own behaviour, make more informed choices and better decisions, to manage their affairs more efficiently, and to obtain the products and services that best meet their needs.\nmidata is part of the Government’s growth agenda. It will help achieve economic growth by improving information sharing between organisations and their customers, sharpening incentives for businesses to compete keenly on price, service and quality, building trust and facilitating the creation a new market for personal information services that empower individuals to use their own data for their own purposes.\nOrganisations can help realise the goals of midata by providing customers with the ability to access and re-use their ‘customer data’ – including data about customer transactions, interactions and usage behaviours that organisations collect.\nThe aim of the midata project is for organisations that collect, store and use customer data to endorse and work towards the following goals and principles.\nOrganisations collecting, using and holding customer data should:\n· maintain and make available to customers accurate and up-to-date descriptions of the types of personal data they hold about these customers. (Consumer Data Transparency)\n· develop, support and promote ways to release customers’ data back to them in a safe, privacy-friendly, portable and re-usable manner. This data should be made available to them online for free and to use as they see fit. (Consumer Data Access)\n· minimise risks of data breaches and invasions of privacy. This includes a) working to ensure that all personal information is accessed and released safely and securely; b) helping to create a personal data environment that enables individuals to hold, use and share their data in ways they understand and can trust, which protects their interests and empowers them to use their data for their own purposes. (Consumer Data Security)\n· work with other organisations via the midata project to encourage the innovation of new consumer information services that deliver midata goals. (Consumer Data Innovation)\nConsumer Data principles\nThe following principles will guide the project:\n1. Data that is released to customers will be in reusable, machine-readable form in an open standard format.\n2. Consumers should be able to access, retrieve and store their data securely.\n3. Consumers should be able to analyse, manipulate, integrate and share their data as they see fit - including participating in collaborative or group purchasing.\n4. Standardisation of terminology, format and data sharing processes will be pursued as far as possible across sectors.\n5. Once requested, data will be made available to customers as quickly as possible.\n6. The focus will be to provide information or data that that may be actionable and useful in making a decision or in the course of a specific activity.\n7. Organisations should not place any restrictions on or otherwise hinder the retention or reuse of data.\n8. Organisations will work to increase awareness amongst consumers of the opportunities and responsibilities that arise from consumer data empowerment.\n9. Organisations will provide customers with clear explanations of how the data was collected and what it represents, and who to consult if problems arise.\nContacts ndsenquiries@coi.gsi.gov.uk ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/11/the-uk-takes-a-step-closer-to-streams-banks/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" title=\"ESOMAR 3D Presentation – The Business of Influence\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShould I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation – the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms, which may entail my negotiating different terms or choosing not to buy that specific product or service.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo me, a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others is nothing short of dystopia. Of course, the situation I describe above is far from where we find ourselves today and I make the case that influence professionals should be helping to lead the charge toward empowering the customer – past, present and future. As such, the chapter continues to lay out a potential privacy framework, introducing Streams Banks:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s the moniker I’ve given the service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualize it all.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA streams bank archives the minutiae of your life, if you so wish. The service may offer suggestions or advice in decision-making, and perhaps it may even be relied upon to make certain decisions for you autonomously.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImagine that you’re a mobile telephone network operator. Right now, you own the data describing the customer’s use of your network. What competitive advantage might be had by reversing that situation, by transferring ownership to the customer – on the condition of service of course that you can have access to their data in order to determine billing and associated aspects of your service provision? And what if you gave the customer the tools to learn about her data, to download it and share it with whomever she wished. What might she learn about herself and her family? How might this data be mashed up? How much easier would it be to source the perfect tariff for the next year given the opportunity to share last year’s data? If you think that sounds bad for business you’re effectively saying that opacity is good. History has shown that walled gardens and other protective practices eventually crumble in competitive telephony markets.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell, it seems this day is dawning.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The UK takes a step closer to Streams Banks – your personal data nirvana"},{"content":"Public relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect mutual understanding . Right?\nWell, 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.\nFor the best part of this week I\u0026rsquo;ve been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what\u0026rsquo;s going on in the minds of customers and prospects.\nESOMAR describes itself as \u0026ldquo;the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide\u0026rdquo;. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members\u0026rsquo; contribution to effective decision-making.\nThis particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far\u0026hellip;\nFirstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we\u0026rsquo;re all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently?\nSecondly, there is, as Peter Harrison of BrainJuicer called it yesterday, the context gap. This refers to the customer being \u0026lsquo;in the right moment\u0026rsquo;. For example, Peter imagines a Friday morning when you insist that you\u0026rsquo;ll just have two drinks in the evening, but this response changes when you find yourself in the social environment of the restaurant or bar. Another presenter referred to this as either the \u0026lsquo;hot response\u0026rsquo; – representing the actually behaviour the respondent is more likely to exhibit in the real situation, and the \u0026lsquo;cold response\u0026rsquo; – the one they\u0026rsquo;ll proffer to the researcher when out of context.\nAnd this is where social media comes in; the media where we all express ourselves in context. We\u0026rsquo;re at the match. We\u0026rsquo;re out shopping. We\u0026rsquo;re down the pub. We\u0026rsquo;re watching the TV.\nThe market research community is grappling with how to take advantage of the opportunities that social media and continuous engagement with customers and prospects offers, whilst continuing to live up to its self-regulating ethical standards and scientific rigor.\nAs such there\u0026rsquo;s an incredible amount of innovation underway in market research. We\u0026rsquo;re learning about the \u0026lsquo;researchification\u0026rsquo; of games (a pun on and extension of the \u0026lsquo;gamification\u0026rsquo; trend), facial imaging for automated recognition of emotional response, and the specific characteristics of mobile phone based research.\nFor my part, I\u0026rsquo;d like to see a joint ESOMAR CIPR conference so the two can learn more about the other.\n___\nWritten for the CIPR Friday Roundup.\nPhotograph credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ricardo_mangual/5758711377 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/what-our-publics-are-telling-us/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePublic relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/about-us/about-pr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003emutual understanding\u003c/a\u003e\n. Right?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell, 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the best part of this week I\u0026rsquo;ve been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what\u0026rsquo;s going on in the minds of customers and prospects.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Miami beach\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/MiamiBeachHome.jpg\" title=\"Miami beach\"\u003eESOMAR describes itself as \u0026ldquo;the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide\u0026rdquo;. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members\u0026rsquo; contribution to effective decision-making.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we\u0026rsquo;re all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What our publics are telling us"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m in Miami today at the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference. For those of you unfamiliar with ESOMAR, it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research in illuminating real issues and bringing about effective decision-making.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011 View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake I\u0026rsquo;m kicking off the conference despite probably being the least expert in market research in the room! But that\u0026rsquo;s not why I was invited. Rather, I\u0026rsquo;m expert in the shifting landscape in which market research is situated, and my role is to act as tour guide and possibly polemicist, to lend context to the opportunities and challenges for market research going forward.\nRegular readers will recognise some slides, but there are three new ones you should take a look at in particular, all bar charts taken from IBM\u0026rsquo;s recent CMO report .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/esomar-3d-presentation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m in Miami today at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.esomar.org/index.php/3d-digital-dimensions-2011-overview.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions\u003c/a\u003e\n conference. For those of you unfamiliar with ESOMAR, it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research in illuminating real issues and bringing about effective decision-making.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/the-business-of-influence-esomar-3d-digital-dimensions-conference-2011\" title=\"The Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"ESOMAR 3D Presentation – The Business of Influence"},{"content":"An interesting start to the day today\u0026hellip; over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.\nI had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q\u0026amp;A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t tell you what they are (well, without being retained by you anyway!)\nThanks to Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit ) for being in the chair, and for Andrew Ross (@AJMRoss ) for putting the session together.\nCIPR Freshly Squeezed 25th Oct 2011 View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/measuring-online--cipr-freshly-squeezed-training-session/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAn interesting start to the day today\u0026hellip; over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q\u0026amp;A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;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.\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqznzVgyY3Q\u0026t=22m32s ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/interview-with-carla-buzasi-editor-in-chief-huffington-post-uk/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI recently interviewed \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/carlabuzasi\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCarla Buzasi\u003c/a\u003e\n about her relatively new role as Editor-in-Chief of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHuffington Post UK\u003c/a\u003e\n. The interview went out as the middle part of October\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqznzVgyY3Q\u0026amp;t=22m32s\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqznzVgyY3Q\u0026t=22m32s\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Interview with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post UK"},{"content":"European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\nI\u0026rsquo;m in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s European PR Congress 2011. I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting to compare the two.\nNow, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov\u0026amp;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 : \u0026ldquo;Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions\u0026hellip; putting penetration at 121.2%.\u0026rdquo;\nWhilst I haven\u0026rsquo;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.\nMy stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month\u0026rsquo;s Dreamforce , so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it\u0026rsquo;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.\nPre-conference questions I was asked two questions prior to the conference, and thought I\u0026rsquo;d share these and my answers with you here\u0026hellip;\nWhat tools for measuring PR effectiveness do you find most useful for the modern Communications Director and why? Your organisation is unique. It occupies a unique position in its marketplace with unique relationships with its stakeholders. Your objectives, strategy and execution are unique. Unsurprisingly, this then demands that you select a unique balance of metrics that tell you: i) how well execution is proceeding; and ii) whether the original strategy remains relevant or needs a tweak or an overhaul.\nThe right tools for you are the ones that allow you to best monitor your particular balance of metrics.\nWhy did you decide to talk about Influence Scorecard? What is this approach about and what are its advantages? The Influence Scorecard augments the Balanced Scorecard – the dominant business performance management (BPM) framework adopted by the majority of the Global 2000.\nIt identifies influence as the highest common factor unifying the otherwise disparate C-level executive roles. It helps everyone in the organisation appreciate that everyone is responsible for the ease with which the organisation influences stakeholders and systematically ensures it\u0026rsquo;s influenced back.\nI call this the business of influence. It creates the social enterprise.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/the-role-of-pr-in-a-digital-age/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/european-pr-congress-2011-the-role-of-pr-in-the-digital-age\" title=\"European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age \" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEuropean PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more presentations from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s European PR Congress 2011. I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting to compare the two.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, \u003ca href=\"http://www.m-p.ru/eng/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMikhailov\u0026amp;Partners.Ukraine\u003c/a\u003e\n) 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, \u003ca href=\"http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=458101\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eaccording to Total Telecom in July last year\u003c/a\u003e\n: \u0026ldquo;Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions\u0026hellip; putting penetration at 121.2%.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhilst I haven\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/09/influence-socializing-the-enterprise-%e2%80%93-my-presentation-at-dreamforce-2011/\"\u003elast month\u0026rsquo;s Dreamforce\u003c/a\u003e\n, so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Role of PR in a Digital Age"},{"content":"My book, The Business of Influence , has just been reviewed in Communication Director .\nThe magazine is billed as the professional specialist magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations in Europe. It documents opinions on important strategic questions in communication, discovers transnational developments and discusses their relevance from a European perspective. The publication is associated with the European Association of Communication Directors .\nThe review Page 90, Communication Director Magazine, September 2011\n\u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re in business, you\u0026rsquo;re in the business of influence\u0026rdquo;. So begins a typically thought-provoking chapter from The Business of Influence that explores the concept of the Influence Scorecard and the non-tangible results of new communication tools.\nCommunicators looking to keep pace with the digitalisation of the industry and its consequences for business strategies would do well to pick up a copy of this book: modestly-proportioned, it nevertheless demands a high-level of concentration of the reader as strategies, theories, diagrams and a thorough selection of the latest in public relations and marketing thought pack the pages.\nPhilip Sheldrake takes a lively approach to the mass of material, arguing with, comparing and contrasting the ideas that crowd his writing - the book is all the better for the numerous interjections by the author.\nThis is no bloodless textbook, and Sheldrake makes a convincing case for the creation of a \u0026lsquo;Chief Influence Officer\u0026rsquo; within the organisation, \u0026ldquo;charged with making the art and science of influencing and being influenced a core organisational discipline\u0026rdquo;. According to Sheldrake\u0026rsquo;s vision, marketing and public relations will \u0026ldquo;ultimately come under the CInflO\u0026rsquo;s domain\u0026rdquo;, a bold vision characteristic of this visionary book.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/communication-director-magazine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Communication Director Magazine\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/communication-director-magazine.jpg\" title=\"Communication Director Magazine\"\u003eMy book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" title=\"How many Tweets make a Like?\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n, has just been reviewed in \u003ca href=\"http://www.communication-director.eu/magazine/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCommunication Director\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe magazine is billed as the professional specialist magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations in Europe. It documents opinions on important strategic questions in communication, discovers transnational developments and discusses their relevance from a European perspective. The publication is associated with the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eacd-online.eu/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEuropean Association of Communication Directors\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-review\"\u003eThe review\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePage 90, Communication Director Magazine, September 2011\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re in business, you\u0026rsquo;re in the business of influence\u0026rdquo;. So begins a typically thought-provoking chapter from The Business of Influence that explores the concept of the Influence Scorecard and the non-tangible results of new communication tools.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Communication Director Magazine book review – The Business of Influence"},{"content":"Are you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you\u0026rsquo;re a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.\nMarshall Sponder visited London last week as part of his tour promoting his new book, Social Media Analytics – Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics (ISBN 978-0-07-176829-0). Having read a draft manuscript of the book, a quote of mine appears on the front cover: \u0026ldquo;Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market.\u0026rdquo;\nThere is no better independent authority on the tools and techniques than Marshall. Whilst some pundits simply maintain lists of social analytics vendors with some basic feature comparison tables, Marshall has actually used many of them for real. Moreover, he has a peculiar ability to prod the vendors and the engineers that build these services, to get under the hood and separate the actual capabilities from the marketing claims.\nMarshall is not, however, a public relations practitioner or management consultant. This book does not provide a strategic framework for the integration of social analytics into your organisation. It does not address important issues such as privacy (of customers, employees and the wider public) or ethics. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review.\nRather, Marshall tells it how he sees it as a straight forward analyst guy. He simply picks through some of the services he finds most interesting. Here\u0026rsquo;s what he\u0026rsquo;s worked with, here\u0026rsquo;s what some of the vendors have to say, and here\u0026rsquo;s the state of play. He reviews dashboards (which he calls scorecards). He touches upon the increasing trend of combining social analytics with CRM and the nascent power of connecting social analytics into the retail environment.\nMarshall and I disagree on the measurement and evaluation of ROI (return on investment) and the role and treatment of so-called \u0026lsquo;influencers\u0026rsquo;. We\u0026rsquo;re poles apart it seems (and my full \u0026lsquo;book blurb\u0026rsquo; inside the cover makes this clear). Yet I recommend this book whole heartedly because it\u0026rsquo;s a brain dump from the best social analyst savant I know. It will be an eye-opener for those just coming to this field or, indeed, a year or two into it.\nOn a related note, check out Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; recent interview with Marcel LeBrun , SVP and GM, Salesforce Radian6.\n[originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/10/social-media-analytics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAre you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you\u0026rsquo;re a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarshall Sponder visited London last week as part of \u003ca href=\"http://learnmore.mcgraw-hill.com/2011/08/19/smablogtour/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehis tour\u003c/a\u003e\n promoting his new book, \u003cem\u003eSocial Media Analytics – Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics\u003c/em\u003e (ISBN 978-0-07-176829-0). Having read a draft manuscript of the book, a quote of mine appears on the front cover: \u0026ldquo;Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Social Media Analytics, Marshall Sponder\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/socialmediaanalytics-202x300.jpg\" title=\"Social Media Analytics, Marshall Sponder\"\u003eThere is no better independent authority on the tools and techniques than Marshall. Whilst some pundits simply maintain lists of social analytics vendors with some basic feature comparison tables, Marshall has actually used many of them for real. Moreover, he has a peculiar ability to prod the vendors and the engineers that build these services, to get under the hood and separate the actual capabilities from the marketing claims.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarshall is not, however, a public relations practitioner or management consultant. This book does not provide a strategic framework for the integration of social analytics into your organisation. It does not address important issues such as privacy (of customers, employees and the wider public) or ethics. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social Media Analytics"},{"content":"If you\u0026rsquo;re looking for an acid test as to whether an organisation is centred in this social world, as to whether they have a marketing and communications strategy that integrates social media cogently and coherently rather than bolts it on, listen out for questions like this:\nHow much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?\nIf this is the kind of question they\u0026rsquo;re asking then, in my opinion, they simply don\u0026rsquo;t yet \u0026lsquo;get it\u0026rsquo;. If you\u0026rsquo;re feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:\n$0.23 per hundred A \u0026rsquo;like\u0026rsquo; is definitely worth somewhere between 2 and 3 tweets; sort of around 2.42 A comment has an engagement quotient nine times that of a \u0026lsquo;friend\u0026rsquo; If you\u0026rsquo;re in tech, then a +1 is currently five times more potent than a RT, but the reverse is true for other markets That depends if you\u0026rsquo;re B2B or B2C Well, can I ask, is there any yellow in your logo? In The Business of Influence (Chapter 5) I include the following table, titled \u0026ldquo;Maturity of influence approach\u0026rdquo;.\nMaturity Characteristics High Trace the influence (the action) back to source. Focused on business outcomes, as we should be. Best practice, intelligent and you could say scientific and professional marketing and PR, and associated activities. Influence-centric Medium It’s quality not quantity. Not how many people you interact with, but how and in what context? Low Number of followers, friends, subscribers, circulation. Empirically supported network science. Akin to column inches and AVE – measurement because you can, not because you should. Influencer-centric Pitiful Obfuscating compound measures of non-contextual trivial variables. No empirical evidence. I then go on to explain the difference between influencer-centric and influence-centric approaches, but right now I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m on a mission to get the following out there\u0026hellip;\nThe Fallacy of Social Media ROI An investment in social media activities is an investment in the way in which your organisation communicates with valued stakeholders and keeps abreast of the influence going around its marketplace. It is an intangible investment, just like issuing Blackberrys, the rebrand, R\u0026amp;D and staff training; in fact, most modern organisations have considerable intangible assets.\nIntangible assets have no value in isolation, only when they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026lsquo;in the mix\u0026rsquo;, so attempting to determine an ROI for any one intangible asset at a time vies with AVE for being a complete and utter waste of time and money. In fact the ramifications are worse than that. Such calculations are usually demanded in order to make budgetary choices, and as these calculations are fascinating works of fiction at best this can only be a bad way to make decisions.\nTrue Social Media ROI Investment in social media activities is at its most valuable when it is informed and driven by the organisation\u0026rsquo;s objectives. The objectives guide the development of a well articulated strategy that plays to the full characteristics of social media and related technologies, trends and behaviours, which is then mapped scientifically onto operations with appropriate and diligent metric selection. Period. Such a rigorous cascade has ROI built-in even if the units for the metrics in question aren\u0026rsquo;t preceded by dollar signs.\nAMEC Social Media Measurement Group At The North American Summit on Public Relations Measurement this week, run jointly by the PRSA and IPR , The Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC ) has just announced the formation of a global Social Media Measurement Group. Barry Leggetter, Executive Director of AMEC, says:\nThis is a key new Group for AMEC as we plan international coalition initiatives with other like-minded groups to establish global standards in social media measurement.\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be a member of this group, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting here as we crystallise our remit, consult relevant bodies around the world and begin to draw conclusions.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the list of the group\u0026rsquo;s members:\nRichard Bagnall (Chair), MD of Metrica and Director Gorkana Group , UK KC Brown , General Manager, Cision Global Analysts , US Eddie Chau, Founder \u0026amp; CEO from Brandtology (Media Monitors Group , Asia Pacific) Joerg Kramer, MD and founder of Kantar Media Intelligence , Germany Fadl Al Tarzi , COO of News Group / SocialEyez , Middle East Philip Sheldrake , Chair of the CIPR \u0026rsquo;s measurement group \u0026amp; Founding Partner, Meanwhile , UK Stephen Waddington , Managing Director, Speed Communications , UK Katie Delahaye Paine , founder and CEO of KDPaine \u0026amp; Partners LLC Johna Burke , Senior Vice President, BurrellesLuce . ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/09/how-many-tweets-make-a-like/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for an acid test as to whether an organisation is centred in this social world, as to whether they have a marketing and communications strategy that integrates social media cogently and coherently rather than bolts it on, listen out for questions like this:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf this is the kind of question they\u0026rsquo;re asking then, in my opinion, they simply don\u0026rsquo;t yet \u0026lsquo;get it\u0026rsquo;. If you\u0026rsquo;re feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e$0.23 per hundred\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA \u0026rsquo;like\u0026rsquo; is definitely worth somewhere between 2 and 3 tweets; sort of around 2.42\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA comment has an engagement quotient nine times that of a \u0026lsquo;friend\u0026rsquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;re in tech, then a +1 is currently five times more potent than a RT, but the reverse is true for other markets\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat depends if you\u0026rsquo;re B2B or B2C\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWell, can I ask, is there any yellow in your logo?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" title=\"Socializing the enterprise. Are you?\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n (Chapter 5) I include the following table, titled \u0026ldquo;Maturity of influence approach\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How many Tweets make a Like?"},{"content":"Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:\nRegular readers will know I\u0026rsquo;ve argued for some time that we\u0026rsquo;ve really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it\u0026rsquo;s the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a QR code , image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now.\nAnd yet in 2011 it\u0026rsquo;s probably still pertinent to make the distinction between \u0026lsquo;being online\u0026rsquo; versus \u0026lsquo;offline\u0026rsquo;. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it\u0026rsquo;s just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you\u0026rsquo;ll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.\nHowever, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we\u0026rsquo;re well down the line in moving from so-called \u0026lsquo;click and type\u0026rsquo; interfaces to \u0026rsquo;touch and swipe\u0026rsquo;. Think about someone just like you living a century ago\u0026hellip; the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a reason that, following the outstanding successes of the motion sensing Nintendo Wii and touch sensing iPhone, the Microsoft Kinnect became the fastest ever selling consumer electronics device, selling 8 million units in 60 days . In simple terms, we love stuff that brings us the power and excitement of computing without the hassle; without the burden of having to learn specialist skills.\nWe are entering the decade of pervasive computing, a term describing a reality where everything is an interface. Employing technologies such as haptics, eye tracking, speech analysis, emotion recognition, gesture recognition and gait analysis, there\u0026rsquo;s almost no limit to the ways in which we will all interact with services and resources delivered over the Internet.\nNow I invite you to reconsider your definition of social media and the manifestations of public relations.\nBest regards, Philip and the Conversation team.\n___\nPlease note, this Conversation Roundup is written in my own capacity. I am not a spokesperson for the CIPR.\nIn praise of publicity - a woman\u0026rsquo;s history by Heather Yaxley of Applause Consultancy\nI’ve yet to come across Constance Hope in any public relations textbook – perhaps not surprising as women are largely missing from the history. Indeed, apart from Doris Fleischman, I am unaware of any female voices writing about early experiences of the practice in the US; and Fleischman’s contribution inevitably is linked to her husband Edward Bernays.\nSo exactly who was Constance Hope and why should we care about her story? Well she authored a book called: Publicity is Broccoli (published in 1941) a title which has to be worth a bit of our attention – More\u0026hellip; The failure that is the UK government on YouTube by Mark Pack of MHP Communications\nMention \u0026ldquo;YouTube\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;British government\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;failure\u0026rdquo; to most people interested in online politics or comms and the chances are they will think of Gordon Brown and that YouTube film with the unusual smiles.There is however a quieter failure, going on every day and hitting many Whitehall departments. It is quite simply this: lots of films made, almost no-one watching.\nTake the example of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Plenty of films on its YouTube channel but not many viewers. More\u0026hellip; Facebook or Bust, The Audience Is Listening by Julio Romo of twofourseven\nGeorge Lucas was right, \u0026lsquo;The audience IS listening\u0026rsquo;\nFacebook has brought together an audience of incredible numbers. The social networking giant is today a community of people that keeps on growing, creating for businesses an opportunity to reach out directly to consumers. But here lies the question, why are businesses still looking like ‘rabbits in the headlights’ and failing to truly engage with audiences that can help many survive during these hard economic times? Today, Facebook has over 750 million users worldwide. More\u0026hellip; It does not really matter where you place your links online by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nColonel Gaddafi probably isn’t top of your mind at the moment. Yet he is in the news. Equally, Keira Knightley probably isn’t your hot topic of the moment, yet she too is making headlines today. And while we’re at it, spare a thought for George Osborne; he’s been getting a bit of stick lately. Topical news stories, but we hardly give them a second glance after we are done with them. We read them, then move on. Unless the media keeps on reminding us the “half life” More\u0026hellip; How to make Social Media social in enterprise by Sean Trainor of Uber Engagement\nIt makes me smile when I observe the amount of content on social media sites that is taken up discussing social media. Marshall McLuhan did coin the phrase \u0026ldquo;The medium is the message\u0026rdquo; but this observation stretches that thought a bit. Great as this site is, it is no different. It highlights the navel gazing obsession that mainstream media have about reporting on media.Which makes me question how \u0026ldquo;Social\u0026rdquo; this stuff really is. As I look over the other side of the room, my teenage son is absorbed in a virtual world which seems to be dominated with pimping fast cars and prostitutes. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Coupon Use Growing at 118 Percent in U.S. by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nMobile coupons currently represent a small portion of marketer\u0026rsquo;s digital promotions, but usage is growing at a fast pace. The adoption of redeeming retailer coupons extends the trend of searching online for product discounts \u0026ndash; which emerged as a widespread, money-saving activity during the U.S. economic downturn.\n\u0026ldquo;Even as the sputtering economy attempts its recovery, the popularity of couponing has continued, spurred in part by the burgeoning daily deals space,\u0026rdquo; said Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst. More\u0026hellip; Putting conversations at the heart of business by Rachel Miller (née Allen) of rachmiller.com\nBBC coverage of Manchester and Salford riots\nLast month riots and chaos erupted in the UK with people taking to the streets to loot buildings and shops. I contacted Amanda Coleman, Head of Corporate Communications for Greater Manchester Police, where she has worked for the past 10 years, and asked her to write a guest article for Diary of an internal communicator about the events in Manchester and Salford (in the north of England), from a professional communicator\u0026rsquo;s perspective. Here she looks at the role of social networks, how communication plans were developed and how the force reacted and responded. More\u0026hellip; Copyright Tribunal to rule on newspaper web licence dispute by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nMeltwater and the PRCA are making a final bid at countering the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) licensing scheme at the Copyright Tribunal in London this week.\nThe Copyright Tribunal is an independent body which adjudicates in commercial licensing disputes.\nEarlier attempts by Meltwater and the PRCA to quash the scheme in the High Court in November 2010 and the Court of Appeal in July 2011 were unsuccessful.\nThe NLA Web End User Licence scheme introduced in January 2010 requires any party involved in distributing or receiving links from one of the NLA\u0026rsquo;s newspaper members on a paid-for basis to pay a fee. More\u0026hellip; Social media policy video from Australian government department by Stuart Bruce of Stuart Bruce Associates\nOver the last six years I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on developing a lot of social media policies – for multinational companies, large and small UK companies, public sector and voluntary/not-for-profit organisations – but I\u0026rsquo;ve got to confess this is the best idea I\u0026rsquo;ve seen so far. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those killer \u0026lsquo;wish I\u0026rsquo;d thought of that\u0026rsquo; moments: from Australia\u0026rsquo;s Department of Justice in Victoria Every company and organisation should have a social media policy. It\u0026rsquo;s protection against things that might go wrong, but more importantly helps to ensure that social media and social networks aren\u0026rsquo;t a threat, but an opportunity. More\u0026hellip; Why Retailers are Targeting Ads at Tablet Owners by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nMedia tablet owners are more engaged with retail brands, making more purchases and website visits compared with mobile smartphone users, according to the latest market study by eDigitalResearch and IMRG in the UK.\nThe results show that 30 percent of tablet users have used their device to shop online, while currently only 25 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone to do the same. Similarly, almost half (48 percent) of tablet owners have used their devices to research products in-store, but only 29 percent have done the same via their smartphone. More\u0026hellip; A Barometer on the Sunday Paper Market by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nSince the closure of the News of the World over the phone hacking scandal, the Sunday newspaper racket “doesn\u0026rsquo;t have enough competition [or] enough alternatives”. That’s according to Sir Martin Sorrell, chief exec at WPP.\nSir Martin told The Guardian today he is keen for News International to launch a Sunday version of The Sun newspaper to plug the gap left by NOTW’s closure. Without the default Sunday tabloid, he believes the Sunday paper market, and therefore his own media buying empire, is suffering from a lack of choice. More\u0026hellip; Nielsen: Social media report Q3 2011 by Michael Litman of Poke\nnielsen-social-media-report.pdf Download this file Key findings courtesy of We Are Social: Across a sample of 10 global markets, social networks and blogs are the top online destination in each country, accounting for the majority of time spent online and reaching at least 60 percent of active Internet users US – Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans\u0026rsquo; time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet. At over 53 billion total minutes during May 2011, Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other website US – More\u0026hellip; Five Psychological Tips for Websites by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nGetting people to engage with your website and to click on anything is an ever increasing problem. The number of available web pages is rising dramatically – 40 new websites are created every single minute of each day. And together with the existing websites (all 260 million of them) Google reckons there are more than 1 billion pages of new content being added every day…! We are swimming against the tide of never-ending information it seems. On top of this, there is some evidence that our attention span is shortening. More\u0026hellip; Being inclusive about PR ethics by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nOne of the great things about the Ethics Awareness Month initiative from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is that it helps focus clear attention on a core issue in the profession that, in many people’s minds, needs that attention.\nIt doesn’t matter a bit that the PRSA’s initiative happens to be organized by the professional body that represents practitioners in the USA. To give full credit to them (as well as recognize some good common sense at work), it’s very open – More\u0026hellip; Ten examples of QR codes for real time marketing by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nEarlier this week, I wrote a blog post titled QR codes deliver buyers in real time. In comments on the post as well as via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ a few people mentioned that QR codes are not very popular. In fact, some said that many people don\u0026rsquo;t even know what they are or how to use them. While I do agree that the average person wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know what a QR code is, I also recall in 1995 when web site URLs started to appear in offline advertising and again in 2008 when Twitter IDs started popping up, people didn\u0026rsquo;t know what they were either. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/09/click-and-type-or-touch-and-swipe/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePost written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRegular readers will know I\u0026rsquo;ve argued for some time that we\u0026rsquo;ve really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it\u0026rsquo;s the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/david.meerman.scott/ten-examples-of-qr-codes-for-real-time-marketing\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQR code\u003c/a\u003e\n, image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet in 2011 it\u0026rsquo;s probably still pertinent to make the distinction between \u0026lsquo;being online\u0026rsquo; versus \u0026lsquo;offline\u0026rsquo;. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it\u0026rsquo;s just to allow you to \u003ca href=\"https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirds\u0026amp;hl=en\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003echuck an angry bird\u003c/a\u003e\n around the screen). But you\u0026rsquo;ll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we\u0026rsquo;re well down the line in moving from so-called \u0026lsquo;click and type\u0026rsquo; interfaces to \u0026rsquo;touch and swipe\u0026rsquo;. Think about someone just like you living a century ago\u0026hellip; the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Click and type or touch and swipe"},{"content":"[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]\nI adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I\u0026rsquo;m doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I\u0026rsquo;m attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.\nDreamforce 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 \u0026ldquo;awesome\u0026rdquo; by the American delegates.\n[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]\nSalesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order:\n1. Develop a social customer profile\n2. Develop an employee social network (collaborate, service and engage, connect and sell, automate and extend)\n3. Develop a customer social network (social marketing, products and partners, listen and analyze).\nThe company\u0026rsquo;s approach and capabilities in these regards are second to none in enterprise computing in my opinion, and it\u0026rsquo;s great to see that the act of \u0026lsquo;socializing\u0026rsquo; extends to employees too, not just consumers. However, always wanting more, it will be interesting to keep tabs on the speed with which Salesforce.com turns its attention to \u0026lsquo;socializing\u0026rsquo; other stakeholder groups such as suppliers, the channel and other partners.\nFrom a technical perspective, there is a lot of talk about architecting around social objects. Hugh Macleod defines social objects as the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to someone else (see social objects for beginners ). And Salesforce.com\u0026rsquo;s Chief Scientist, JP Rangaswami, has been building some interesting principles for social objects :\nAn object becomes social only when it is shared; it is the sharing that makes the object social, not the object per se. A social object creates value not for itself but for the community in which it is shared. The process by which value is created is by the community interacting with the object, leaving comments, classifications, tags, notes, notations, corrections, observations, links, questions and even answers. If a social object falls in a forest and there’s no one to record and comment on its passage, it doesn’t make a sound. Social objects get cocooned in metadata, the who-what-when-how-much that describes frequency of access, the population doing the accessing, number of edits, when and how carried out and by whom, relative popularity, links, tags and so on. By inspecting the metadata we learn about ourselves and about the organisation(s). How enterprise computing has had to move on since the 20th Century! And that\u0026rsquo;s a nice segue to my small contribution to proceedings here – organisations cannot \u0026lsquo;socialize the enterprise\u0026rsquo; simply by procuring best practice enterprise computing. They too need to move on in other ways.\nTypical organisational structures, cultures, policies and processes were honed in the 20th Century and haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been adapted to the new realities of social media, other major information technology advances and modern approaches to business performance management. Making that transition is incredibly hard work, but as Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, told delegates here this week, there will be those who make the transition over the next three to five years, and the rest simply won\u0026rsquo;t survive.\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\n___\nPlease note, this Conversation Roundup is written in my own capacity. I am not a spokesperson for the CIPR.\nAnnouncing: The End of Business as Usual by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nEarlier this year, I announced that I was writing another book. I left clues here and there, but I had yet to officially announce the title or the focus of the book. The truth is that I didn’t want to give readers of Engage 2 the impression that I was ready to move on.\nSo finally, it is with great pleasure that I share with you the name and also the semi-final draft of the book’s cover.\nOfficially introducing, “The End of Business as Usual.”\nIt will go live on October 1, 2011 and it’s available for pre-order now at Amazon | Barnes and Noble | 800CEOREAD. More\u0026hellip; Three ways of creating a mobile version of your website by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nDo you own a smartphone? I bet, being the sophisticated reader that you are, you do. You only need to do a quick scan of people on trains, in supermarket queues and around the office to know that smartphones are absorbing more and more of people\u0026rsquo;s attention. And there are plenty of stats to prove it.\nRecent figures (compiled by Google and the British Retail Consortium) show that mobile search is growing over 200% year-on-year. 27% of the UK population now owns a smartphone (and shockingly, for cash strapped parents, 57% of teenagers). More\u0026hellip; 97.3 Million American Mobile Users Access the Internet by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nThe mobile web user population in the United States will increase by almost 25 percent this year \u0026ndash; as 97.3 million mobile device users access the internet from their device at least monthly, according to the latest market study by eMarketer.\nBy 2015, more than three in five mobile device users \u0026ndash; and almost half the total U.S. population \u0026ndash; will be using the mobile internet, eMarketer forecasts.\n\u0026ldquo;The rapidly expanding smartphone and mobile internet user populations raise the stakes for marketers and make the mobile web more of an imperative than ever,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; If you build it, will they come? by Rachel Miller (née Allen) of rachmiller.com\nThis week I was asked to offer some thoughts on recruiters using social media for recruitment based on what I have seen online. What struck me from the conversation I had was the perception some people have that creating social media channels equals success.\nTurning to the \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; networks, anyone can create a Twitter account, LinkedIn group or Facebook page. But what happens next? It surprised me that some organisations think that simply creating these channels means that people will flock to you. More\u0026hellip; Facebook ditches Deals and Places; location isn’t a walk in the park by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nFacebook seems to be rethinking its approach to location. Following a number of large-scale changes to features on the site last week, it has also announced the closure of two of its relatively young location-based products; Facebook Places and Facebook Deals.\nPlaces was the Foursquare-like product that allowed users to ‘check-in’ to locations and was launched with a great fanfare last year. It always had a slightly uncomfortable position on the site and, as with Foursquare, seemed to lack a clear raison d’etre. More\u0026hellip; Efficiency as a marketing asset by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nYesterday, my wife Yukari Watanabe Scott and I dropped our daughter off for her freshman year at Columbia University in New York City.\nWe arrived in the city a few days early because of the impending arrival of Hurricane Irene. We \u0026ldquo;camped\u0026rdquo; in a hotel room as the storm approached and then passed by, venturing out a few times when it was safe. It was a fun bonding weekend for the three of us prior to the start of our daughter\u0026rsquo;s university career (and our life as empty nesters).\nI was considering the logistical nightmare faced by Columbia University. More\u0026hellip; Who are your internal communications for? by Simon Wakeman of Medway Council\nAn article by Thomas J. DeLong in Harvard Business Review caught my eye about the “ignored majority” of employees in companies.\nThe diagram shows a categorisation of employees by how they are meeting the organizational performance goals (on the y-axis) and how they are meeting their own personal standards of expectations at work (on the x-axis). It leads to a model where there are people in all four corners, with the majority in the middle.\nThe general argument in the piece was that leaders in organisations spend too much time concentrating on those in the four corners of the model, at the expense of the largest number of employees who actually fall into the central “stalwart” More\u0026hellip; Americans Viewed 5.3 Billion Video Ads in July 2011 by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\ncomScore released data showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in July 2011 \u0026ndash; for an average of 18.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.\nGoogle Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in July \u0026ndash; with 158.1 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 62.1 million. Facebook.com was ranked third with 51.4 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 49.5 million and Viacom Digital with 47.3 million. More\u0026hellip; Managing Online Social Predators and Bullies by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nOnline social predators and community bullies pervade the internet. You know the type \u0026ndash; out there in the social sphere trying to create chaos and breed discontent. They are the dissatisfied customer, the slighted consumer, the angry applicant who didn\u0026rsquo;t get the job, kids who think social vandalism is fun. Perhaps they got bumped off a flight, your software crashed their system or they got rejected from a club or college. These nay-saying crusaders are everywhere, and they show up again and again in online communities. More\u0026hellip; FIR Interview upcoming on Altimeter Group\u0026rsquo;s Social Business Readiness survey by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nYour FIR co-hosts are planning an interview for next week with Altimeter Group‘s Jeremiah Owyang about the release of a new study, \u0026ldquo;Social Business Readiness,\u0026rdquo; released today – the presentation is embedded below.\nIn preparation for the interview, we’re sharing some of the study’s highlights in this post. Let us know in comments here or in the FIR Friendfeed room if there are any questions you’d like us to ask Jeremiah.\nSocial Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang Companies are at various stages of integrating social media into their business processes. More\u0026hellip; FIR Interview: Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nWe first spoke with Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, in an FIR interview on January 12, 2007, not too long after Dell’s first blog was launched.\nWe spoke with Lionel again to find out how the blog and the company’s overall social media approach has evolved in the intervening 4½ years. The interview was conducted using a Google+ Hangout. An audio version is available.\nGet this podcast:\nDownload the MP4 (video) file (106Mb, 37:51) Download the MP3 (audio) file More\u0026hellip; What\u0026rsquo;s the R.O.I.? A Framework for Social Analytics by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\n“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” - Albert Einstein\nSay hello to my little friends, R.O. \u0026amp; I.\nYes. Those three letters have become the bane of an entire new media industry. However, avoidance is not the answer.\nWhile the question of “what’s the R.O.I. of social media” is difficult to answer, it is necessary as it forces us to dig deeper. The result is maturity.\nThis conversation is important as you are expected to answer it not just today, but and also over time. More\u0026hellip; The State of Ethics in Public Relations by Keith Trivitt of Public Relations Society of America\nTo commemorate PRSA Ethics Month, PRSA is publishing a monthlong series of posts on important ethics issues facing the public relations profession. PRSA will host a Tweet chat at 3 p.m. EDT Sept. 6 to discuss the state of ethics in PR.\nFacebook, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and other new technologies have taken the communication industry by storm in the past five years, rapidly revolutionizing the way that public relations, advertising and marketing professionals communicate with their publics. More\u0026hellip; Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011 by Philip Sheldrake of Meanwhile\nSalesforce.com\u0026rsquo;s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week\u0026rsquo;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!)\nThe theme for this year\u0026rsquo;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.]\nDreamforce 2011 presentation – More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/09/socializing-the-enterprise-are-you/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I\u0026rsquo;m doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I\u0026rsquo;m attending the \u003ca href=\"http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF11/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDreamforce\u003c/a\u003e\n conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDreamforce 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 \u0026ldquo;awesome\u0026rdquo; by the American delegates.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSalesforce.com advocates \u003ca href=\"http://www.salesforce.com/solutions/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea three-step approach\u003c/a\u003e\n to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Socializing the enterprise. Are you?"},{"content":"Salesforce.com\u0026rsquo;s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week\u0026rsquo;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!)\nThe theme for this year\u0026rsquo;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.]\nDreamforce 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.\nWhen 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\u0026rsquo;t appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking.\nMy book\u0026rsquo;s main thrusts inform the main theme of my presentation as you might expect, and I have been particular in emphasising that \u0026lsquo;socializing the enterprise\u0026rsquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t easy and cannot be achieved simply by buying in some tools and some in-house skills. It demands a top-down review of the entire structure and culture of the organisation; its policies and processes; its human, information and organizational assets.\nToday\u0026rsquo;s typical organization has been shaped by 20th Century technologies, media, and appreciation for strategy development and execution. But all three of these are transformed beyond recognition in 2011. We\u0026rsquo;ve heard this week how companies such as Salesforce.com, Facebook and Google have grown up with social \u0026lsquo;built-in\u0026rsquo;, but also how longer-established companies like Burberry, Coca-Cola, Kelly Services, Avon and Verizon are making the transition.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve embedded my presentation above. My stacks are increasingly text-light as I seek to encourage conversation over presentation, but if you\u0026rsquo;d like me to add more context please just get in touch.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve met some fantastic people this week and I thank Salesforce.com for putting us all under one (very big) roof. To quote the one word I\u0026rsquo;ve heard uttered most often from the North American delegates here this week\u0026hellip; AWESOME.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/09/influence-socializing-the-enterprise--my-presentation-at-dreamforce-2011/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSalesforce.com\u0026rsquo;s CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week\u0026rsquo;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!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe theme for this year\u0026rsquo;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.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/dreamforce-2011-presentation-sheldrake\" title=\"Dreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDreamforce 2011 presentation – Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/9101447\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"550\" height=\"460\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentations\u003c/a\u003e\n from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere can be no doubt that \u003ca href=\"http://www.salesforce.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSalesforce.com\u003c/a\u003e\n 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen I \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/04/radian6-and-the-insights-platform-%E2%80%93-getting-semantic/\"\u003espoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference\u003c/a\u003e\n in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn\u0026rsquo;t appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011"},{"content":"The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media\u0026hellip; the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.\nFirst up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; 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.\u0026rdquo; Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don\u0026rsquo;t use .\nI think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form\u0026hellip; Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren\u0026rsquo;t. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased\u0026hellip; How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?\nThe primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can\u0026rsquo;t blame social media or society\u0026rsquo;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 \u0026ldquo;Twitter riot\u0026rdquo; , but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots.\nIn his famous 1967 polemic \u0026ldquo;The Medium is the Massage\u0026rdquo;, Marshall McLuhan asserts: \u0026ldquo;All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.\u0026rdquo;\nBeginning an empirical analysis we would have to distinguish between variables (eg, how fast is the car going?) and parameters (eg, how far is the accelerator pedal pressed down?). Many pundits find themselves debating the variables whereas I think we\u0026rsquo;re looking here at a media with substantially different parametric characteristics.\nAnd when we do some systems thinking for these riots and similar phenomena I think we\u0026rsquo;ll find that the relationship between the parameters (eg, how are we communicating?) with the variables (eg, how quickly does this thing escalate?) will demonstrate that the system is out of kilter with our historic norms. And when this happens the best course of action is rarely to try and roll back the changes manifest – they are manifest and there is no going back - but to adjust other parameters accordingly. Engineers refer to this as feedback control.\nWhat does that mean exactly if we\u0026rsquo;re to dampen the rate at which future riots might escalate? Well, I\u0026rsquo;d start by making sure the counter-positions, the reasons not to riot, are communicated via precisely the same media, living up to the very definition of Grunig\u0026rsquo;s fourth model of public relations in trying to affect mutual understanding. And then I\u0026rsquo;d seek to sensitise the operations of emergency services to this new media.\nI\u0026rsquo;d refer to this as keeping abreast of the Six Influence Flows, and this is precisely the journey some of our best companies have embarked upon in communicating with their stakeholders. We\u0026rsquo;ve seen some members of the public initiate positive and beneficial responses to the riots via social media, as described in some of the posts below. It\u0026rsquo;s now time for the government to do the same.\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\n___\nPlease note, this Conversation Roundup is written in my own capacity. I am not a spokesperson for the CIPR.\n#Londonriots – Fuelled By Mobile, Not Social Media by Julio Romo of twofourseven\nSocial media sites Facebook and twitter were blamed today by Government and Metropolitan Police spokespeople for fanning the UK #Londonriots and looting over the weekend. Fingers were pointed at these social networking sites for the fact that they enable people to send out calls for people to gather together.The disturbances happened after the fatal shooting of Tottenham father of four Mark Duggan who was allegedly killed in a minicab on Thursday by police firearm officers. Blaming these sites is just placing a distraction for the real reasons for the unlawful behaviour that took place, highlighting a lack of understanding or will to understand of how people use social media today. More\u0026hellip; Don’t blame Twitter or Facebook for London riots by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nApparently, as I return from holiday, “mindless thugs” have overtaken London, setting fire to large parts of Croydon, rioting in Tottenham, upturning Ealing and running amok in Enfield. That’s to say nothing of the violence in Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool overnight. The police seem helpless, politicians are rushing back from their holidays and the world looks on open-mouthed. In the midst of all the chaos, Twitter and Facebook are being blamed for providing the rioters with the ability to organise themselves and be one-step ahead of the police. More\u0026hellip; The Social Media Scapegoat - Why Twitter Isn\u0026rsquo;t To Blame for Riots! by Chris Date of Rave Communications Ltd.\nNone of us can fail to have been moved by what we have seen unfold over the past few days. The age of rolling news makes it easy for us to become immersed in the mayhem that has spread across UK cities - and I for one was moved to tears at hearing the Reeves family speak on Sky News last night about seeing their family business of five generations go up in flames in Croydon.\nIt must surely be clear to most that events over the last two nights have had little or nothing to do with Mark Duggan. Whether these scenes are indicative of a long term breakdown in the moral fabric of society, caused by a lack of respect for authority and property that has been bubbling under for some time, is a debate for elsewhere. More\u0026hellip; 8 flexible and creative thinking tips for responding to ‘the riots’ by Andy Green of andygreencreativity\nThe riots across the UK have shown the worst – and the best of people.\nThe film of a young man being callously mugged on the street while being injured can make you despair of humanity.\nYet, the widespread responses of people positively demonstrating their reaction to mindless destruction can equally warm your heart – that maybe all is not lost with humankind.\nHere are eight flexible thinking tips to help you in guiding your thoughts in response to ‘the riots’: More\u0026hellip; Banning social media for riots: ‘perilous’ and ‘stupid’ by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nFollowing the intense rioting in London this week, social media and online services are now in the firing line from politicians. There have been fresh calls for Twitter and RIM’s BBM service to be suspended or blocked, as both have both been used to help organise and coordinate riot activities.\nWe’ve already highlighted this earlier in the week, but with fresh calls today from David Cameron and the Home Security for bans it seems worth bringing up again.\nCameron has stated today “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.” More\u0026hellip; Is it simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don\u0026rsquo;t use? by Mark Pack of MHP Communications\nIn amongst the many causes and contributing factors to this week\u0026rsquo;s riots, technology certainly takes its place. My Engine colleague Jon Akwue has accurately pointed out how it was Blackberry Messenger far more than the headline-favourite son Twitter which was involved, and the use of technology was by no means all for the bad – witness the Twitter-organised cleanup operations for example.\nYet from some commentators and MPs there were immediate demands to suspend, curtail or otherwise regulate social networks. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/08/the-twitter-blackberry-facebook-riots/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media\u0026hellip; the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst up, \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14488055\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea statement from the Prime Minister\u003c/a\u003e\n in the House of Commons yesterday: \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; 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.\u0026rdquo; Conversationalist \u003ca href=\"http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/mark.pack/is-it-simply-a-question-of-politicians-and-pundits-always-trying-to-ban-technologies-they-dont\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don\u0026rsquo;t use\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form\u0026hellip; Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren\u0026rsquo;t. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased\u0026hellip; How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can\u0026rsquo;t blame social media or society\u0026rsquo;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 \u003ca href=\"http://themediablog.typepad.com/the-media-blog/2011/08/daily-mail-tottenham-violence-twitter.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewhen the Daily Mail labels one photograph of a London bus ablaze \u0026ldquo;Twitter riot\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n, but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s how The Independent reports on this week\u0026rsquo;s Appeal Court decision to uphold the High Court\u0026rsquo;s decision that customers of media monitoring services – which provide digests of news from websites run by newspapers – need licences from the publications involved, in order to avoid breaching their copyright.\nAnd as much as this might surprise anyone who thought they knew that the Web is made up of web pages with unique addresses that anyone can forward, share, bookmark, embed and access – I\u0026rsquo;m afraid you\u0026rsquo;re wrong. In fact, I may have broken UK law by including the link to The Independent article without having bought a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA ).\n[Note to non-UK resident readers: This situation is acutely embarrassing for us Brits and I\u0026rsquo;d appreciate it if you kept this quiet. After all, our current coalition government really wants the rest of the world to think we \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; digital.]\nYou see the trouble is the Court\u0026rsquo;s are dealing with horse and cart in the age of the automobile. The government commissioned May 2011 review of the state of UK intellectual property law, the Hargreave\u0026rsquo;s report , concludes that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth. An unequivocal conclusion if ever there was one.\nThe report urges government to ensure that in future, policy on Intellectual Property issues is constructed on the basis of evidence, rather than weight of lobbying.\nIn the original High Court decision, now upheld by the Appeal Court, Justice Proudman writes:\n\u0026ldquo;The Publishers have arrangements or understandings with certain free media monitoring services such as Google News and Google Alerts whereby those services are currently licensed or otherwise permitted. It would apparently be open to the End Users to use such free services, or indeed a general search engine, instead of a paid media monitoring service without (currently at any rate) encountering opposition from the Publishers. That is so even though the End Users may be using such services for their own commercial purposes. The WEUL [Web End-User License] only applies to customers of a commercial media monitoring service.\u0026rdquo;\nThe case goes forward to the Copyright Tribunal this September. I would like the Tribunal to review this distinction between \u0026ldquo;commercial media monitoring service\u0026rdquo; and Google. Is Google commercial? Of course; it may not charge per search but it definitely monetizes the activity very profitably in many other ways. And does Google monitor media? Erm, I think that\u0026rsquo;s quite possibly a YES!\nSo have I broken the law here? Well it\u0026rsquo;s for the Tribunal to decide whether any and every UK commercial entity needs an NLA license in order to share a link to an NLA member\u0026rsquo;s web page, as I have done here and the logical conclusion I believe if the NLA\u0026rsquo;s case is interpreted fully. And then I guess we\u0026rsquo;d have to decide whether I\u0026rsquo;m a commercial entity. I\u0026rsquo;m writing at home at my kitchen table in my own capacity. But isn\u0026rsquo;t my motivation for writing such content as The Roundup commercial in the long run?\nSee you in court.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/07/dont-forward-that-could-be-illegal/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/appeal-court-backs-newspaper-copyright-ruling-2326867.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s how The Independent reports\u003c/a\u003e\n on this week\u0026rsquo;s Appeal Court decision to uphold the High Court\u0026rsquo;s decision that customers of media monitoring services – which provide digests of news from websites run by newspapers – need licences from the publications involved, in order to avoid breaching their copyright.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd as much as this might surprise anyone who thought they knew that the Web is made up of web pages with unique addresses that anyone can forward, share, bookmark, embed and access – I\u0026rsquo;m afraid you\u0026rsquo;re wrong. In fact, I may have broken UK law by including the link to The Independent article without having bought a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (\u003ca href=\"http://www.nla.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNLA\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Note to non-UK resident readers: This situation is acutely embarrassing for us Brits and I\u0026rsquo;d appreciate it if you kept this quiet. After all, our current coalition government really wants the rest of the world to think we \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; digital.]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou see the trouble is the Court\u0026rsquo;s are dealing with horse and cart in the age of the automobile. The government commissioned May 2011 review of the state of UK intellectual property law, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHargreave\u0026rsquo;s report\u003c/a\u003e\n, concludes that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth. An unequivocal conclusion if ever there was one.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Don't forward. That could be illegal."},{"content":"The Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in BRIC – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and 771 million mobile phone subscriptions , no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.)\nThe Indian economy The OECD’s June 2011 review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment:\nThe Indian economy has been catching up quickly in the past two decades, and weathered the global recession well, with only a limited and short-lived slowdown. In just over 11 years, income per capita has doubled. Wide-ranging reforms and increased investment have lifted potential growth to almost 9%, the highest in Indian history, helped by improvements in infrastructure. Inclusive growth of 10% per year is feasible given that demographic developments are set to push up saving, but will only be achieved if the administrative and regulatory barriers facing companies are reduced.\nCompared to Western European markets where 2% annual GDP growth is considered outstanding, India is obviously going through something special and ranks second only to China. And the OECD review makes the observation that in contrast to many emerging economies, where growth is largely export led, Indian growth has been driven by domestic demand.\nHowever, some pundits warn that India’s continued success cannot continue unabated simply by dint of population. Take Arminio Fraga for example, a guy who knows a bit about booming economies in highly populated countries following his years as President of Brazil’s Central Bank. In a Business Week interview recently, Dr. Fraga commented:\n… for the life of me I can’t see why having more people in India is a good thing. Some population growth can be helpful in some situations. Having a large population that can be educated – that can save and work hard – is possibly a plus, but it’s also a real managerial challenge.\nMarketing According to the FT in January this year, Facebook accounts for 36% of all Indian social media traffic (and 5.3% of all Web traffic), just over twice that of the former leader, Google Orkut. And the top 10 Indian Facebook pages (by fans numbering one to three million) include MTV, mobile network operators Tata Docomo and Vodafone, the Mumbai cricket team, Kingfisher Airline and Axe (the men’s deodorant).\nAccording to Brand Republic , Warc forecasts that India will be the fastest growing advertising market in 2011 of the twelve major markets it tracks, with growth of 18% this year, and about the same again next year. This compares to an average of 5.5% this year, with the next BRIC market being Russia with 17% growth in 2011.\nNo meeting at the Meetup My colleague Jay and I decided to get social in Mumbai with the people who are supposed to ‘get’ social. After a good trawl around the social Web we alighted upon a Meetup group called Mumbai Marketing and, with amazingly good timing, the third meetup was scheduled for this past Tuesday. However, after an hour in traffic, things didn’t turn out to be quite so social. Of the eleven registrants for the meetup, no one else turned up. Not even the organiser. Then an hour’s traffic weaving back to the hotel.\nSocial media controversy The Indian government appears determined to track its citizens’ use of the social Web and other communications media, paying particular attention to Blackberry devices , Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Skype . Perhaps this is motivated by the tensions with Pakistan (there were as yet unattributed terrorist attacks in Mumbai earlier this month), or perhaps by a governing establishment simply feeling ill at ease with the ability of the electorate to coalesce and share opinions and content anonymously.\nIronically, in reciprocation, it appears the public would like more visibility over the actions of government officials and other public sector employees in light of the frequent charges of corruption. Indeed, the police pulled our driver over one morning on apparently vexatious grounds only to be appeased by rupees, and a colleague had to pay an unforeseen charge, in cash for some reason, to customs officials on bringing some filming equipment with him. The headline news throughout the week has been the poor state of Mumbai’s roads and questions about where the money is going.\nInfo tech The New Statesman reported on various facets of the country this month, including this article on the growth in information technology capabilities . There is no doubt that India has risen sharply to be a global info tech hub.\nThe article quotes Angela Saini, author of Geek Nation: How Indian Science Is Taking Over the World , and whilst it reports that Saini’s overall assessment is positive, she believes that India isn’t so good at technological innovation. Specifically:\nShe concludes that the big Indian IT firms “capitalised on India’s cheap and educated labour force to do workaday maintenance for western customers. Even now, thousands of software engineers are stuck in drone-like jobs, and this has made the industry slow at inventing products.”\nThe article evidences this claim by comparing the rate of patent filing of India’s IBM, Infosys, with IBM itself – 300 by Infosys over four and a half years versus 4,000 per annum by IBM.\nIn conclusion Being in Mumbai for just one week has proved exhausting. Meetings can take place any time – 8am, 9pm, and Saturdays. The pace is relentless. The enthusiasm infectious. The people lovely. The potential enormous. So we’ll be back regularly.\nThanks to everyone who made us feel so welcome. And you never know, perhaps we’ll arrange the Meetup next time we’re in town.\n[originally posted to the Meanwhile blog ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/07/meanwhile-in-mumbai/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBRIC\u003c/a\u003e\n – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and \u003ca href=\"http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=463105\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e771 million mobile phone subscriptions\u003c/a\u003e\n, no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-indian-economy\"\u003eThe Indian economy\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/economics/oecd-economic-surveys-india-2011_eco_surveys-ind-2011-en\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOECD’s June 2011\u003c/a\u003e\n review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Meanwhile in Mumbai"},{"content":"[caption id=\u0026quot;\u0026quot; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Image via Wikipedia\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\nIn an endeavour to improve customer satisfaction, Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín has taken the decision this week to bring call centres back from India to the UK.\nActually, \u0026ldquo;to improve customer service\u0026rdquo; is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction.\nCall centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004).\nInterestingly, the FT reports that Santander UK\u0026rsquo;s move follows a diktat by the UK\u0026rsquo;s Financial Services Authority that banks publish complaint numbers for the first time in 2010, making Santander more visibly the most complained-about bank for the first half of the year, and second only to Barclays during the second half.\nI say \u0026ldquo;more visibly\u0026rdquo; because no doubt it was already quite visible to Santander UK\u0026rsquo;s customers. It follows then that few of them will have been telling friends and family members how delighted they were with the Santander UK service. Quite the opposite. And despite a traditional reluctance for British bank customers to change banks, no doubt this situation cannot have been good for business.\nThe FT article states that Ms Botín \u0026ldquo;made a point of stressing that investment was vital to improve customer service – implying that her predecessor had gone too far, too fast to cut costs.\u0026rdquo;\nIn The Business of Influence , I discuss the possibility of call centres becoming essentially a profit- rather than cost-centre; a critical membrane for creating more customer evangelists and for organisational learning. In moving marketing, public relations, customer service and all the influence processes from being influencer-centric to influence-centric, by focusing resources on the influenced (Santander\u0026rsquo;s existing customers) rather than prospects, Santander UK is more likely to achieve its objectives sooner than later. To its satisfaction. To the delight of its customers. To the delight of its shareholders.\nOn the basis that Ms. Botín appears to be on a journey to drive customer satisfaction rather than simply eliminate dissatisfaction, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to send her a free copy of my book. I wonder what she\u0026rsquo;ll make of it. I wonder in fact if Santander UK might make an awesome Influence Scorecard case study (the briefest of web searches indicates that the organisation has adopted the Balanced Scorecard to some degree).\nTime will tell, as indeed will Santander UK\u0026rsquo;s reputation.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/07/santander-uk-chief-executive-ana-botin-gets-a-free-copy-of-the-business-of-influence/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026quot;\u0026quot; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Image via Wikipedia\u0026rdquo;]\u003ca href=\"http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ana_Patricia_Bot%C3%ADn_en_el_Foro_Econ%C3%B3mico_Mundial.jpg\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Ana Patricia Botín, Member of the Board, Grupo\u0026hellip;\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/300px-Ana_Patricia_Bot%C3%ADn_en_el_Foro_Econ%C3%B3mico_Mundial.jpg\" title=\"Ana Patricia Botín, Member of the Board, Grupo...\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn an endeavour to improve customer satisfaction, \u003ca href=\"http://www.santander.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSantander UK\u003c/a\u003e\n Chief Executive Ana Botín has taken the decision this week to bring call centres back from India to the UK.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eActually, \u0026ldquo;to improve customer service\u0026rdquo; is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCall centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInterestingly, \u003ca href=\"http://mnwh.li/pwmlWd\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe FT reports\u003c/a\u003e\n that Santander UK\u0026rsquo;s move follows a diktat by the UK\u0026rsquo;s Financial Services Authority that banks publish complaint numbers for the first time in 2010, making Santander more visibly the most complained-about bank for the first half of the year, and second only to Barclays during the second half.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín gets a free copy of The Business of Influence"},{"content":"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.\nI 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\u0026rsquo;s found guilty, then you might say all\u0026rsquo;s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;all\u0026rsquo;s well and good\u0026rdquo; in that?\nThis trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.\nAnd yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying recently that \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo;. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, \u0026lsquo;perception is reality\u0026rsquo;. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here?\nPrior to the evolution of proper judicial process, hearsay ruled. Suspect witches were dunked, and were definitely witches if they survived – to be executed. Else innocent – albeit sadly dead! We\u0026rsquo;re witnessing a renaissance of rumour and hearsay, but perhaps only temporarily. The legal beagles need to adjust process as they did before.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve already seen the first juror jailed for talking to a defendant via Facebook, and perhaps those who govern such things now need a crash course in modern reputation issues. Should, for example, a defendant be seen and photographed and filmed in handcuffs if they are innocent at that juncture? Does that not only serve to send out the wrong signals? Should the courts publish the facts of high profile cases, as they exist and are known, to create a higher authoritative source of information than would otherwise be provided by the media? Should the public be admitted to the court room? Is the jury system still relevant or workable?\nIf, like me, you think this is a grave matter, perhaps you will think twice now before retweeting, \u0026rsquo;liking\u0026rsquo; or \u0026lsquo;plus one\u0026rsquo;ing\u0026rsquo; anything until at least checking the validity of the source. Else you are guilty of helping destroy this treasurable tenet.\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\nInform and Guide Customers with Crossmedia Content by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nToday\u0026rsquo;s technology-centric business success often hinges on the ability to inform and guide prospective customers who are entering the buying-cycle for complex products and services. That said, few marketers have mastered this essential skill \u0026ndash; informing and guiding via digital multimedia content \u0026ndash; in a meaningful way.\nThat said, eMarketer reports that findings from Focus Research indicate business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers are more likely to direct their attention to improving client understanding and retention this year than their business-to-business (B2B) counterparts, who are placing a higher emphasis on filling the sales pipeline. More\u0026hellip; Cannes Recap: PR Makes Strides But Ad Firms Still Take the Spotlight by Keith Trivitt of Public Relations Society of America\nFormer Hill \u0026amp; Knowlton U.S. Chairman MaryLee Sachs reports from the 2011 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:\nIt was a jam-packed week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and I’ve taken in as much as humanly possible, picking and choosing the most interesting speakers and topics to me. The best way to provide a round-up is to impart one key factoid, quote or provocation from each of the presentations I really enjoyed:\nBritish newspaper The Guardian sponsored a seminar with Dr. More\u0026hellip; Web 3.0 and The Internet of Things by Andrew Ross of Chartered Institute of Public Relations\nLast Thursday evening Philip Sheldrake headed up a Social Summer session which created and stirred up debate at CIPR towers.\nPhilip gave a whistle-stop tour of the web up to the era we now find ourselves in – Web 3.0 or, the semantic web. In a nutshell, we’re at a point in time where we are finding the Web itself understanding the meaning of all the content and participation currently at your fingertips, but you can check out his deck above for the specifics…\nOne of (the many!) tools Philip revealed was Rel Finder, this ‘extracts and visualizes relationships between objects in RDF data and makes these relationships interactively explorable.’ More\u0026hellip; Can you trust anyone online? by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nTweet Trust. It is fundamental to your private and your business life. Stop trusting your spouse and your marriage is doomed. Stop trusting your colleagues and your work-life is doomed. Stop trusting what you read online and…..? New research from the USA shows us that trust is in short supply these days. According to Gallup who conducted the study, it’s down to the way we feel because of the recession. But that’s just an excuse. The real reason for lack of trust is the internet itself. More\u0026hellip; small business pr: a big opportunity but one size never fits all by Becky McMichael of Ruder Finn\nWhen I pick up a shiny new top off the shop rail, nothing makes my heart sink faster than a \u0026ldquo;one size\u0026rdquo; label. Why? It never fits. You\u0026rsquo;re pretty much guaranteed either your boobs, your tummy or your bum will be mercilessly exposed by a garment designed to be OK for everyone but that usually provides a poor result. And it\u0026rsquo;s usually the one part you want to hide that ends up on show.\nI hadn\u0026rsquo;t intended to start with a shopping analogy but hey ho, I am short of time so let\u0026rsquo;s press on.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of work recently with small to medium sized businesses and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies just don\u0026rsquo;t get what they need. More\u0026hellip; Reputation Online set to close (mirror copy) by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nVikki Chowney has announced the closure of Reputation Online. The news follows an announcement by Centaur yesterday that Design Week and New Media Age would close their print editions from this week (both will continue online). That the Reputation Online site can’t cope with the traffic from people wanting to know what’s going on tells you everything that you need to know about the popularity of the community. We’ve mirrored Vikki’s post here about its closure. Please feel free to repost. More\u0026hellip; Reputation is everything as online closes by Owain Betts of OMB Communications\nIn our increasingly digital world it seems odd to be writing a post about the demise of an online publication that covers digital PR.\nVikki Chowney, editor of Reputation Online, has today revealed that the site is closing with immediate effect after a sudden reorgansation by owners Centaur. They are also ceasing publication of New Media Age in printed format, instead taking it exclusively online.\nI can understand taking NMA online. It makes perfect sense, although as a subscriber I’m yet to be officially told that I will no longer receive a printed copy in the post. More\u0026hellip; Lobbying MPs on the URL copyright tax by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nMeltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) has launched a lobbying campaign to raises awareness of the so-called URL copyright tax amongst MPs. Neville Hobson has the full story and a template letter.\nTo concisely re-cap: from early 2010, anyone copying and supplying UK newspaper web content to others for a fee (monitoring or press clippings agencies to PR agencies, for instance, and from those PR agencies to their clients) must acquire a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), a body that\u0026rsquo;s owned by the mainstream media. More\u0026hellip; Google+: its prospects and likely implications for PR by Mark Pack of MHP Communications\nWith a relatively low-key blog post, Google has announced details of its long-talked about new foray into social networking - Google+.\nGoogle\u0026rsquo;s hit rate with its new projects is fairly low. It knows that if it tries out enough new ideas, the occasional one will be the sort of success that more than makes up for the efforts which went into the flops. Even in social networks, there have been plenty of flops already - remember Google Sidewiki, Google Buzz or Google Wave to name but three?\nHowever, Google+ has three things going for it that make it look, at this early stage, more like a Chrome or an Android - something that is set to become a major success. More\u0026hellip; How data is transforming digital marketing by Philip Sheldrake of Meanwhile\nDigital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we\u0026rsquo;ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.\nThe pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.\nEvery one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – More\u0026hellip; 2011 is now half gone - 8 creativity tools to help you get the most out of the rest of 2011 by Andy Green of andygreencreativity\nWow! We are now over half way through 2011.\nNow is a great time to take stock of your plans – and crucially how you can make the most of the remaining six months to ensure 2011 is another great year in your life.\nHere are some great innovation and creativity tools – to ensure you make the most of your situation, talents and opportunities.\nFollow these 8 steps to transform the rest of your year.\nIf these ideas can help transform the remainder of 2011, just think what they can also do to help your work, next campaign, or boost your innovation and creativity skills. More\u0026hellip; Not just another monitoring and analytics tool – PeopleBrowsr launch by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nWhat the social media industry really doesn’t need at the moment is another monitoring tool.\nThe market is overcrowded (this wiki lists more than 200 products). Vendors dazzle prospects with data and features rather properly demonstrating their products rather than helping to educate. I\u0026rsquo;m generalising for effect but I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve been on the receiving end of countless cold calls.\nTonight a breath of fresh air blew through the streets of Soho in the name of PeopleBrowsr. It held its European launch at the Hospital Club in London. More\u0026hellip; TNT employees Social Media Guidelines: A great example of can-do attitude by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOver the past week, I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about the conflict between legal staff and communicators when if comes to real-time media. My post When lawyers stupidly get in the way of marketing kicked off the series followed by my video interview with Vivienne Storey Is social media worth the risk? A lawyer\u0026rsquo;s perspective.\nNext up is a terrific set of social media guidelines from TNT. Rather than saying \u0026ldquo;no,\u0026rdquo; the legal and HR staffs, communicators, and management of TNT have created an environment of \u0026ldquo;yes.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; FIR Interview: Bill Calder, Managing Editor, Intel Free Press by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nFIR co-host Shel Holtz explores how Intel is taking steps to become a media company in this interview with Intel Free Press managing editor Bill Calder.\nAccording to the About page on the site, \u0026ldquo;The Intel Free Press is a tech news beta from Intel Corporation, covering technology and innovation stories that are often overlooked or warrant more context and deeper reporting. The stories here are reported and produced by writers employed by the company with a focus on people, technology, events and topics relevant to Intel.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/07/guilty--the-cipr-friday-roundup/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI 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\u0026rsquo;s found guilty, then you might say all\u0026rsquo;s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;all\u0026rsquo;s well and good\u0026rdquo; in that?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying recently that \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo;. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, \u0026lsquo;perception is reality\u0026rsquo;. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today\u0026rsquo;s Social Media Conference. I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here\u0026rsquo;s my presentation.\nI know\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.\nAlways ready with a smart answer, he suggests I have two stacks in future\u0026hellip; one for the presentation, one for slideshare.\nIs there an app for that?\nThe Business of Influence – Measurement View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/social-media-measurement-and-the-influence-scorecard--hwz-social-media-conference/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just arrived in Zurich at \u003ca href=\"http://www.fh-hwz.ch/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHWZ\u003c/a\u003e\n (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today\u0026rsquo;s Social Media Conference. I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here\u0026rsquo;s my presentation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI know\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a bit text heavy in parts. \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/gabbicahane\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@gabbicahane\u003c/a\u003e\n has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference"},{"content":"Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.\nThe pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.\nEvery one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.\nBig data When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.\nWhat does this mean in everyday terms?\nWe collect the click paths of visitors’ interactions with our website today, but we can’t yet access the data describing their use of most brown and white goods. We can invite customers to share their location data with us via their mobile phones, but we can’t yet help them review their driving style (Fiat’s EcoDrive facility excepted) or their use of public transport. We can encourage consumers to reap the anticipated advantages of greener products and services, but we can’t identify the actual advantage they achieve and reflect it back at them. We can market a food product’s expected role in a balanced diet, but not the specific role it plays in a particular household’s diet.\nData will increasingly help marketers close the loop for customers, which will potentially lead to enhanced loyalty. Data will also help customers test marketers’ claims and debunk those shown up as false or exaggerated.\nThe Internet of Things This perspective on digital detritus is closely related to the ‘Internet of Things’. This term means exactly what it sounds like – a network of things not typically connected to the network at present. This includes for instance central heating, cars, lighting, power distribution, temperature and other environmental sensors, clothes and even fast-moving consumer goods packaging. These innovations are playing out right now.\nThe marketing ramifications of such an internet of things are manifold. With the potential to monitor every dishwashing machine remotely in real time, how might a company like Bosch Siemens design and market preventive maintenance benefits? How might that lay new foundations for a lifetime relationship with the customer? Using RFID tags to detect that a customer wearing clothes from Prada (and another wearing clothes from Primark) have just walked through the door, how might a retailer’s in-store marketing respond? And what impact might this information have on your pricing strategy?\nThe meaning of data If Web 1.0 is about documents and e-commerce and Web 2.0 is about social community and user-generated content, then Web 3.0 revolves around the web itself understanding the meaning of community participation and content. This is the semantic web.\nWhen you see the word orange online, for example, the computers that underpin the pre-semantic web simply see six alphanumeric characters in a row. They’re also very good at spotting when the same six characters appear in a row elsewhere. The semantic web, on the other hand, knows orange to be a colour, a fruit and a mobile telecommunications brand; but not only that, the semantic web knows which of these three meanings is intended in each and every instance, just as humans do.\nWikipedia is undergoing a semantic web transformation right now, an initiative known as DBpedia. The BBC and the UK government are already there with the bbc.co.uk and data.gov.uk websites, as is Tesco with some of its sites. Tests reveal that Google has already tweaked its PageRank algorithms to boost the rankings of semantically marked-up content over non-semantic content, constituting one serious reason for marketers to understand what is going on here.\nFascinating insight is achievable with today’s social web analytics services, particularly those that move beyond keyword analysis and try to overlay a semantic interpretation of the content they discover. Yet this overlay, typically dependent on algorithms developed from a field of computer science and linguistics known as natural language processing, does not achieve the analytical or computational power of a natively semantic Web. If you’re excited by your social analytics service to date, all I can say is that we’ve only just scratched the surface, and ‘getting more semantic’ appears to be an inevitable trend.\nAwesome analytics advantage Social analytics, website analytics, CRM analytics, retail analytics and analytics related to the internet of things are most often treated as silos. The first marketers to tie them together, to begin to connect the data records in each database relating to the same stakeholder, will have an awesome advantage.\nWill your organisation be one of them? Just as importantly, how will your analytics affect social norms? Will you impress your stakeholders by championing their ‘right’ to own ‘their’ data? Will you risk scaring stakeholders with your Orwellian powers, or will you take this opportunity to champion new approaches to stakeholder relationships?\nHowever you look at it, one unquestionable trend is increased complexity. For the next few years, just knowing the right questions may well put you ahead of the pack.\nThis post is an edited extract from my chapter on digital marketing for The Marketing Century, published by Wiley to mark the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The book is available from the CIM and all good book shops.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/how-data-is-transforming-digital-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eDigital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"big-data\"\u003eBig data\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does this mean in everyday terms?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How data is transforming digital marketing"},{"content":" The very nice people at Global Dawn invited me in a couple of weeks back to meet the team and speak about some of the stuff covered in The Business of Influence . They were particularly drawn to the aspects of measurement / ROI / business performance management, and the convergence of the traditional influence-related silos come to that.\nI was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series.\nhttp://youtu.be/siWreSm48 _Y\nThanks to Ema Linaker for making this happen.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/an-invitation-from-global-dawn/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.globaldawn.co\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Global Dawn logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/global-dawn-logo.jpg\" title=\"Global Dawn logo\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe very nice people at \u003ca href=\"http://www.globaldawn.co\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGlobal Dawn\u003c/a\u003e\n invited me in a couple of weeks back to meet the team and speak about some of the stuff covered in \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n. They were particularly drawn to the aspects of measurement / ROI / business performance management, and the convergence of the traditional influence-related silos come to that.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An invitation from Global Dawn"},{"content":"I posted about the Profiting from the New Web conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too.\nThanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I\u0026rsquo;m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we\u0026rsquo;ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.\nhttp://youtu.be/RQHQK594w7c ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/profiting-from-the-new-web--the-video/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/05/the-web-this-decade-and-what-it-means-for-your-organisation/\"\u003eposted\u003c/a\u003e\n about the \u003ca href=\"http://newweb.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eProfiting from the New Web\u003c/a\u003e\n conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I\u0026rsquo;m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we\u0026rsquo;ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Profiting from the New Web – the video"},{"content":"You\u0026rsquo;ll know that consumer facing organisations are investing shed loads in social media. Right? But how intelligent is this investment? Are they even getting the basics right?\nThinking or just acting? This is the number one differentiator in my book between the success stories and the also-rans. There are those who truly \u0026rsquo;think\u0026rsquo; social. They have reviewed operations from the ground up in light of the age of social media. Every aspect of business is reviewed systematically through the lens of social media, and strategy is developed on this basis. And whilst they are to be celebrated, this post is about one company that has visibly #failed in my eyes in recent weeks.\nBT\u0026rsquo;s woeful social inadequacy [caption id=\u0026quot;\u0026quot; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;200\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Image via Wikipedia\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\nBT is the UK\u0026rsquo;s number 1 Internet Service Provider, yet a May 2011 upgrade to the firmware of its customers\u0026rsquo; home routers left Linux users unable to connect to it.\nAnd in case you didn\u0026rsquo;t know, Android, the world\u0026rsquo;s fastest growing operating system for Smartphones, is based on Linux. So BT does not currently provide me Internet service for my Android phone, leaving me and other customers in my position having to use the more expensive 3G data networks than home broadband. Disgraceful.\nBut this isn\u0026rsquo;t a blog about ISPs. This is a blog about social media and customer relationships and business performance. Enter BT\u0026rsquo;s support forum (at http://community.bt.com ).\nThe specific post about this technical fault runs to 20 pages already, and was going nowhere fast. No resolution from BT. So I took to Twitter and moaned a bit, and ended up in conversation with Dinah Greek, a journalist for ComputerActive , one of the UK\u0026rsquo;s most popular computer and Internet related consumer publications. To its credit, BT was also monitoring Twitter (and I had helpfully hashtagged #BT and the name of its router #homehub). To its discredit, all @btcare could do was point me to the 20-page thread where no help from BT was forthcoming. And then go silent.\nAnd this is where it gets completely bonkers. If I\u0026rsquo;m being kind, it\u0026rsquo;s where one gets taken back in time to a pre-social age where support forums were the be-all and end-all of interacting with customers online.\nYou see I posted my frustrations to the support community, thanked Dinah for helping us resolve this problem and invited readers of the thread to get in touch with her. I provided her email address as she had invited me to do via a public Twitter exchange.\nThe next thing I know, that part of my contribution is deleted by an admin, and I was furious. Another member of the forum pointed out the deletion, and then guess what?\u0026hellip; the admin deleted that too!! Unbelievable. I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen anything like this since the pre-social dark ages. In another post to the thread, I then pointed the BT admins to the Tweet in which Dinah had given me permission to publish her email address to the forum, and this post got deleted too. Double gobsmackers Batman.\nI then receive an email pointing me to the \u0026ldquo;private messages\u0026rdquo; left for me by the community\u0026rsquo;s admin. Here\u0026rsquo;s the main parts of these messages:\nHi psheld,\nI wanted to let you know that I have edited your recent post in the thread about the Ubuntu [Linux] isssue. The elements I have removed break section 7.1e of our Terms of Use:\n7.1 You agree not to use the Site (or any part of it) to:\ne) solicit participation in public discussion, debate, comment or activity outside this Site;\n\u0026hellip;\nI also want to let you know that discussion of moderator actions is also not allowed on our boards as perm term 6.3h -\nh) Discussions of moderator actions on the boards. If you need to comment on a moderator action, please private message any administrator/moderator;\n\u0026hellip;\nI know this is a frustrating issue for you, but we are aware and working towards implementing a fix. Any updates regarding timescales for this will be posted on the thread.\nYou are welcome to post in the community, but please bear in mind the terms and guidelines for any future posts.\nThanks for your help with this. Kerry\nSo social media BT-style requires that one not solicit public discussion or debate or activity beyond BT\u0026rsquo;s website. And you\u0026rsquo;re not allowed to discuss BT\u0026rsquo;s partipation in this conversation either. Wow, sounds like one of those repressive regimes we\u0026rsquo;re seeing so much of on the news of late (without wishing to be flippant about what such regimes must be like).\nHow long will BT\u0026rsquo;s customers put up with this behaviour? I for one have decided not to participate on this community ever again (apart from one last cheeky post linking here, until it\u0026rsquo;s deleted that is), and to change my ISP as soon as my current contract expires.\nSo rather than culture great customer relations, BT\u0026rsquo;s social media policy has had quite the opposite effect. Well done.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/bts-social-failure-drives-customers-away/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eYou\u0026rsquo;ll know that consumer facing organisations are investing shed loads in social media. Right? But how intelligent is this investment? Are they even getting the basics right?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"thinking-or-just-acting\"\u003eThinking or just acting?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the number one differentiator in my book between the success stories and the also-rans. There are those who truly \u0026rsquo;think\u0026rsquo; social. They have reviewed operations from the ground up in light of the age of social media. Every aspect of business is reviewed systematically through the lens of social media, and strategy is developed on this basis. And whilst they are to be celebrated, this post is about one company that has visibly #failed in my eyes in recent weeks.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"bts-woeful-social-inadequacy\"\u003eBT\u0026rsquo;s woeful social inadequacy\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026quot;\u0026quot; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;200\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Image via Wikipedia\u0026rdquo;]\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BT_logo.svg\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"BT Ireland logo (2005 - Present)\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/200px-BT_logo.svg.png\" title=\"BT Ireland logo (2005 - Present)\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.bt.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBT\u003c/a\u003e\n is the UK\u0026rsquo;s number 1 Internet Service Provider, yet a May 2011 upgrade to the firmware of its customers\u0026rsquo; home routers left Linux users unable to connect to it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd in case you didn\u0026rsquo;t know, Android, the world\u0026rsquo;s fastest growing operating system for Smartphones, is based on Linux. So BT does not currently provide me Internet service for my Android phone, leaving me and other customers in my position having to use the more expensive 3G data networks than home broadband. Disgraceful.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut this isn\u0026rsquo;t a blog about ISPs. This is a blog about social media and customer relationships and business performance. Enter BT\u0026rsquo;s support forum (at \u003ca href=\"http://community.bt.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://community.bt.com\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"BT's social failure drives customers away"},{"content":"The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone\u0026rsquo;s lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. Apart from that, it works just fine!\nThis summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC\u0026rsquo;s top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another.\nWhy? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps:\n\u0026ldquo;Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…\u0026rdquo;\nWhat does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment.\nI believe (correct me if I\u0026rsquo;m wrong) that AMEC delegates await a sort of formula that will determine the ROI for both these executions identically. Yet the \u0026ldquo;returns\u0026rdquo; on their respective investments will be quite different because the two organisations are different. They have different missions, visions, values and objectives. Their priorities will differ, and so therefore will their portfolio of investments in all kinds of assets. And so the specific role public relations plays will be different, and so therefore its contribution to the organisation\u0026rsquo;s success.\nWhat do I recommend?\nWell, running organisations is hard work – performance management (including measurement) is an exhausting discipline. There are no shortcuts or easy wins. By definition, public relations permeates every aspect of organisational life, and we should acknowledge this intertwining in seeking to ascertain the potential of public relations and in assessing the actual benefits, rather than pursue this work in disciplinary isolation.\nThe Influence Scorecard approach attempts just this, working into the Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard – the dominant framework for business performance management.\nFor more reading on this topic, I recommend Katie Delahaye Paine\u0026rsquo;s roundup of this month\u0026rsquo;s AMEC summit , and David Phillip\u0026rsquo;s post: Can PR use ROI as a form of measurement? Its harder than you think .\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\nThe 9Cs of social media user types - which ones are you? by Simon Sanders of Lansons Communications\nConsider two men called Brian. First of all ‘Brian’ (no surname). In his infamous Open Letter to all of Advertising and Marketing he noted that if he likes a sausage ad, he might just buy the sausages. But that’s where his engagement ends. Where, he queried, did you get the idea that I might want to create and upload a video, draw a picture, nominate a friend or, in short, participate in your marketing? The letter is almost certainly fictional, an industry in-joke, but it makes its point to anyone planning social strategies. More\u0026hellip; Focus your business in 140 characters by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nI spent a frustrating fifteen minutes today trawling around a company’s website to try and find a succinct description of them. Googling them didn’t help a bit – every description I did encounter around the web actually didn’t say what they do in a way I can use.\nWhy is is that so many companies do a really terrible job at making available a short and clear description that, at a glance, lets you understand their business and makes it easy for you to repeat their description with a quick copy and paste and little editing or rewriting? It’s as if everything you read was written by a committee and has a sales or marketing spin behind it. More\u0026hellip; Transmedia Lenses by Steve Sponder of Lawton Communications Group\nConversations about Transmedia have been very healthy recently, with both Brain Clark\u0026rsquo;s (@gmdclark) \u0026lsquo;Reclaiming Transmedia Storytelling\u0026rsquo; post and Brooke Thompson\u0026rsquo;s (@imbri) \u0026lsquo;Transmedia is killing Hollywood will kill Transmedia\u0026rsquo; post generating thought provoking discussion in the form of hundreds of comments. Most of the transmediarati (did I just coin that? :) were present including @imbri @gmdclark @mikemonello @vipsteve @lanceweiler @robpratten @goonth @garyphayes and @4dfiction\nThese guys really know their stuff with many of them behind some of the most progressive entertainment and digital marketing projects over the last decade. More\u0026hellip; The Twitter Paradox by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nThere’s an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Twitter is a paradox that redefines that old saying to, “If it’s broke, don’t fix it, because it works.”\nFor all intents and purposes, Twitter shouldn’t work yet 200 million people (and bots) have created accounts on in the thriving information egosystem. New no longer break, it Tweets. Celebrities use it daily to connect directly with fans and also augment their income streams. More\u0026hellip; AMEC European Summit - what happens now? by Richard Andrews of University of Chichester\nAfter a hectic week at the office, I have finally found the time to look back at some of the news coming out of the AMEC European Summit, recently finished in Lisbon and said to be the follow-up to the Barcelona Principles agreed last year.\nArun Sudhaman from The Holmes Report provides an overview of what the PR measurement industry has agreed, but the Dummy Spit blog questions how representative it was.\nSo what happens next? There was strong agreement from the summit with the need for common ROI definitions, and for the industry to become more specific beyond the Barcelona Principles. More\u0026hellip; Owning awareness vs just renting it by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nHow do you generate awareness for your business or your ideas?\nDo you rent awareness?\nRenting awareness involves paying money to reach somebody else\u0026rsquo;s audience. There are many ways to pay for awareness such as:\nGoogle AdWords and other search engine ad schemes where you rent keyword and phrase result placement. Banner ads which you rent on a per impression basis. Content syndication services such as online news release distribution that you buy on a one-off basis. Renting tradeshow booth space for a few days. More\u0026hellip; Social Media @ Work premieres June 17 by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nIn March, I interviewed David Ferrabee, Managing Director of change management consultancy Able and How, and Robin Block, Director of Red Sky Vision, in an FIR Interview podcast about an innovative new video the pair were working on that addresses a disconnect they see between how immersed and digitally-connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered.\nThe video includes hours of interviews with insights from communicators like Richard Dennison and journalists like Helen Dunne (I was also one of those interviewed). More\u0026hellip; The dark side of Groupon by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nGroupon, a U.S. \u0026ldquo;deal of the day\u0026rdquo; site that provides coupons to consumers for local businesses is getting tons of buzz, the vast majority very positive. The company is growing very fast – revenues were $713 million in 2010, up from $30 million in 2009 and early this month they announced plans to raise money in a Groupon public stock listing.\nWith all the hype, I wanted to provide some observations on the dark sides of Groupon for potential advertisers, customers, and investors to consider.\nWhat is Groupon?\nAccording to the site: More\u0026hellip; Social media strategic, but no social media strategy - report by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nA recent HBR / SAS survey of how organisations are using social media is worth reading. Its analysis is biased towards SAS\u0026rsquo;s interests in analytics and monitoring, but the data is interesting in itself.\nFor example:\n75% of companies said that they don\u0026rsquo;t know where their customers are talking about them - they\u0026rsquo;re missing both the advocates and the detractors; 79% said they are using (58%) or planning to use (21%) social media, yet only 1/3 of those had a social media strategy in place; 42% said social media is integral to their overall goals and strategies; More\u0026hellip; The Hashtag Economy by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nHashtags are to the social web what emoticons were to Web 1.0 and TXTing. While both are forms of expression and sentiment, there is one subtle, but vital difference. Hashtags are not only part of online culture, they are defining a new era of communication on the Web and IRL (in real life). What started out as a way to index conversations in Twitter has now substantially altered how people convey, relay and discover information in and out of the popular nichework. In social media, “x” More\u0026hellip; Keep taking the tablets – Who is using the iPad and who isn’t by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nFor a while now we’ve known that media tablets are the latest talked about product. As with any new piece of technology, the first adopters make a lot of noise, and often work in agencies! However, we now have more tangible data available for us to measure tablet reach amongst normal people. This means we can start to make informed decisions around the relevance of these devices for clients and their customers. Some of the data is presented below.\nFirst, an update on the tablet leader – More\u0026hellip; Slidedeck: how to get ahead, and hired, in social media by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere is my deck from the CIPR Summer Socialsession that I ran last night at the CIPR in Russell Square on personal reputation and how to get ahead, and hired, in social media.\nThere are three components of personal brand: your work; your personal network; and increasingly your online footprint. The session last night focused on the latter two and explored how you can use social technology to build your network and online profile. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/the-roi-of-public-relations--friday-roundup/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone\u0026rsquo;s lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. \u003csarcasm\u003eApart from that, it works just fine!\u003c/sarcasm\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC\u0026rsquo;s top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup"},{"content":" \u0026ldquo;CELEBRITIES, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results. Online \u0026lsquo;reputation management\u0026rsquo; agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings.\u0026rdquo;\nSo opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can\u0026rsquo;t provide the link to The Times as I\u0026rsquo;m not a subscriber to its paywall, but it\u0026rsquo;s syndicated here , sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.)\nOn reading the article, part of me recognised this sort of capability at the same time another part of me felt very uncomfortable with it being associated directly with PR. And then I winced some more\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;[These agencies] typically use thousands of social networking profiles - set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person - to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is NOT public relations. This is not two-way communication aspiring to foster mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. Such activities clearly breach the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s code of conduct , specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation.\nNow I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone would write an article about \u0026ldquo;a new breed of journalist conversant in phone hacking\u0026rdquo;, so why lump such unethical services into PR? Saying that then, I have a question. Are UK PR agencies / consultants offering these services, or is it largely the domain of firms specialising in this specific sort of thing?\nI think and indeed hope it\u0026rsquo;s the latter, and either way I hope we can expose any and every use of false names and sham dialogue to these ends. Then the subjects in question will find themselves with a reputation management problem.\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\n(P.S. Just a reminder that I write these Conversation Roundups in my own capacity. I am not a spokesperson for the CIPR.)\nHow to prevent Twitter from leading you to prison by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nSepp Blatter is coming in for a lot of online stick today. The much-criticised President of FIFA appears to be somewhat oblivious to the highly vocal complaints that international football is in crisis. Allegations of corruption are flying around and on Twitter, for instance, you’ll find plenty of people willing to say exactly what they think about Mr Blatter.\nThe problem for many of those people is the fact that Twitter has made it clear in the past few days that they are willing to reveal your details should someone wish to take proceedings against you. More\u0026hellip; To tweet or not to tweet? by Rachel Miller (nee Allen) of rachmiller.com\nYesterday\u0026rsquo;s Media Guardian featured a front page articleabout Twitter. Written by Charles Arthur, the story mulled over the past few weeks and how thousands of people have flocked to it and how it is now \u0026ldquo;fight or flight\u0026rdquo; for the site.\nWhat struck me was the box of statistics alongside the article on p2 in the hard copy version. It revealed that 264 million accounts are currently registered on Twitter. Of those account holders, 45 per cent are believed to have never sent a Tweet. Sorry, what?! Nearly half of the people who have signed up to Twitter are not tweeting, not only that, they have never sent one. More\u0026hellip; Marketing staff reveal how little they understand about online marketing by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nEmma Watson, the film star you might know as Hermione Granger from Harry Potter fame, was pictured recently carrying a copy of the third volume of “Chicken Soup for the Soul“. Quite why a hugely successful, multi-million pound earning, much-praised individual needs “self-help” remains pure speculation of course. But it is an interesting example of the phenomenon that is “Chicken Soup” and the readiness with which people buy in to the concept of “self-help”. More\u0026hellip; In Social Media, Your Return Represents Your Investment by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nSometimes the path of least resistance unwinds into a far more complicated and arduous journey than we anticipated. In times of change, taking the path less traveled is easier and far more rewarding. Such is true for social media.\nI read a review about Engage once that read, “Brian Solis takes the fun out of social media.” The author’s point was that the book took an academic approach when the industry could benefit from something that focused on best practices, case studies, and actionable takeaways. More\u0026hellip; The Social Media Landscape in 2011 by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia freshnetworks.com More\u0026hellip; Brands Seeking Agencies by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nAgencies SBC Advertising, an agency rooted in retail brands, Columbus, OH, USA Vibrandt, the contextual advertising leader, New York Kunde and Co, integrated marketing, Copenhagen, Denmark Brands\nDuncan Baird Publishing, Illustrated publishing, UK Elderstreet Investment, a venture capital fund manager, London UK The Berrics, skateboard park owned by pro skateboarders Steve Berra and Eric Koston, USA Voyages SNCF, train operator and holidays, France Polycom, teleconference supplier and telepresence, worldwide Brands Seeking Agencies\nHealth clinic looking for “creative marketing pitches to doctors offices” More\u0026hellip; FIR Book Review: The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nThe Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk.\nFIR Book Review editor Bob LeDrew reviews Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, The Thank You Economy. Vaynerchuk earlier hit the bestseller charts with Crush It. He oversaw spectacular growth of Wine Library through the use of social media. He was also a guest on FIR Live #15.\nHere’s the Amazon product description of the book: \u0026ldquo;The Thank You Economy is about something big, something greater than any single revolutionary platform. It isn’t some abstract concept or wacky business strategy – More\u0026hellip; Who is to blame for your website problems? by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nIs it national “blame another country week”? I woke up this morning to the news that Google was blaming China for an issue with Gmail. The day before we had the Germans blaming the Spanish for an E.coli food poisoning outbreak. And, following the allegations that the UK Border Agency is not up to scratch, I hear on the Your Call programme on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning that people in this country can’t get jobs “because of people from other countries” coming here and “stealing them”. More\u0026hellip; Marketing and PR must start with strategy by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nEarlier this week on this blog, I riffed on how You and I are incredibly lucky. My point was that marketing and PR is so much easier with the ability today to publish information. Several people called me out to say that I make it seem too easy. That simply tossing stuff out there is not enough.\nFor example, Stephen Eugene Adams wrote: \u0026ldquo;I think that we are now seeing a lot of unemployed marketing and PR people. If everyone can now do it themselves, then why do we need a top level person to run our marketing effort. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/06/not-pr--friday-roundup/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;CELEBRITIES, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results. Online \u0026lsquo;reputation management\u0026rsquo; agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can\u0026rsquo;t provide the link to The Times as I\u0026rsquo;m not a subscriber to its paywall, but it\u0026rsquo;s syndicated \u003ca href=\"http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/how-celebrities-and-companies-are-keeping-their-secrets-safe-from-google/story-e6frgakx-1226066987503\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n, sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn reading the article, part of me recognised this sort of capability at the same time another part of me felt very uncomfortable with it being associated directly with PR. And then I winced some more\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;[These agencies] typically use thousands of social networking profiles - set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person - to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is NOT public relations. This is not two-way communication aspiring to foster mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. Such activities clearly breach the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/policy-resources/code-conduct\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u0026rsquo;s code of conduct\u003c/a\u003e\n, specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Not PR – Friday Roundup"},{"content":"According to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can\u0026rsquo;t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s current definition of PR does.\nDespite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst \u0026lsquo;perception is reality\u0026rsquo; may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo; more appropriate.\nBut what is truth?\nDon\u0026rsquo;t worry, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get philosophical here, just sharing some thoughts based on the conversation at an event I chaired this week. The event\u0026rsquo;s core focus was the \u0026lsquo;new web \u0026rsquo; – the web beyond the content, ecommerce and social manifestations that we know today – and the issue of truth cropped up within the first half hour.\nDuring his keynote and subsequent Q\u0026amp;A, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) presented his aspirations for the Web of Data, a vision describing how the Web becomes a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge. But where there\u0026rsquo;s data, there may be false data. And where there\u0026rsquo;s information, there may be misinformation.\nKnowledge may be defined as the result of structuring or organising information in such a way that it helps to form a framework for the incorporation of further information and aids the evaluation of the world, accruing experience, expertise and know-how. In which case, structuring and organising misinformation will create a flawed knowledge base.\nA primary challenge for the new web therefore is the ability to identify or qualify truths. This in turn requires attention be paid to components such as provenance, sincerity, identity, authority and validation; all significant technological challenges.\nSeparately, I had the pleasure of chatting with Andreas Cohen this week, Chairman, I-COM (International Conference on Online Media Measurement). We invested some time discussing so-called \u0026lsquo;big data\u0026rsquo;, what some describe as the \u0026rsquo;exaflood\u0026rsquo; – an eventuality where we have more data at our fingertips than we ever dreamed possible. Andreas and I agree without a flicker of doubt that future marketing and PR professionals will need fluency in big data, in new web technologies, in truth.\nTruth be told.\nBest regards, Philip and The Conversation team.\nDuplicate Content \u0026amp; Your Website by Paul Greenhalgh of Searched, Designed, Developed\nIf you present your site to an SEO firm and they tell you that you have a \u0026ldquo;duplicate content issue\u0026rdquo; or you have \u0026ldquo;content duplication issues\u0026rdquo;, they will tell you it in a world-weary way.\nThis is because duplicate content is the bane of most SEOs\u0026rsquo; lives (there are forum discussions about it going back as far as the 1990s). However, they might not explain why it is a problem.In this post, I will attempt to explain the issues and discuss how to avoid them.\nHow Google Works\nIn the UK, Google holds around 90% of the search market share. More\u0026hellip; Tackling copyright confusion and why Google isn\u0026rsquo;t a British firm by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe intellectual property (IP) laws in Britain are knackered. They simply aren\u0026rsquo;t fit for purpose and the danger is that if current legislation remains unchecked it will throttle the creative industries in Britain.\nProfessor Ian Hargreaves delivered his report this week on the UK’s IP framework. You can download the full report here (PDF).\nHargreaves, who holds the chair of Digital Economy at Cardiff University and who himself has an impressive track record in the creative industries, was asked by Prime Minister David Cameron to set up an independent review in November 2010. More\u0026hellip; Signs of the times for the future for e-books by Neville Hobson of NevilleHobson.com\nI have a Kindle, the digital e-book reader from Amazon who launched the third-generation model last year. Actually, my whole family has Kindles. We also have stacks of printed books. We’re not especially wedded to format, more the content and that content being available to us in formats we like, aren’t too expensive and are convenient to use.\nBasically, we’re big on books and other content – which includes magazines and blogs – however they’re offered, not platforms and delivery formats. More\u0026hellip; Profile of Mobile Location Check-In Service Users by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\ncomScore released the results from a study of mobile social networking check-in service users. The study found that 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers used location-based check-in services on their phones in March 2011 \u0026ndash; representing 7.1 percent of the entire mobile population.\nAbout 12.7 million check-in users did so on a smartphone \u0026ndash; representing 17.6 percent of the smartphone population. The study also found that they showed a high propensity for mobile media usage, including accessing retail sites and shopping guides, and displayed other characteristics of early adopters \u0026ndash; including a higher interest in tablet devices and accessing tech news, when compared to the average smartphone user. More\u0026hellip; You Can\u0026rsquo;t Measure What It Is You Do Not Value by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nROI is as popular an acronym in social media as OMG or LOL is in TXTING. No matter how much you believe in social media, the reality is that management needs to know what is the ROI of Tweets in “the” Twitter or Likes in “that” Facebook thing that all the kids are talking about? Kidding aside, the future of social media within your organization and the value your customers experience in their networks of relevance is in your hands.\nNo one said this was going to be easy, and if they did, they didn’t report to the management infrastructure where you and I operate. More\u0026hellip; The future\u0026rsquo;s bright, the future\u0026rsquo;s IC by Rachel Miller (nee Allen) of rachmiller.com\nThis morning I joined around 15 other professional communicators for a research briefing session hosted by Melcrumin London called The Future of Internal Communications (IC).\nIt was hosted by Aviva at their stunning offices in the City and apart from being wowed by the incredible view from the 23rd floor, I found the conversations generated by the research and the networking opportunity useful.\nAttendees were from various organisations including BSkyB, Gazprom, Kingfisher, RSA, Vodafone and BAE Systems. More\u0026hellip; Dancing With Digital Natives by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\n\u0026ldquo;Stop listening to music and playing on Facebook. Do your homework.\u0026rdquo; I am doing my homework. But I work better when I multi-task.\n\u0026ldquo;Did you email your friend to see if they want a ride?\u0026rdquo; No. But I texted her.\n\u0026ldquo;Twitter is not allowed on work computers.\u0026rdquo; Okay. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll just have to go into the restroom with my iPad so I can tweet with my business followers.\nEvery day, miscommunication happens between \u0026ldquo;Digital Natives\u0026rdquo; (those born since the availability of today\u0026rsquo;s technologies and therefore have native fluency in computers, mobile phones, and social networks) and \u0026ldquo;Digital Immigrants\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Why Mark Zuckerberg is right about the under-13s by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nFacebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has caused a wave of controversy by saying that he wants to fight for the right of children under the age of 13 to use Facebook. At the moment it is illegal in the USA for social web companies to allow registrations of those under the age of 13. Here in the UK, it is simply a code of best practice, but not illegal. The law, though, is ineffective; around 7.5m children under the age of 13 already have Facebook accounts which are used regularly.\nThere is a powerful lobby against children using Facebook. More\u0026hellip; How to Close an Online Community Without Hurting Your Brand by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThere have been plenty of recent blog posts and articles about starting an online community, as a wide range of organizations have begun to realize the value of this social business tool. Some newcomers to the social media scene may not realize well-established online communities have operated for many years \u0026ndash; a few in excess of two decades!\nWhile many online communities have evolved and adapted to changing business and member needs over time, sometimes a community has to shut down. The reasons vary: More\u0026hellip; The changing of the guard by Michelle Allison of Industrious Ltd\nAmongst the thousands of articles written about the superinjunction/Ryan Giggs debacle, one woefully out of touch article from The Guardian stood out. Written by Richard Hillgrove, who is described as a \u0026lsquo;business and political public relations consultant\u0026rsquo;, the article seems only to emphasise the divide between the old and new guard.\nMany of the below the line commenter\u0026rsquo;s make the point that regulating what people write on a social network is nigh on impossible. Indeed, a couple liken the article’s point to the Royal Mail being sued for something they have written in a letter to a friend, or the fact the Twitter is somewhat analogous to a phone network. More\u0026hellip; Glympse: a glimpse of the next wave of political technology innovation by Mark Pack of MHP Communications\nAlthough many election campaigns and candidates are still rather old-fashioned in their approach to technology, the bundle of services that a cutting-edge campaign uses has rather settled down for the last few years, in particular since Twitter and Facebook have grown to dominate their niche and push their rivals into obscurity. What people do with these tools still sees plenty of innovation, but the range of tools has become rather standard.\nHowever, that may be about to change as geo-location based tools spread. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/05/truth-be-told--friday-roundup/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAccording to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can\u0026rsquo;t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/policy-resources/careers-pr/whatispr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u0026rsquo;s current definition of PR\u003c/a\u003e\n does.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst \u0026lsquo;perception is reality\u0026rsquo; may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders \u0026lsquo;reality is perception\u0026rsquo; more appropriate.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut what is truth?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Truth be told – Friday Roundup"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the 6UK launch back in November, with keynote by Vint Cerf – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired Profiting From The New Web at the Royal Society with keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?!\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28121\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\nI worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week\u0026rsquo;s conference, and we set ourselves this mission:\nDiscover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise.\nWeb Innovation The term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content.\nA component of the Web of Data, known as Open Data , encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage.\nYou might like to watch Sir Tim Berners-Lee deliver a 5 minute update on Open Data in a 2010 TED Talk:\nYour organisation needs to get to grips with such technological innovations, but that\u0026rsquo;s not the only fluency you need in order to navigate the opportunities, and the risks. The conference covered issues of privacy, trust and provenance, mobility, agility and security, social analytics, journalism, content and brand journalism. We touched upon poor public policy endangering Internet neutrality (without dissension as it happens – perhaps given the weight of authority of those at the conference in favour of neutrality), the ethics of social analytics, the balancing of CRM (customer relationship management) with VRM (vendor relationship marketing ), the Internet of Things, Internet governance, and the expectations and unknowns relating to the imminent connection of the majority of mankind still, as of 2011, unconnected.\nWe hosted speakers from Southampton University / Web Science Trust (Dame Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt), IBM, Salesforce.com, News International, Microsoft, the Cabinet Office, the London School of Economics, the Media Standards Trust, Radian6, Nominet and many more.\nKnowing the right questions The Web is changing faster than ever. You might have a website that ranks highly in terms of usability and accessibility; you might facilitate your customers conversing and transacting with you over the Web; you might be on LinkedIn and have yourself a Facebook page. But equally, your organisation is probably as far forward in understanding yet alone implementing facets of the New Web as it was implementing Web 1.0 back in, say, 1998.\nYet you will appreciate now the advantage secured by those early to Web 1.0, even if that was in terms of learning mistakes all the faster and advantageously. Well, what are you waiting for now?\nHaving just the one day, the New Web conference was as much about helping delegates appreciate some of the questions they should be asking, that they should be challenging their organisations with, as it was hinting at some of the answers. This is a complex area, and the more you dig into it the more you appreciate the drivers behind the creation of Web Science as an academic endeavour. And yet the conference title deliberately prefixes \u0026ldquo;The New Web\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;Profiting From\u0026rdquo; because whilst government and non-profits can profit, there\u0026rsquo;s plenty to excite business too. Now.\nIf, like me, you sense opportunity here, now\u0026rsquo;s the time to find out more. And this applies whether you work in the public, private or third sector. The Web Science Trust is a very good place to start (particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in sponsoring future events). I write about some of these innovations and issues in chapters 4 (social analytics) and 8 (mobile, Internet of Things, privacy, Semantic Web) of The Business of Influence , and please get in touch if you think I can help.\nWatch out for follow-up events to this week\u0026rsquo;s conference. I\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging here and tweeting of course.\nFundamentally, if your (medium to global) organisation has no-one conversant in the topics raised in this blog post, then you have, quite simply, a governance and / or leadership shortfall.\nVideo and photographs [caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28120\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Philip Sheldrake and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28118\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Dame Professor Wendy Hall, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28119\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Professor Nigel Shadbolt, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28122\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Philip Sheldrake, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/05/the-web-this-decade-and-what-it-means-for-your-organisation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the \u003ca href=\"http://www.6uk.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e6UK\u003c/a\u003e\n launch back in November, with keynote by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eVint Cerf\u003c/a\u003e\n – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired \u003ca href=\"http://www.newweb.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eProfiting From The New Web\u003c/a\u003e\n at the Royal Society with keynote by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSir Tim Berners-Lee\u003c/a\u003e\n – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_28121\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)\u0026rdquo;]\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/05/the-web-this-decade-and-what-it-means-for-your-organisation/tbl_newweb_1/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/tbl_newweb_1-300x200.jpg\" title=\"Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI worked with the \u003ca href=\"http://webscience.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWeb Science Trust\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.intellectuk.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIntellect\u003c/a\u003e\n to design this week\u0026rsquo;s conference, and we set ourselves this mission:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDiscover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"web-innovation\"\u003eWeb Innovation\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA component of the Web of Data, known as \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science_data\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOpen Data\u003c/a\u003e\n, encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Web this decade and what it means for your organisation"},{"content":"A big thank you to everyone who joined me last night in central London for the launch party for The Business of Influence . And for those who were still around between midnight and 2am, I can only say that I rarely get the opportunity to cut those dance moves these days; so apologies.\nSpecial thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (@jangles ) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven\u0026rsquo;t yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast amongst many other things .\nListen! [UPDATE 5pm 25th April: Neville has now published this interview on the FIR podcast .]\nAnd thanks also to everyone tweeting their pics of the book, but I\u0026rsquo;m afraid Simon Sanders (@simonsanders ) takes first prize so far for his tongue-in-cheeking unboxing (what\u0026rsquo;s unboxing? ):\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/neville-hobsons-interview-with-me-at-the-book-launch-party/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA big thank you to everyone who joined me last night in central London for the launch party for \u003ca href=\"http://www.influenceprofessional.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/a\u003e\n. And for those who were still around between midnight and 2am, I can only say that I rarely get the opportunity to cut those dance moves these days; so apologies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpecial thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (\u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com/jangles\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@jangles\u003c/a\u003e\n) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven\u0026rsquo;t yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFIR (For Immediate Release) podcast\u003c/a\u003e\n amongst \u003ca href=\"http://www.nevillehobson.com/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003emany other things\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Neville Hobson's interview with me at the book launch party"},{"content":"Today\u0026rsquo;s the day!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s it about? The Business of Influence is a rethink.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.\nThe book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.\nThe Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It\u0026rsquo;s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to thank Robert Howie, MD and CMO of Palladium Group and Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, for writing the foreword. Robert writes:\nThe author’s Influence Scorecard builds on the Kaplan Norton approach, in which success is based on universal management principles: aligning around the critical few things that matter, identifying cause-and-effect relationships that result in desired outcomes, setting measures and targets to drive behaviors, choosing initiatives that close performance gaps, and managing strategy as a process. The Influence Scorecard shares these principles with the Balanced Scorecard, and applies them to the emergent, cross-disciplinary domain of influence.\nAnd this segues neatly into an endorsement for The Business of Influence by Robert Phillips, President and CEO, Edelman EMEA:\nPhilip Sheldrake shares an important vision of the new communications world order. PR and advertising professionals need to sit up and take note. Influence is the future watchword – and the smart companies are already exploring it and switching models.\nMedia and disintermediation Social media has ascended so quickly that today only a minority media remain without a social component. This lends organisations the unprecedented opportunity to listen to and engage directly in many-to-many conversations. It also enables consumers and citizens to coalesce powerfully, eliminating previous geographical and time constraints and levelling the previous power imbalance between ‘them and us’.\nToo often, leadership teams fail to appreciate that this change is more than cosmetic, is more than something that can be abdicated to a small team with new media glasses and the word ‘digital’ or ‘social’ in their job titles. This is a powerful change that demands organisation wide readjustment.\nTechnology The marketing, PR and related professions remain relatively unscientific. They are almost the last business disciplines to be transformed by information and communication technologies, and are now going through the same technology-fuelled convulsions that accounting, manufacturing, logistics and retail, for example, underwent in previous decades. Therefore, I discuss the emergence of an influence professional ambidextrous of mind – equally happy working their right-brained creativity and empathic skills alongside their left-brained analysis and synthesis capabilities.\nThe book explores the continuing revolution in information and communications technologies, including new Web technologies such as the Semantic Web (so-called Web 3.0), the Internet of Things, the explosion in data, and the corresponding personal privacy ramifications.\nBusiness strategy formulation and execution Social media and new technologies demand strategic adaptation to capitalise on the opportunities and attenuate the risks. Moreover, ongoing empirical research into organisational effectiveness continues to throw new light on the facets of strategy formulation and execution that separate the great from the also-rans.\nAccording to the Balanced Scorecard Institute, seven out of ten organisations simply fail to execute their strategies – that is, they fail to live up to their promise of creating value for shareholders. This will become increasingly unacceptable; indeed, unviable.\nMichael Porter defines strategy as selecting the set of activities in which an organisation will excel to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby creating sustained value for its shareholders. If your organisation’s assets and capabilities are unique, and your vision is unique, then you must by definition craft a unique strategy. As your organisation’s structure and culture are critical to strategic execution, these too should be honed to be fit for purpose.\nAnd yet the majority of organisations adopt a template approach to media, advertising, marketing and communications. The structure, processes and too frequently blinkered specialism of its practitioners hold back most marketing and PR teams from recognizing that their objectives, activity and associated measurement and evaluation, must work in orchestrated harmony with other disciplines to deliver specific business outcomes.\nOrganisational structure, culture, vision and strategy must be adapted to this change if the organisation is to survive let alone thrive, and there has to be a process to drive and inform this adaptation.\nAccompanying website Please do drop by the book\u0026rsquo;s accompanying website at www.influenceprofessional.com , kindly supported by my company Meanwhile and the Razorfish London team, to say hi and join the debate.\nEndorsements I\u0026rsquo;d like to thank everyone who provided supportive endorsements for the book cover. These are listed on the accompanying website , but I will just add three more here for the sake of rounding out this post and, hopefully, influencing you to buy The Business of Influence\u0026hellip;\nThe Business of Influence is a whack on the side of the head for traditional marketers. By focusing on influence, instead of traditional marketing think, it reframes and redefines everything that a modern marketer does. The Business of Influence should be found, dog-eared and jam-packed with marks in the margins on every successful CMO’s desk.\nKatie Delahaye Paine, Founder and CEO, KD Paine \u0026amp; Partners, author Measure What Matters\nToday, every organization is in the influence business. We influence customers to buy from us, employees to work for us, and the media to write about us. Gone are the days when you could be your own island. Now, to be successful, you need to live within the influence ecosystem and that requires a change of mindset. Fortunately, Philip Sheldrake will show you how.\nDavid Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR and the new hit Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\nThe Business of Influence is an excellent guide to understanding how to develop and drive a management agenda through marketing and communications in the increasingly complex age of social media and digital technology. It is a handy and useful guidebook for every practitioner from the newly minted account leader in an agency to the seasoned professional or academic in this field.\nDavid B. Rockland, PhD; Partner, Ketchum Communications; CEO, Ketchum Pleon Change and Ketchum Global Research; Chair, AMEC US Agency Research Leaders Group\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/my-book-the-business-of-influence-is-out-today/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eToday\u0026rsquo;s the day!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"whats-it-about\"\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s it about?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/book-cover-sml.jpg\" title=\"The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age\"\u003eThe Business of Influence is a rethink.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It\u0026rsquo;s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My book, The Business of Influence, is out today"},{"content":" With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I\u0026rsquo;ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.\nI mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they\u0026rsquo;ve done just that.\nToday, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it\u0026rsquo;s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there\u0026rsquo;s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory\u0026hellip; particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I\u0026rsquo;ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.\nI consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional\u0026rsquo;s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/taptu-for-ipad--with-gorgeous-illustration/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/04/taptu-for-ipad-%e2%80%93-with-gorgeous-illustration/taptu-web-fishing/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Taptu Web Fishing illustration\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Taptu-Web-Fishing.jpg\" title=\"Taptu Web Fishing illustration\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/01/content-an-illustrated-history/\"\u003eContent – an illustrated history\u003c/a\u003e\n. That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/karoshikula\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@karoshikula\u003c/a\u003e\n) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I\u0026rsquo;ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that \u003ca href=\"http://www.taptu.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTaptu\u003c/a\u003e\n CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they\u0026rsquo;ve done just that.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it\u0026rsquo;s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there\u0026rsquo;s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory\u0026hellip; particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I\u0026rsquo;ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional\u0026rsquo;s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration"},{"content":"Regular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation\u0026rsquo;s tool selection and procurement.\nWell yesterday\u0026rsquo;s CIPR TV was on the topic of social analytics, and Russell and I were delighted to have Alterian \u0026rsquo;s Connie Bensen and NMIncite \u0026rsquo;s Emily Dent join us on the sofa. We also managed to interleave a three minute interview I grabbed with Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun at last week\u0026rsquo;s Radian6 Social2011 conference.\nCheck it out:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNDkNGcgSJw ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/social-analytics-on-cipr-tv--with-connie-bensen-emily-dent-and-marcel-lebrun/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eRegular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation\u0026rsquo;s tool selection and procurement.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social analytics on CIPR TV – with Connie Bensen, Emily Dent and Marcel LeBrun"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;m in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman\u0026rsquo;s David Armano, Dell\u0026rsquo;s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt.\nRadian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform , and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how Radian6 describes it:\nInsights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout , OpenAmplify and OpenCalais . The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.\nHow does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no influence without meaning. Think about this for a minute – there\u0026rsquo;s no influence without meaning. You have been influenced when you think in a way that you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise have done, and such changes demand cognition.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;d like to know more about working with the meaning of content, if you\u0026rsquo;d like to get to grips with the importance of this Radian6 innovation, then you\u0026rsquo;ll find a description of this revolution in my book, The Business of Influence.\n(Amazon UK , Amazon US , Barnes \u0026amp; Noble , Waterstones , The Book Depository ).\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re intent on finding competitive advantage from such Web technologies, look out for the conference \u0026ldquo;Profiting from the New Web\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;m chairing 23rd May at The Royal Society in London. The event is run in conjunction with the Web Science Trust and Intellect , and Sir Tim Berners-Lee is keynoting.\nFor now, here\u0026rsquo;s a brief extract from page 154 in Chapter 8 of my book, a chapter titled Influence Trends.\nWeb 3.0, The Business of Influence If Web 2.0 is all about (user-generated) content and community participation, Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of all the content and participation. Indeed, the Web becomes a universal medium for the exchange of data, information and knowledge.\nWeb 3.0 is more accurately called the semantic Web , although the phrase Web of Data is increasingly popular. To clarify the terms here, semantic Web analysis is a term encompassing techniques to infer meaning in (including the sentiment of) contributions made to the social Web (Web 2.0). The semantic Web (Web 3.0) allows for that meaning to be built in to all published data including, potentially, those contributions.\nThe semantic Web includes a vision known as Linked Data, which in simple terms allows data to be described with reference to universally avail- able common vocabularies, and considerable work is going on around the world on defining these vocabularies and linking datasets accordingly. Figure 8.3 diagrammatically represents a snapshot of this interlinking as of September 2010.\nFigure 8.3 – The LinkedOpenData Project interlinked datasets, September 2010\nDo you recall some of those oft-repeated diagrams in Web 2.0 books and training? Well expect to see this one, and possibly updates to it if they continue to fit on one page, many times in the coming years. It’s probably too detailed to be legible in print here (you can follow the link in the endnotes) but the message it conveys isn’t contained in its text but in the number of data sources (circles) and the extent of the interlinking.\nWhen the team at Wiley and I were discussing what should be included in this book there was some concern that reference to such technologies might be a case of me wearing my technology and engineering hat more than my marketing and PR hat. But in the end the conclusion was resolute: Web 3.0 had to make the final edit because it is happening now at the BBC, Wikipedia, Google and within the UK and US governments, to name just a few of the hundreds of organizations, and moreover I hope I can convey what it means without resort to technical jargon or acronyms.\nIt is significant that The International Press Telecommunications Council is also using Web 3.0. The Council announced in April 2010 the official launch and widespread adoption of its G2 family of news exchange standards sup- ported by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, dpa, The Press Association, and Thomson Reuters. G2 contains some Web 3.0 components.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/radian6-and-the-insights-platform--getting-semantic/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/04/radian6-and-the-insights-platform-%e2%80%93-getting-semantic/social2011_web1/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Radian6 Social2011 conference\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Social2011_web1.jpg\" title=\"Radian6 Social2011 conference\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nI\u0026rsquo;m in Boston this week for the \u003ca href=\"http://www.radian6.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRadian6\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.social2011.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial 2011\u003c/a\u003e\n Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman\u0026rsquo;s David Armano, Dell\u0026rsquo;s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, \u003ca href=\"http://www.webmetricsguru.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarshall Sponder\u003c/a\u003e\n and Nathan Gilliatt.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRadian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching \u003ca href=\"http://www.radian6.com/platform-blog/2011/04/announcing-radian6-insights/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe new Insights Platform\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s how Radian6 describes it:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInsights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include \u003ca href=\"http://www.klout.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKlout\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.openamplify.com\" title=\"OpenAmplify\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOpenAmplify\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.opencalais.com\" title=\"OpenCalais\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOpenCalais\u003c/a\u003e\n. The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Radian6 and the Insights Platform – getting semantic"},{"content":" The CIPR has just announced that it will be launching The Conversation this coming Monday, during its social media conference . The Conversation provides the facility to aggregate the best PR related blogs from members and non-members, in the UK and further afield. And it goes live under a full head of steam because The Conversation is the new face of MarCom Professional, the network I\u0026rsquo;ve been running for the past four years. Here\u0026rsquo;s what the CIPR has to say:\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR ) is launching ‘The Conversation’ at its social media conference , 11 April. The Conversation is your one-stop shop for great blog posts by practitioners, consultancies, academia and students, from the UK and further afield. Syndicating your personal or company blog couldn\u0026rsquo;t be easier, allowing the wider PR community to find your content, find your personal, business and consultancy profiles, and respond to your news and points of view. Everyone is welcome to register themselves and their organisation.\nIn the spirit of The Conversation, the CIPR has invited some of the UK\u0026rsquo;s keenest PR bloggers to break this news.\nThere will be no need to ‘make friends’ all over again on The Conversation. Simply give your existing social networks permission to allow us to take a look at your network, your social graph as some call it, and we\u0026rsquo;ll make sure those relationships are established immediately on The Conversation (ie you won\u0026rsquo;t need to share your passwords with us). Hey presto, instant social glue.\nThe Conversation promises to be an exciting addition to the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website, at least it will be with your input. It won\u0026rsquo;t match Facebook for functionality or LinkedIn for seeing who\u0026rsquo;s connected to whom, but it will be the first such attempt by a professional body to our knowledge. We hope you\u0026rsquo;ll jump in, and work with us as we iron out the inevitable glitch or two.\nFollowing the successes of the CIPR social media panel – CIPR TV , \u0026lsquo;Social Summer\u0026rsquo; events in 2010 and 2011, social media measurement guidance and input to ASA regulation – it\u0026rsquo;s apt that The Conversation will be launched at the CIPR social media conference. We hope to see you there.\nNice blog post from MarCom Professional Friday Roundup author Andrew Bruce Smith too .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/the-cipr-conversation--a-1st/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/04/the-cipr-conversation-%e2%80%93-a-1st/the-conversation/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Conversation\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/the-conversation-300x73.png\" title=\"The Conversation\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n has just announced that it will be launching The Conversation this coming Monday, during its \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/events-awards/conferences/cipr-social-media-conference-2011\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial media conference\u003c/a\u003e\n. The Conversation provides the facility to aggregate the best PR related blogs from members and non-members, in the UK and further afield. And it goes live under a full head of steam because The Conversation is the new face of MarCom Professional, the network I\u0026rsquo;ve been running for the past four years. Here\u0026rsquo;s what the CIPR has to say:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The CIPR Conversation – a 1st"},{"content":"According to BusinessWeek, Groupon could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It\u0026rsquo;s now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business.\nMy sister-in-law recently bought a £300 spa package for £100 via Groupon. Haircut, massage, manicure and pedicure. She\u0026rsquo;s delighted.\n\u0026ldquo;Would you go back to the spa?\u0026rdquo; I ask. \u0026ldquo;Definitely\u0026rdquo; she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: \u0026ldquo;When they run another Groupon deal.\u0026rdquo;\nIn other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles).\nPerhaps Groupon recognises this challenge. Its new service, Groupon Now, is a real-time and timebound play. Got an empty table for lunch? Would you like to fill it than have it go empty? Then promote it now to people looking for lunch and looking for a bargain. This is a classic focus on so-called perishable stock, and reminds me of Mercata and LastMinute of a decade ago.\nThis could be useful. It could give your business the opportunity to present its wares to as yet unsatsified consumers, now, whilst helping to \u0026lsquo;sweat your assets\u0026rsquo;. But this must translate into long-term loyalty (excepting transient passing trade) for your business to reap the full lifetime value of the customer, and indeed all the friends and family she might bring with her.\nIn The Business of Influence (Amazon UK , Amazon US ) I discuss what I consider to be the endgame here, buyer marketing. Rather than business marketing products and services to consumers, buyer marketing entails consumers marketing their need to potential suppliers.\n\u0026ldquo;Anyone out there want to serve me mushroom pizza this lunchtime?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;I need to dry clean my winter coat; any offers?\u0026rdquo; Wrap in the qualitative aspects of so-called social commerce, and a business should be able to articulate the value of its offer in its response, not just its price.\nThere isn\u0026rsquo;t an app for that. But there should be.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nTop 5 reasons PR firms should ask clients/prospects for access to Google Analytics data by Andrew Smith of escherman\nIn March 2010, I gave a presentation on PR and SEO at the CIPR HQ in Russell Square, London, to around 75 senior in-house communications directors and managers. I asked how many of them used Google Analytics data from their own corporate sites to inform their PR and communications strategies. Not a single hand went up. In the intervening months, I’ve been boring for Britain to anyone who’ll listen that asking clients for access to Google Analytics should be one of the key questions any PR should be asking. More\u0026hellip; Oh No! We don’t do THAT [on tv - but everywhere else]! by Stephan Dahl of MIddlesex University\nSo… the alcohol industry has slammed a report by Gerard Hastings and Nick Sheron in BMJ that brandished the self regulation code as “clumsily imposed”, and asks for much tighter regulation - similar to the regulations currently in force in France. The mad.co.uk report features a statement from Diageo (owner of Guinness amongst other) describing how well they (and others) comply with the various codes of practice.\nOf course, it would be correct to point out that the last upheld complaint against Diageo by the ASA was in 2006 - and that since then no complaint was upheld. More\u0026hellip; Nordstrom does Twitter right by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThis morning I popped over to my local Nordstrom to check out what\u0026rsquo;s new for Spring. David Angiulo helped me choose some styling shirts that I can wear with my Peter Millar blue suit. As we were heading to the cash register, he asked me if I\u0026rsquo;m on Twitter. It was a very low key, very casual question. It did not feel pushy in any way.\n\u0026ldquo;Absolutely,\u0026rdquo; I said. \u0026ldquo;Are you?\u0026rdquo;\nHe gave me his card and included his Twitter handle @NordstromDave\nDamn. I wanted to learn more.\nDave says he uses Twitter to keep his customers informed. More\u0026hellip; Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Enchantment by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nGuy Kawasaki is nothing less than enchanting. His vision and experience come to life through an inspired art of storytelling that is, well, inspiring. Guy possesses a truly unique and special talent to captivate your heart, mind, and attention.\nI first followed Guy when he was chief evangelist at Apple. He introduced businesses to an entirely new art form marketing through engagement and empowerment. Over the years, I’ve also followed his work in Silicon Valley spanning from Garage.com to Alltop as well as pored over every book he’s written. More\u0026hellip; Did LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman send you an email? by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage via Wikipedia\nI expect you all just got the email from Reid Hoffman congratulating himself on recruiting 1 million members to Linked In. Lovely. Except he failed in two significant ways\nThe email was not transactional, it was marketing. So the CAN-SPAM law applies. It requires, amongst other things\nPhysical contact data for your organization. Unsubscribe instructions. Seems incredible that a major online player messed up like this.\nMissed opportunity\nBut the main thing Linked In did wrong is to miss out on sending us all a unique ‘thank you’. More\u0026hellip; Firefox 4 downloads infographic by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nFrom Mashable More\u0026hellip; The Rules of Social Media Engagement by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nA study published in 2010 surfaced a startling statistic, “75 percent of employers say their business has no formal policy instructing employees on the appropriate use of social networking sites on the job.” The report, “Employer Perspectives on Social Networking,” compiled date from 34,000 businesses in 35 countries.\nDoes your organization have a formal policy regarding employee use of social media? Perhaps better asked, does your organization offer training, guidelines, and insights to help employees excel in new media on behalf of your business?\nIn the same study, 63% of employers that employed social networking policies reported that those policies improved productivity. More\u0026hellip; Americans View 3.8 Billion Video Ads in February by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\ncomScore released data showing that 170 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in February for an average of 13.6 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.0 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.\nGoogle Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February with 141.1 million unique viewers. VEVO ranked second with 49.0 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 48.8 million, Yahoo! Sites with 46.7 million, and Facebook.com with nearly 46.7 million. More\u0026hellip; CIPR social media measurement guidance by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThe AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.\nIt’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.\nMeasurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner. More\u0026hellip; Why Facebook’s popularity is great news for copywriters, and bad news for article writing sweatshops by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nWhen one door closes, another door opens.\nLong time readers will know that I’m not a fan of the $10 (or less) per keyword article copywriting gigs you find on freelance bidding websites, like Elance and Guru. I pity the copywriters that feel forced into these jobs, where they’re paid sweat shop wages to hammer out 10-20 articles a day just so they don’t have to live in a box.\nHopefully, these low paid writing jobs might be on their way out.\nFollowing Google’s recent ‘Panda’ More\u0026hellip; 10 Rules For Online Community Success by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThe poet T.S. Eliot once wrote \u0026ldquo;If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.\u0026rdquo; Truer words were never spoken as it more difficult to efficiently convey an idea or message than to wax poetic.\nAs social is an emerging trend, many have put down their soapboxes to talk about online communities. Consequently, there is some good (and lots of just OK) advice \u0026ldquo;out there\u0026rdquo; on building online customer communities \u0026ndash; yielding a great deal of information to sort through and parse. More\u0026hellip; The Times they are still a chargin’, but the numbers are changing by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nA second round of digital subscriber figures from The Times, and what it means for public relations practitioners\nMurdoch’s band of digital revenue folks have released a second set of subscriber figures, eight months after The Times paywall went up. In short, all the line graphs in Murdoch’s boardrooms must be pointing skywards. Digital only monthly subscriptions rose to 79,000, up 60% on the figures revealed four months ago.\nThe flip side of this success is the growth of digital subscriptions is slowing, from 50,000 new subs in the first four months of the paywall to 29,000 subs in the second. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Feature Phones Still Popular for Texting by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nWhile smartphone demand continues to grow, many mobile phone users are still purchasing the less-expensive feature phones. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, during 2010 feature phones comprised over 75 percent of the handset market.\nConsumers purchase feature phones for a variety of reasons including the need for a device that is optimized for a specific application, such as text messaging.\n\u0026ldquo;A messaging phone is a feature phone that has been enhanced for messaging services including SMS, MMS, mobile email, and mobile IM. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/04/groupon-is-bad-for-business--no-april-fool/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAccording to BusinessWeek, \u003ca href=\"http://www.groupon.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGroupon\u003c/a\u003e\n could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It\u0026rsquo;s now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy sister-in-law recently bought a £300 spa package for £100 via Groupon. Haircut, massage, manicure and pedicure. She\u0026rsquo;s delighted.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Would you go back to the spa?\u0026rdquo; I ask. \u0026ldquo;Definitely\u0026rdquo; she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: \u0026ldquo;When they run another Groupon deal.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Groupon is bad for business – no April fool"},{"content":" The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.\nIt’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.\nMeasurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.\nThe CIPR launches its guidance on social media measurement today. As chair of the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s social media measurement group, I\u0026rsquo;m particularly keen to learn what you think. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid it is no silver bullet, and that\u0026rsquo;s simply because there will never be a silver bullet.\nHere are the links:\nTo the social media measurement guidance page on the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website .\nTo the guidance PDF directly .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/03/cipr-social-media-measurement-guidance/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/Final_Social_Media_Measurement_Guidance%20_March_2011.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"CIPR social media measurement guidelines\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/social-media-measurement-guidelines.png\" title=\"CIPR social media measurement guidelines\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nThe AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMeasurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR social media measurement guidance"},{"content":"Let\u0026rsquo;s talk about money.\nMichael Porter describes strategy as defining and attending to those activities at which an organisation must excel in order to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby create sustained value for its shareholders (or sustainable value in the case of non-profits).\nOnce you\u0026rsquo;ve articulated why your organisation exists (the mission), and what you want it to be (the vision), the strategy describes the what, who, how, when and where needed to pursue the vision, and specifically how these differ from the competition. How these help beat your competition.\nHowever, as hard as strategy formulation is, the really hard part is putting it into action. The Balanced Scorecard Institute finds that 70% of organisations with a strategy simply fail to execute it. And this becomes the more obvious the further away from the sale / the product / the service you get; the more you get into the intangible assets pivotal to your success.\nMarketing and PR are intangible assets. They are intangible investments. We all know that the right mix of the panoply of marketing and PR activities is essential to organisational success – to the successful definition of organisational strategy and its execution – but too often we\u0026rsquo;re not quite sure how so. This is most apparent when, particularly in harder times, marketing and PR are considered cost centres first and foremost, and cost centres that can be cut.\nWhen we put a dollar in, we want more than a dollar back. Stands to reason. Yet a systematic understanding of how to measure the return on investment of marketing and PR remains the exception rather than the norm.\nBoth David Meerman Scott and I posted about this alarming inadequacy this week. The Digital Publishing Forum invited me to speak this week to address the ROI of social media, yet it turns out that social media is no different to other aspects of marketing and PR. And it turns out marketing and PR are not so different from all the other investments your organisation must make in intangibles. Unfortunately it turns out that too many organisations underperform in mapping and quantifying the strategic benefit of all such assets, not just marketing and PR.\nMoney. How often are you surprised by the gap between our regard for it and our appreciation for how it\u0026rsquo;s put to work? How often does your management team require you to articulate ROI when you know you have no material way to respond? If this is the case, then I can assure you the answer starts with fixing the failings of the management team, not the marketing and PR teams, although you can be instrumental in identifying this and helping to put it right.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nBrand Journalism: The Rise of Non-Fiction Advertising by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImagine a world in which brands tell the truth, advertisers act like publishers and all communication is real-time. Is this world possible? #brandjo\nKyle Monson – Editor JWT Brian Clark – President of GMD Studios Bob Garfield – Advertising Age David Eastman – CRO JWT North America Shiv Singh – Head of digital, Pepsico Eastman: Everyone understand the brand bit – the journalism is an editorial approach to brand buildling – thinking engagement and transparency over messaging and control. More\u0026hellip; ‘Bing’ – the sound of a backlash by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nThere’s two very lovely things in the this here world that often show themselves during great tragedies; the human capacity to give generously and the capacity for large companies to put their money making ways aside to unify large followings into donating hefty sums.\nSocial media has taken hold in this area as well as any other. What better way to get a request for donations out than tweet a link and request to your company’s vast number of followers on Twitter?\nOf course, it’s always best to keep your own interests off the boil while doing this. More\u0026hellip; Public Relations 2011: Issues, Insights and Ideas by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nSydney-based strategic communications consultant and blogger, Craig Pearce, has just released a timely e-report called Public Relations 2011: Issues, Insights, Ideas.\nCraig compiled and edited the report - essentially, a PR thought leadership \u0026rsquo;e-dossier\u0026rsquo; - with the help of a disparate band of PR folk from around the globe (I\u0026rsquo;m proud to say the PR Warrior was lucky enough to be included in such esteemed company).\nContributors include academics and practicing professionals from countries such as Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, England and Australia. More\u0026hellip; The Future of Broadcast is More Than Integrating Tweets into Programming by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nThe future of broadcast is literally at our fingertips…\nThe living room is the epicenter of family, the hub of the household. Perhaps more so than the dining table, the living room hosts hours upon hours of family attention and interaction every week. Whether we were gripped by the music and voices emitting from radios or entranced by the moving images illuminating our televisions, we celebrated everything from togetherness to relaxation around a common centerpiece.\nThis once mighty magnet of attention, through its iterative forms, is learning to share its powers of attraction forever changing the idea of the family cornerstone. More\u0026hellip; SNCR Research Findings Highlight the Evolution of Social Business by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nI am proud to introduce the results of the 2nd annual New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research study by The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR); a benchmark on the impact of social media on enterprise decision-making.\nThe study is a result of collaboration between my co-researcher Don Bulmer and me as part of our fellowship with SNCR. We have also benefited greatly from the analysis of my colleague at SAP and senior fellow at SNCR, Peter Auditore. In the first study we focused on professionals’ More\u0026hellip; SEO giving way to social search – and there’s more by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s an article that I’ve written for Fresh Business Thinking continuing my thesis that search will give way to social search and recommendation via social networks.\nIt’s a topic that I’m picking up in a pitch at Reputation Online’s Live event ‘Where social meets search and PR’ event on Friday in London.\nThere’s a cracking line-up of speakers including Sony Ericsson’s Ben Padley, Punch Communications’ Pete Goold, Browser Media’s Joe Friedlein and O2’s Alex Pearmain. More\u0026hellip; SXSW 2011: Transmedia Content Marketing by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nBrand marketers in a variety of different industries are beginning to accelerate their multimedia production and distribution efforts. They\u0026rsquo;re acting more like non-fiction storytellers and commercial publishers, as they create new forms of digital content.\nThis established trend was one of the significant themes at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2011. In addition, the early-adoption of Transmedia Storytelling techniques \u0026ndash; by a relative few forward-looking organizations \u0026ndash; was the noteworthy emerging theme. More\u0026hellip; Tweet Manually and Be Sincere by Ari Herzog of Ari Herzog\nI recently received three direct messages from people after I followed them on Twitter:\n1. Thanks for following. I try to mostly tweet interesting stuff I find. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting as well.\n2. Thanks for following! I do check my messages daily, so be sure to DM me if you ever need anything in blogging \u0026amp; social media!\n3. Thanks for following. I look forward to your tweets!\nDirect messages are private messages that can only seen by the sender and receiver. You can only DM me if I follow you. More\u0026hellip; What’s the ROI of social media? by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum. It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be. I sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What\u0026rsquo;s the ROI?\u0026hellip;\nOf the latest rebrand? Of the office refurb? Of the internal communications activity? Of the training and development programme? Of the upgrade to Windows 7? Of the new standard issue smartphones? Of the stakeholder engagement via social media? If you\u0026rsquo;d like to see where we went from there, here\u0026rsquo;s the presentation: More\u0026hellip; Marketing ROI and what you should measure by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThese days, the Web gives everyone — B2B companies, consumer brands, consultants, nonprofits, schools, etc. — a tremendous opportunity to reach people and engage them in new and different ways. Now we can earn attention by creating and publishing online for free something interesting and valuable: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an e-book, a Facebook page.\nBut how should we measure the success of this new kind of marketing? The answer is that we need new metrics. More\u0026hellip; B2B Social Media Lead Generation Explained by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nGuest post by Eric Schwartzman and Paul Gillin\nB2B social media marketing is particularly well suited for business-to-business lead generation. Business purchasing decisions are made by stakeholder committees with diverse priorities and a voracious appetite for details. Social media is the most efficient channel for committees of engineers, product developers, purchasing managers and marketers to self-educate, and a way for marketers to abbreviate sales cycles.\nB2B social media makes it possible for marketers to inform communities with greater fidelity and less friction. More\u0026hellip; 3 Reasons to put Business back into Social Business by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nThree reasons to get \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; back into Social Business are: to manage its risk, complexity and cost as a major project initiative; to ensure it fits with business strategy and informs it from customer strategies; and, to ensure that it is effectively operationalised.\nGetting \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; right is a pre-requisite to getting the use of social media right. The notion of Social Business (in the new for-profit sense) has evolved from discussions over the last couple of years that started with social media and evolved into such things as \u0026ldquo;social business design\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; Are specialisms a hindrance for PR professionals? by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nAs regular readers of this blog will know, I’m very interested at the moment about what the future of agencies will look like. And I’m looking forward to the PRCA debate on this exact subject taking place next week.\nSo I was intrigued by a blog post from Steve Rubel that was highlighted to me yesterday by Drew Benvie.\nSystems Thinking\nThe gist of Steve’s thinking is that despite the current trend towards specialisation – e.g. people that are ‘experts’ in digital and social media – More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/03/money/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s talk about money.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Porter describes strategy as defining and attending to those activities at which an organisation must excel in order to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby create sustained value for its shareholders (or sustainable value in the case of non-profits).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce you\u0026rsquo;ve articulated why your organisation exists (the mission), and what you want it to be (the vision), the strategy describes the \u003cem\u003ewhat\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003ewho\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003ehow\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003ewhen\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003ewhere\u003c/em\u003e needed to pursue the vision, and specifically how these differ from the competition. How these help beat your competition.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, as hard as strategy formulation is, the really hard part is putting it into action. The Balanced Scorecard Institute finds that 70% of organisations with a strategy simply fail to execute it. And this becomes the more obvious the further away from the sale / the product / the service you get; the more you get into the intangible assets pivotal to your success.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarketing and PR are intangible assets. They are intangible investments. We all know that the right mix of the panoply of marketing and PR activities is essential to organisational success – to the successful definition of organisational strategy and its execution – but too often we\u0026rsquo;re not quite sure how so. This is most apparent when, particularly in harder times, marketing and PR are considered cost centres first and foremost, and cost centres that can be cut.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Money"},{"content":"I was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the Digital Publishing Forum . It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.\nI sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What\u0026rsquo;s the ROI?\u0026hellip;\nOf the latest rebrand? Of the office refurb? Of the internal communications activity? Of the training and development programme? Of the upgrade to Windows 7? Of the new standard issue smartphones? Of the stakeholder engagement via social media? If you\u0026rsquo;d like to see where we went from there, here\u0026rsquo;s the presentation:\nThe ROI of social media View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake Thanks to Julia Lampam (@JuliaLampam ) for the invitation to speak.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/03/whats-the-roi-of-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI was delighted to have the opportunity to present my take on the ROI of social media to approximately 80 people yesterday evening at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/digital-publishing-forum/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDigital Publishing Forum\u003c/a\u003e\n. It seems this was a hot topic of interest; as well it should be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI sought to put the topic into perspective with the following challenge. What\u0026rsquo;s the ROI?\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the latest rebrand?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the office refurb?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the internal communications activity?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the training and development programme?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the upgrade to Windows 7?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the new standard issue smartphones?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOf the stakeholder engagement via social media?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;d like to see where we went from there, here\u0026rsquo;s the presentation:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What's the ROI of social media?"},{"content":"Neil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years\u0026rsquo; managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.\nNeil now runs Alpha Voice Communications .\nI\u0026rsquo;m increasingly pleased with the live CIPR TV format and the questions submitted via the streaming video player, Twitter and Facebook. Without such participation we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have thought to ask Neil about the internal communications aspects of the BP crisis, for example, although the question about Neil\u0026rsquo;s regard for the controversial (ex-)CEO, Tony Hayward, was to be expected!\nNeil\u0026rsquo;s responses are compulsory watching for every PR practitioner imho.\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-MRN-Do-k ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/03/in-conversation-about-the-bp-deepwater-crisis-with-neil-chapman/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNeil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years\u0026rsquo; managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"In conversation about the BP Deepwater crisis with Neil Chapman"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It\u0026rsquo;s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.\nThanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here\u0026rsquo;s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic \u0026lsquo;Content – An illustrated history \u0026rsquo;, which is easy to breeze through :-)\nInfluence in the age of the social web View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/03/influence-in-the-age-of-the-social-web--keynote-to-euprera/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It\u0026rsquo;s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0749449683\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Young and David Phillips\u003c/a\u003e\n for the invitation. Here\u0026rsquo;s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic \u0026lsquo;\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/01/content-an-illustrated-history/\" title=\"Content – an illustrated history\"\u003eContent – An illustrated history\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;, which is easy to breeze through :-)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA"},{"content":"Real-time PR is a hot topic.\nThis is nothing to do with fashion, but the unavoidable pressures of modern PR. David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s November 2010 book, \u0026ldquo;Real-time Marketing and PR \u0026rdquo; is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and with Twitter responses frequently meaningless after an hour\u0026rsquo;s delay, if not minutes, and many conversations requiring a response within the hour or two, awaiting the Monday meeting to debate possible responses is now simply unrealistic.\nI presented at Social PR 2011 today on just this topic. The main take home\u0026hellip; it isn\u0026rsquo;t easy.\nHow to plan \u0026amp; execute real-time PR that delivers for your organisation View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake Being the eyes, ears and mouth of an organisation to the drumbeat of the daily news was never easy. Being the eyes, ears and mouth, with heightened sensitivity to influence and be influenced in real-time, requires enhanced levels of strategic diligence, meticulous planning, training, constant attention to detail and rigorous measurement.\nReality is perception.\nIt’s impossible to fake it.\nReal-time PR must, by nature, be authentic.\nReal-time PR marks the death of the persuasion / ‘spin’ school.\nLong live two-way, symmetric PR fostering mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/real-time-pr-demands-rigorous-strategic-alignment/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eReal-time PR is a hot topic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is nothing to do with fashion, but the unavoidable pressures of modern PR. David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s November 2010 book, \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470645954.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eReal-time Marketing and PR\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and with Twitter responses frequently meaningless after an hour\u0026rsquo;s delay, if not minutes, and many conversations requiring a response within the hour or two, awaiting the Monday meeting to debate possible responses is now simply unrealistic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Real-time PR demands rigorous strategic alignment"},{"content":" You can now get your hands on The Marketing Century – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book\u0026rsquo;s introduction.\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I\u0026rsquo;m more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.\nBuy at Amazon / CIM / The Book Depository / Blackwell\u0026rsquo;s / Waterstone\u0026rsquo;s . And more info at Google Books .\n1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , Peppers \u0026amp; Rogers Group) The Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company\u0026rsquo;s long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer.\n2. Segmentation (Professor Malcolm McDonald ) Malcolm explains that all organisations need a better understanding of all their customers and the complexity of the market, and this is where market segmentation is critical. There is a general lack of understanding about market segmentation and especially the real needs of customers in mature markets. This leads organisations to trade on price and, therefore, makes them behave as if they were in a commodity market. This is the whole point of market segmentation: competing only on price assumes that price is the main requirement of customers, whereas this is rarely the case.\n3. Innovation (Professors John Saunders and Veronica Wong ) John and Veronica explain how innovative companies succeed: what they do to ensure success, the pitfalls they avoid and the lessons that others can learn from them. The challenges of commercialisation and taking new products to market are also described. With the twin forces of globalisation and technology giving rise to some of the most significant, memorable and valuable business developments, innovation is an essential aspect of marketing. It has come to be viewed as equivalent to new product development, but any new activity that improves the organisation by adding value for customers is important.\n4. Digital Marketing (Philip Sheldrake ) Technology and advertising feature strongly in this chapter. This was almost too long to write, such is the burgeoning volume of technological opportunities, influences and challenges that are shaping the next marketing century. It is essential because technology is enabling so much modern communication, leading to greater knowledge and understanding. Computers power the Internet and modern telecommunications, providing an infrastructure that delivers consumer content, conversations, applications and services. This, in turn, has attracted mass involvement and participation, which has led us to digital marketing and its language of persuasion. Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of platforms, media, channels, tools, services and applications. This chapter provides an expert guide to the past, present and future, highlighting some of the most significant, interesting or impactful developments.\n5. Sales and Business Development (Beth Rogers ) Beth eloquently address the fact that selling has often not received the recognition or respect it deserves during the last 100 years. The point is one of extremes: when is bad it is ghastly, and when it succeeds and is at its best it is a triumph. However, between these extremes it is still never less than essential. This chapter provides a fascinating guide to the development of sales, what makes a great sale and salesperson, as well as the changing character of selling. This echoes points made in other chapters and different contexts: selling, like so much in modern marketing, relies on a trusted, ethical approach, innovation and the capacity to build profitable long-term relationships based on a clear understanding of the customer. It is also where \u0026rsquo;the rubber hits the road\u0026rsquo; and connects a wide range of activities in the organisation. For that reason, it is both strategic and tactical: an issue that is recognised as being important by everyone from the chief executive to the most junior new recruit.\n6. Customer Relationship Management (Professor Merlin Stone ) The CRM chapter takes up the point that customer insights and relationships are a vital, influential component of business success. Merlin explains that the value of CRM lies in its ability to help businesses improve their understanding of their customers. Organisations that do this effectively are more competitive and profitable because they are better able to segment and appeal to different customes, develop and maintain profitable customer relationships, decide how to handle unprofitable customers and customise their offer and promotional their offer and promotional efforts. Achieving success often requires sophisticated technology and analytical skills, but by enabling organisations to focus on how they interact with customers, CRM enhances the customer experience and builds long-term customer value.\n7. Branding (Graham Hales , Managing Director, Interbrand London) The concepts of dialogue, understanding and trust form an important element of this chapter. Graham defines a brand as a living assets that is brought to life across all touchpoints, which, if properly managed, creates identification, differentiation and value. Brands matter for many reasons: they raise awareness of a product or service; they show what is distinctive about the product or business; and they convey emotional relevance, making the case for a purchase against other alternatives. The fact that they can influence choices can result in price premiums, loyalty and advocacy that will create revenue and profit for the owner, building brand equity and shareholder value. The evolution of branding is interesting and even today it is a keenly debated subject, perhaps because a brand often conveys what is is that a society values at a given moment in time.\n8. Advertising (Jonathan Gabay ) Jonathan makes the point that during the marketing century advertising has changed drammatically: not just in style but in its approach, meaning and substance. What started as a tool controlled by the few to reach the many has undergone a transformation – one that is still happening – with technology enabling consumers to choose the advertising campaigns and brands they allow into their lives. This changing relationship and shift in power require an increasingly sophisticated, subtle approach, one that draws on technology and a clear understanding of people and behaviour. From its earliest days advertising was closely connected with psychology, focusing on influence, persuasion and the benefits of understanding human behaviour.\n9. Public Relations (Paul Mylrea , Head of Press and Media Relations at BBC) The forces of technology and globalisation combine with the need for an ethical approach in both life and work in this chapter. Clearly, much has been achieved and gained in 100 years of marketing, but accusations of propaganda and \u0026lsquo;spin\u0026rsquo; have often been in the background of PR, even as its popularity and value have grown. Good public relations remain critical and this insightful, intelligent chapter explains that PR is an essential aspect of organisational life because it is about creating dialogue and generating understanding between an organisation and it publics. It facilitates a relationship and enables people to participate in a genuine conversation, with all that implies. It is the discipline that looks after reputation. Just as an individual might engage in a conversation or dialogue to express a view, persuade, influence, enquire, challenge, manage expectations or understand, all the while staying true to their own values, so it is with PR at an organisational level.\n10. Internal Marketing (Keith Glanfield ) A subject that at one time would have easily been misunderstood is increasingly recognised as being an essential, indispensable way of achieving short-term profits and long-term growth, as well as greater efficiency, brand equity and shareholder value. Marketing can be seen as a single thread that runs throughout the organisation, connecting everything that happens internally with customers and others outside the business. This marketing thread needs to be consistent, it needs to inform and set standards, it needs to be real and present. Above all, it shapes the culture – the way things are done – and this affects key messages, branding, positioning and the way the business appears. Issues of trust, loyalty, customer relationships, perceptions and appeal all benefit from greater internal dialogue, understanding and marketing.\n11. Marketing and Sustainability (John Grant ) Sustainability is an issue that has always been present but has come to greater prominence relatively recently. John makes the point that while brand marketing and sustainability are often thought of as opposites (the former urges people to consume more, the latter to consume less), it is far from a simple case of two entirely separate and contradictory domains. Like many cultural opposites, brands and sustainability are intertwined.\n12. Social Marketing (Paul White and Veronica Sharp) This chapter explains how marketers tackle some of society\u0026rsquo;s most challenging problems by using commercial marketing practices together with other techniques to change the behaviour and attitudes of individual – no small task. Veronica Sharp recognises the impact of marketing and the difference it can make: in particular, the fact that it adds genuine value and is increasingly used to improve the quality of people\u0026rsquo;s decisions and lives. The concept succeeds by recognising that people do not operate in isolation. Social marketers have to overcome significant barriers to change and deeply ingrained attitudes, often among the most disadvantaged in society. To achieve this, they merge marketing with insights from social science to devise new types of marketing campaign that influence people\u0026rsquo;s behaviour and devisions.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/the-marketing-century--a-compilation-of-expert-insight/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/12/book-reviews-or-what-to-give-a-marketing-and-pr-professional-for-christmas/themarketingcentury/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The Marketing Century\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/themarketingcentury.jpg\" title=\"The Marketing Century\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nYou can now get your hands on \u003cem\u003eThe Marketing Century\u003c/em\u003e – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book\u0026rsquo;s introduction.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I\u0026rsquo;m more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBuy at \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0470660155\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon\u003c/a\u003e\n / \u003ca href=\"http://www.cim.co.uk/shop/books/bookDetails/themarketingcent.aspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIM\u003c/a\u003e\n / \u003ca href=\"http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780470660157\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Book Depository\u003c/a\u003e\n / \u003ca href=\"http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/The_Marketing_Century/9780470660157\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlackwell\u0026rsquo;s\u003c/a\u003e\n / \u003ca href=\"http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/jeremy\u0026#43;j-\u0026#43;kourdi/chartered\u0026#43;institute\u0026#43;of\u0026#43;marketing/the\u0026#43;marketing\u0026#43;century/7647283\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWaterstone\u0026rsquo;s\u003c/a\u003e\n. And more info at \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=cY3KbwAACAAJ\u0026amp;dq=9780470660157\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle Books\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"1-strategic-marketing-martha-rogers-and-don-peppers-peppers--rogers-group\"\u003e1. Strategic Marketing (\u003ca href=\"http://www.peppersandrogersgroup.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMartha Rogers and Don Peppers\u003c/a\u003e\n, Peppers \u0026amp; Rogers Group)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company\u0026rsquo;s long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight"},{"content":"Today, I’m in Paris. I’m working with the Mozilla Europe team to prepare for the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and Firefox Mobile. And this prompts me to write here on the subject of privacy – a hot topic and one on which your organisation can lead, to your customers’ advantage and yours.\nMozilla is a global, non-profit organisation dedicated to making the Web better. It emphasises principle over profit, and believes that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.\nThis means that whilst Internet Explorer must justify its existence to Microsoft, Safari to Apple, and Chrome to Google, Firefox is only answerable to you. Many consider Mozilla to be the sole reason we’ve all moved on from the terrible browsing experience Internet Explorer 6 gave over 90% of Web users back in 2003. And now Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe.\nBack to privacy. Do you know what information your browser is reporting about your browsing habits? Do you know that some high profile websites add as many as 100 tracking devices to your computer?\nNow, lest you think this is some kind of hippy essay, I’m a capitalist. I believe the for-profit motive is the best mechanism we’ve found to date to improve life. But we’ve also seen in recent times that some free markets require a bit of intervention now and then; a spot of regulation. Indeed, a recent Business Week article identified how free-marketers are as fond of regulation as they are more widely reported to dislike it.\nTo date, we have witnessed an arms race to get the most detailed personal profile of customers / prospects / users / visitors. And there’s a reason my biography on the Meanwhile website says: “Some say Philip can see a halo of ones and zeros around people’s heads. Which is just as well, because therein lies marketing nirvana.”\nYet, as information technologies become increasingly pervasive, as more interactions of many more types are logged and sent back to base, it becomes rapidly obvious that high levels of “spying” or “eavesdropping” risk some of our most cherished characteristics of liberal democracies.\nMozilla has lead the conversation with what’s become known as the Do Not Track feature. Once set by the user, owners of websites should take note and do exactly what this feature says on the tin – cease tracking.\nWill your organisation demonstrate its authenticity? Will it live up to those brand values that head up your marketing and PR strategies? Will you comply with the spirit of Do Not Track? Will you make sure your technology partners do so on your behalf? Will you accrue the reputation as leaders in this regard?\nOr will you just await the legislation in each part of the world?\nA bientot. Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nEight out of ten cat owners are wrong by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nDo humans really have a head for numbers?\nEight out of ten owners say their cats prefer Whiskas. (Other pet foods are available.) Do you remember this famous advertising slogan? Maybe Pedigree Pet Foods would have done better if they had said “80 per cent of cat owners” instead of “eight out of ten”. The reason, according to new consumer research is that even though we know that the two figures represent the same numerical proportions we somehow feel that 80% is bigger than 8 out of 10. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Engagement Accelerates Media Fragmentation by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nAs momentum in the mobile phone market swings clearly in favor of smartphones, more people are adopting mobile apps, while device performance increased and yet prices continue to drop.\nMeanwhile, the majority of U.S. mobile service subscribers still have a feature phone. But eMarketer predicts smartphone ownership will rise from 31 percent this year to 43 percent by 2015. Nearly 110 million Americans will have a smartphone by the end of 2015.\n\u0026ldquo;Smartphone owners already command the majority of marketer attention,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Location Based Offers (LBO) – valid business model or just more L-BS? by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nFollowing on from my recent post on “Foursquare fatigue”, and the recent launch of Facebook deals in the the UK, I thought it would be a good time to look at these initiatives, from both the consumer angle as well as the retailer.\nAnecdotal discussions with a number of retailers as well as consumers point to the fact that Location Based Offers (LBO) are still in their infancy.\nIndeed I was chatting to a couple of people at Social Media Week last week right after a representative from Groupon spoke, and two separate experiences with the up and coming group savings offer website. More\u0026hellip; Mobile advertising’s success lies on the second screen not the main screen by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nI have Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to thank for a new analogy to debunk pundit thinking on mobile advertising. Yesterday in Barcelona, Dick gave a great speech at the annual Mobile World Congress. You can watch his 30 minute speech online, where “registration” (for spam collection) is required but it is free.\nDick said that calling Twitter a microblogging service misses its transformative impact. Like calling an automobile a “horseless carriage”.\nIn the same way, saying that 20XX is the “year of mobile” More\u0026hellip; The 2011 Twitter Brand Bowl: And the winners are… by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nSuper Bowl XLV is now in the history books. 2011 is the year that the Green Bay Packers reclaimed the NFL Championship. And, it is also the year that now holds the record for the most viewed television broadcast of any kind in U.S. history, attracting an audience of over 111 million viewers.\nWhile many watched the game, it is the advertisements that spark conversations online and offline. Going back to Apple’s 1984 commercial directed by Ridley Scott that introduced the Macintosh, the Super Bowl is now as much about football as it is about the ads that support it. More\u0026hellip; Blocking Facebook and Corporate Regime Change by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;m wondering when will companies that block employee access to social networks go through the same sort of revolution as Egypt? I think it will be soon. These companies are ripe for uprising.\nI was fascinated by Sunday\u0026rsquo;s 60 Minutes piece on Wael Ghonim, Google\u0026rsquo;s regional marketing manager for the Middle East. He talked about how Egyptian people came together via Facebook.\nWatch the interview with Wael Ghonim and Egypt\u0026rsquo;s New Age Revolution.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a Ghonim quote that interested me the most: More\u0026hellip; Changes to Pages signal yet another change in Facebook’s attitude to brands by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nI’ve blogged before about the differences between Twitter and Facebook.\nThe former is a very open platform where everyone is encouraged to see everything. Twitter is a blank canvas where individuals and brands (and fictional characters, animals etc. etc.) can decide how they want to use the tool (and the user generated creation of things like RTs, hashtags and even follow Fridays demonstrates this nicely).\nFacebook on the other hand has, from the start, approached things from the opposite direction. More\u0026hellip; Twitter for business workshop deck and cheat sheet by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s a deck for a workshop that we run for clients and prospects on Twitter for business. There’s also an accompanying Twitter Cheat Sheet for Business that FreshBusinessThinking.com has published. It’s basic stuff but is a good introduction for anyone that hasn’t used Twitter before. More\u0026hellip; Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI\u0026rsquo;ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile. We\u0026rsquo;re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I\u0026rsquo;ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.\nIn short:\nPreviously distinct disciplines are converging There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy. More\u0026hellip; 63.2 Million People in the U.S. Own Smartphones by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\ncomScore reported key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending December 2010. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. market.\nThe December report found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 24.8 percent market share, while RIM led among smartphone platforms with 31.6 percent market share.\nFor the three month average period ending in December, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices. More\u0026hellip; 71 Top Online Customer Communities: The Big List by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nOnline customer communities are everywhere \u0026ndash; you just have to look for them \u0026ndash; sometimes in unlikely places. Because they are dedicated to serving customers, often they are not evangelized to the general public or consumer audiences. But they are alive, well and thriving within many enterprises. By way of definition, when we say \u0026ldquo;online customer communities,\u0026rdquo; we mean an interactive, often gated, website that a company sets up for customers to collaborate on topics of mutual interest. And, we are NOT including customer service websites; More\u0026hellip; PR Filter continues search for relevant press release content by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPR Filter from Realwire finds press releases for journalists and bloggers based on the content that they’ve published online. It’s a bid to kill PR spam. When I log in a web page displays relevant press releases from all the major wire services (BusinessWire, Marketwire, Realwire and Sourcewire etc) and major media and technology web pages.\nThis week PR Filter added a search function to the platform to enable anyone to search its firehouse of 15,000 press releases per week.\nI caught up with Realwire boss Adam Parker (@aparker) today and asked him what lay behind this development behind this development. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/do-not-track/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eToday, I’m in Paris. I’m working with the Mozilla Europe team to prepare for the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and Firefox Mobile. And this prompts me to write here on the subject of privacy – a hot topic and one on which your organisation can lead, to your customers’ advantage and yours.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMozilla is a global, non-profit organisation dedicated to making the Web better. It emphasises principle over profit, and believes that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis means that whilst Internet Explorer must justify its existence to Microsoft, Safari to Apple, and Chrome to Google, Firefox is only answerable to you. Many consider Mozilla to be the sole reason we’ve all moved on from the terrible browsing experience Internet Explorer 6 gave over 90% of Web users back in 2003. And now Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBack to privacy. Do you know what information your browser is reporting about your browsing habits? Do you know that some high profile websites add as many as 100 tracking devices to your computer?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow, lest you think this is some kind of hippy essay, I’m a capitalist. I believe the for-profit motive is the best mechanism we’ve found to date to improve life. But we’ve also seen in recent times that some free markets require a bit of intervention now and then; a spot of regulation. Indeed, a recent Business Week article identified how free-marketers are as fond of regulation as they are more widely reported to dislike it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Do Not Track"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile . We\u0026rsquo;re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I\u0026rsquo;ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.\nIn short:\nPreviously distinct disciplines are converging There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy. Here\u0026rsquo;s how I present the situation in my upcoming book, The Business of Influence (Wiley, April 2011):\nLet me generalise. Marketing is too hit and miss. Advertising is in spasm. Public relations is polarised, with a minority that ‘get it’ and a majority that don’t know they don’t. Customer service is drowning. The ‘digital’ slash ‘social’ lot are trying hard to live up to the false promise they promised. The Chief Exec is frustrated that things just aren’t gelling. And most everyone is inward focused in the current recessionary (or at least ‘non-boom’) climate, focused on this month’s costs and cash flows.\nIs this fair? No, I said I was generalising. But I have spoken with a fair few board directors from different disciplinary backgrounds in the last year or two that hold at least one of these views about the other disciplines, and not too rarely about their own.\nConfusion reigns. We have SEO shops issuing press releases (and running reputational risks ), advertising firms recruiting PR consultants , PR firms brushing up their SEO , and a “media buying shop” being awarded a major digital PR contract . Many organisations, not just end-users, appear to be suffering so-called social network fatigue.\nSome baggage handlers break a guitar and some customer service staff claim ignorance and then it’s all hands fighting the fire. Nokia’s failure to understand changes in its market is partially attributed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek to it being in Finland “that meant it wasn\u0026rsquo;t in the mix of innovative ideas, which would have forced it to question its assumptions – and watch its back – every day .” Separately, a Harvard Business Review article acclaims Nokia for its success in Asia in bringing the customer into the product design process (Rethinking Marketing, January 2010).\nThe over-arching conclusion of my book is picked out on the back cover:\nMedia has most definitely evolved, as have the ways in which we contemplate, design, communicate and execute strategy. And rather than technological evolution, we’re plainly in the midst of a technological revolution.\nWe have no choice then but to reframe marketing and PR in the context of 21st Century technology, 21st Century media and disintermediation, and 21st Century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.\nOur new consultancy, Meanwhile, does just that. Not only does this reframing inform our approach to defining projects and longer-term relationships with clients, but it has informed the selection of the partners ourselves. The uninformed might call us eclectic; the informed would call us transmedia, or cross-disciplinary; my colleague Gabbi Cahane calls it brutally relevant, a turn of phrase that has been adopted into our key messaging.\nBut what does this other phrase \u0026ldquo;venture marketing\u0026rdquo; mean exactly? Well it’s our way to describe the combination of the social influence of marketing and communications and the entrepreneurial approach of private equity and venture capital. We believe that the way we do business and get rewarded should be aligned with the way our clients do business and get rewarded. We like to structure deals that are founded upon mutual commitments, risks and rewards; playing to that justifiable trend I mentioned earlier re. accountability.\nIs this the philosophy and strategy of the new model agency in the 21st Century? Time will tell, but we definitely think so.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/meanwhile-a-new-approach-to-marketing-and-pr-consultancy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.andmeanwhile.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Meanwhile\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/meanwhile.png\" title=\"Meanwhile\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nI\u0026rsquo;ve teamed up with some very useful chaps to form \u003ca href=\"http://www.andmeanwhile.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMeanwhile\u003c/a\u003e\n. We\u0026rsquo;re defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I\u0026rsquo;ll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn short:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePreviously distinct disciplines are converging\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThere is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s how I present the situation in my upcoming book, \u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e (Wiley, April 2011):\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy"},{"content":"I need your help.\nMy book, The Business of Influence, comes out with Wiley in April. That means the proofs go to press 24th February, and the URL to the book\u0026rsquo;s accompanying website will be writ therein. And what better URL could one have than thebusinessofinfluence.com?\nThe problem is, this domain is registered. According to a whois lookup, the name of the owner is Beeta Vahdat, a \u0026ldquo;principal of IMANI Communication Design\u0026rdquo; living in the Melbourne, Australia area. Ms. Vahdat does not appear to be using the domain name, so I\u0026rsquo;d like to see if I can buy it from her\u0026hellip; if only I could get in touch.\nI wonder, do you know anyone in Melbourne you might ask? Perhaps you live in Melbourne. Perhaps you live in Melbourne and work in the same line of business (note to self to email Trevor Young immediately after this post). If so, I\u0026rsquo;d love you to ping your network and point them here to explain my predicament. There\u0026rsquo;s a free book in it! :-)\nThanks in advance, Philip.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/hi-do-you-know-beeta-vahdat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI need your help.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy book, \u003cem\u003eThe Business of Influence\u003c/em\u003e, comes out with Wiley in April. That means the proofs go to press 24th February, and the URL to the book\u0026rsquo;s accompanying website will be writ therein. And what better URL could one have than \u003cstrong\u003ethebusinessofinfluence.com\u003c/strong\u003e?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe problem is, this domain is registered. According to a whois lookup, the name of the owner is Beeta Vahdat, a \u0026ldquo;principal of IMANI Communication Design\u0026rdquo; living in the Melbourne, Australia area. Ms. Vahdat does not appear to be using the domain name, so I\u0026rsquo;d like to see if I can buy it from her\u0026hellip; if only I could get in touch.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Hi, do you know Beeta Vahdat?"},{"content":"Just over two years ago I posted about a \u0026rsquo;lost cat\u0026rsquo; poster stapled to trees in my neighbourhood, but a poster with a difference\u0026hellip; this was a \u0026lsquo;cat found\u0026rsquo; poster saying thank you to everyone who had helped recover the treasured pet.\nSometimes in business it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to think that the value exchange, where I give you what you want in exchange for what I want, is the be all and end all\u0026hellip; the customer has the product or service they were looking for, and we get money (or other currency, like attention).\nBut every business must strive for a relational rather than transactional customer, moving the focus from the once-off purchase to the lifetime value of the customer and the network of friends and family he / she might bring with them; so emotion comes into it, not just economic arithmetic.\nMoreover, perhaps the transaction doesn\u0026rsquo;t complete. I always check my shed to make sure I haven\u0026rsquo;t locked the latest lost cat in there – and whilst I wasn\u0026rsquo;t directly responsible for returning the cat in question above, I was thanked anyway.\nDo you say \u0026ldquo;thank you\u0026rdquo;? If you do, do you do so in a way that\u0026rsquo;s believable? Authentic? Or in a \u0026ldquo;have a nice day\u0026rdquo; automated sort of fashion that communicates no emotion whatsoever and just constitutes pollution?\nI have a hypothesis that only those that are passionate about what they do and what they sell can find genuine feeling when conveying their thanks. And I look for this enthusiasm when considering my lifetime patronage of a cafe, bank, web host and, well, everything.\nThank you.\nThank you for your attention, to this Friday Roundup and the previous 160 or so!\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nShould B2B Copywriting Be More Conversational? by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nShould you write the way you talk? Many copywriters I follow (Dean Rieck for example) and learn from certainly think so. But persuading the B2B marketing crowd of conversational copywriting’s merits is another matter.\nConversational copywriting is an informal style that mimics they way you’d talk to a friend, but with all the ‘ums’ and ‘you knows’ taken out. Readers find it easy to read because it’s a friendly and fun way of writing. It offers benefits for copywriters too. More\u0026hellip; CIPR TV show notes: Bell Pottinger’s Claire Cater and CIPR CEO Jane Wilson on the Big Society by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nWhatever your view of the Big Society – and it’s clear that opinion is polarised – it’s success, or otherwise will require PR and communications to mobilise communities. Russell Goldsmith and I caught up with Bell Pottinger’s Claire Cater and CIPR CEO Jane Wilson on CIPR TV yesterday in a bid to grips with the Big Society and how changes to Government policy are likely to impact PR professionals.\nThe timing of the initiative couldn’t be worst coming as it does on the back of massive cuts in the public sector. More\u0026hellip; B2B Online Marketing Spending Outlook for 2011 by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that according to the results of a recent market study of business-to-business (B2B) marketers, traditional online tactics are still important.\nJust over half of B2B marketers surveyed told BtoB Magazine their budgets would go up this year, but by less than 15 percent.\nThe primary marketing goal was customer acquisition (69%), with the greatest number of respondents expected spending increases for online (78%).\nIn contrast, 44 percent of the survey respondents said they would be spending more on events and 36 percent said more on direct mail. More\u0026hellip; Even Scoble agrees with me that Quora is all hype! by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nOn Thursday, I wrote a blog about how I was amazed at the amount of hype Quora was receiving. One of the main perpetrators of this hype has been tech blogger extraordinare, Robert Scoble.\nA month ago, he was full of praise for the service:\n“Thanks Quora for providing a great community and way for people to communicate about what’s interesting in their lives in a new way. That’s innovation in blogging.”\nAnd yet, today we get this:\n“Turns out I was totally wrong [about it being a good service for blogging]. More\u0026hellip; Government Social Media: Five Questions For 2011 by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nGuest writer Dr. Mark Drapeau is the Director of U.S. Public Sector Social Engagement at Microsoft, and the editor of SECTOR: PUBLIC, a new online magazine about how science, technology, and innovation are affecting the public sector, public service, and civic improvement. You can follow him on Twitter at @cheeky_geeky.\nThe Federal government has made a good deal of progress toward being more transparent, collaborative, and participatory during the two years since President Obama took office. More\u0026hellip; Great example of Australian politician using social media for election campaigning by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nI noted with interest a new website haveabeerwithmike.com.au which has been launched to support Mike Baird (@mikebairdmp), the current Member for the Seat of Manly, one of Sydney’s beach suburbs.\nIn the great Aussie tradition of “having a beer”, Mike not only invites you to book him for a beer/coffee/chat via the website, but also shows you his recent check-ins.\nIt is a great site, and harnesses the power of social media well.\nAs mentioned on the site,\n“Mike wants to have a beer with you. More\u0026hellip; What The Daily Could Mean for PRs by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nToday was a momentous day in the digital publishing world, or even the entire publishing world. Maybe. Rupert Murdoch and some equally big deal types from Apple got up on stage to launch The Daily, the first newspaper designed solely for the iPad. Solely for now that is. Although Murdoch believes “this year and last year belongs to Apple” in tablet terms, he isn’t ruling out farming The Daily out to more tablets as they emerge. The new paper will feature 100 pages of fresh, original content daily, costing 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year on subscription. More\u0026hellip; Are you a content consumer or creator? by Brian Solis of BrianSolis.com\nYou’ll soon learn why I’m posting shorter, but more frequent posts…In the mean time, I wanted to share with you something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about these days.\nThink about the generation or two before us. A significant portion of free time was spent consuming media. From print to broadcast, everyday people simply digested information and content presented to them. But then everything changed. We were gifted with the ability to share what we think, feel, and experience, on demand. More\u0026hellip; Six Reasons Firms Build B2B Customer Communities by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThe B2B online community may be the forgotten partner of the glitzy, headline and spotlight-grabbing B2C communities at the center of the social media revolution. In social media land, there is nothing more eye-catching than a community for a popular TV show, a cool consumer-facing site for coffee lovers or a sports team. Not to mention the tantalizing sound of the word \u0026ldquo;monetization!\u0026rdquo;\nOK, the B2C communities are big, often flashy and backed by recognizable brand names. They\u0026rsquo;re fun to talk about, as compared to the ho-hum business of building communities that help customers find solutions to core business issues in areas like technology, manufacturing or insurance. More\u0026hellip; Riding a real time Amazon announcement to reach an influential journalist by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLast week I delivered a keynote about Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas.\n(Watch this space \u0026ndash; I will be releasing a free video of my presentation in a few weeks.)\nA few days after the talk, Richard Harrison, president of SMTP.com contacted me to say that he had just used one of the techniques I discussed in my talk. Richard leveraged something going on in the news in real-time to get his company noticed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll let Richard tell you what happened: More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/02/thank-you/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eJust over two years ago \u003ca href=\"../2009/01/communication-when-you-dont-have-anything-to-flog/\"\u003eI posted about a \u0026rsquo;lost cat\u0026rsquo; poster\u003c/a\u003e\n stapled to trees in my neighbourhood, but a poster with a difference\u0026hellip; this was a \u0026lsquo;cat found\u0026rsquo; poster saying thank you to everyone who had helped recover the treasured pet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes in business it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to think that the value exchange, where I give you what you want in exchange for what I want, is the be all and end all\u0026hellip; the customer has the product or service they were looking for, and we get money (or other currency, like attention).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut every business must strive for a relational rather than transactional customer, moving the focus from the once-off purchase to the lifetime value of the customer and the network of friends and family he / she might bring with them; so emotion comes into it, not just economic arithmetic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMoreover, perhaps the transaction doesn\u0026rsquo;t complete. I always check my shed to make sure I haven\u0026rsquo;t locked the latest lost cat in there – and whilst I wasn\u0026rsquo;t directly responsible for returning the cat in question above, I was thanked anyway.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDo you say \u0026ldquo;thank you\u0026rdquo;? If you do, do you do so in a way that\u0026rsquo;s believable? Authentic? Or in a \u0026ldquo;have a nice day\u0026rdquo; automated sort of fashion that communicates no emotion whatsoever and just constitutes pollution?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have a hypothesis that only those that are passionate about what they do and what they sell can find genuine feeling when conveying their thanks. And I look for this enthusiasm when considering my lifetime patronage of a cafe, bank, web host and, well, everything.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThank you.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThank you for your attention, to this Friday Roundup and the previous 160 or so!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Thank you"},{"content":"UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)\nUPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format .\nUPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.\nUPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock \u0026amp; @rulsCC .\nUPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu\u0026rsquo;s brand communications going forward. Cool.\nUPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare\u0026rsquo;s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.\nUPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don\u0026rsquo;t know why we didn\u0026rsquo;t think of it earlier! Embedded below.\nNo-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what\u0026rsquo;s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.\nWho would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?\nWho would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?\nWho would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?\nWho would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.\nI am fascinated with the history of media and content, its present and its future, and being a communicator I wanted to share my awe in a way that would prompt others to share it with their friends and family. So I joined forces with Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ), an outstanding illustrator, to design \u0026ldquo;Content – an illustrated history\u0026rdquo;.\nI work with a social and media technology company that has developed a social news aggregator, My Taptu , so you\u0026rsquo;ll forgive me if I have positioned this beautiful little app to represent the best of the present day – but that\u0026rsquo;s because it does :-)\nLastly, please feel free to share this in anyway you like in line with the creative commons license, but if you have a high-volume website I\u0026rsquo;d appreciate it if you downloaded a copy to your own server rather than kill mine! (Right click to save the image.) Thanks.\nContent: An illustrated history by Sheldrake \u0026amp; Karoshikula is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License .\nThe video http://youtu.be/wp2eUSL4oHc ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/content-an-illustrated-history/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 1: Thank you to \u003ca href=\"http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/25/illustrated-history-social-news\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWired\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://mashable.com/2011/01/25/the-history-of-content/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashable\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/dmscott\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@dmscott\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/guykawaski\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@guykawaski\u003c/a\u003e\n and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 2: Now available in \u003ca href=\"http://slidesha.re/hPYjnd\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSlideshare format\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 4: Now available \u003ca href=\"http://www.wannaflock.com/2011/01/la-historia-del-contenido-infografia/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ein Spanish\u003c/a\u003e\n. Thanks to \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/FollowFlock\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@FollowFlock\u003c/a\u003e\n \u0026amp; \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/rulsCC\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@rulsCC\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu\u0026rsquo;s brand communications going forward. Cool.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 6: The \u003ca href=\"http://slidesha.re/hPYjnd\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSlideshare format\u003c/a\u003e\n made the number 1 slot on Slideshare\u0026rsquo;s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don\u0026rsquo;t know why we didn\u0026rsquo;t think of it earlier! Embedded below.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what\u0026rsquo;s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho would have thought \u003cem\u003ethirty\u003c/em\u003e years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho would have thought \u003cem\u003etwenty\u003c/em\u003e years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho would have thought \u003cem\u003eten\u003c/em\u003e years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWho would have thought \u003cem\u003efive\u003c/em\u003e years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Content - an illustrated history"},{"content":"This week\u0026rsquo;s CIPR TV focused on the formation of the Public Affairs Council in response to the Public Administration Select Committee\u0026rsquo;s recommendations in its December 2008 report, Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall . We\u0026rsquo;re delighted that Elizabeth France, UKPAC\u0026rsquo;s chair, and Keith Johnston, CIPR and UKPAC board member, could join us to explain what\u0026rsquo;s going on, who it affects and how.\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlL4w1i _4WA\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/the-new-governance-of-lobbying--in-conversation-with-elizabeth-france-and-keith-johnston/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis week\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.tv\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR TV\u003c/a\u003e\n focused on the formation of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.publicaffairscouncil.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePublic Affairs Council\u003c/a\u003e\n in response to the Public Administration Select Committee\u0026rsquo;s recommendations in its December 2008 report, \u003ca href=\"http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubadm/36/36i.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall\u003c/a\u003e\n. We\u0026rsquo;re delighted that Elizabeth France, UKPAC\u0026rsquo;s chair, and Keith Johnston, CIPR and UKPAC board member, could join us to explain what\u0026rsquo;s going on, who it affects and how.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlL4w1i\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlL4w1i\u003c/a\u003e\n_4WA\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The new governance of lobbying – in conversation with Elizabeth France and Keith Johnston"},{"content":"I first published this overview back in 2004. I\u0026rsquo;m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it\u0026rsquo;s interesting. No seriously, it is.\nWhen is a web page secure? Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts \u0026ldquo;https://\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;http://\u0026rdquo;. Saying that, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you\u0026rsquo;re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here:\nFirefox security Chrome security Internet Explorer security Safari security Opera security What do we mean by \u0026lsquo;secured\u0026rsquo;? We mean that information sent from your browser to the web server and sensitive information sent from the web server to your browser is encrypted so that, if the data was intercepted, it would be meaningless to the interceptor.\nOccasionally, a web page can be secure without any of the visual indications or confirmations described above. This is when a secure web page is served within (a frame of) another webpage. This is poor website design, and if you are unsure if a web page is secure, act as if it\u0026rsquo;s definitely not.\nWhy not make all web pages secure? Cryptography places a considerable calculation burden on the processor power of web servers and your own computer. Whilst the latter is unlikely to be tasked for long, highly popular websites would really struggle to encrypt all pages and the time taken to access these pages would take longer. Therefore, browsing the latest weather forecast or tonight\u0026rsquo;s TV schedule isn\u0026rsquo;t encrypted, but your online banking definitely is.\nHow does this encryption work exactly? Let\u0026rsquo;s get the acronyms out of the way, and then we\u0026rsquo;ll take a look at the basic mathematics. If you can read clocks then the mathematical basis is a breeze!\nAcronyms Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a set of rules for transferring data files over the World Wide Web. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used with Internet Protocol (IP) to divide this data up into manageable little packets for efficient shipping across the Internet.\nThe Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is inserted between the HTTP and TCP layers to undertake the encryption and decryption task for secure web pages. Originally developed by the company behind the first popular browser, Netscape (which effectively became Firefox upon the formation of the Mozilla Foundation), SSL reached near ubiquitous application across all makes of browser.\nLike all technologies, SSL has evolved and since SSL 3.0 it has become something called Transport Layer Security (TLS). This improved protocol is included in all modern browsers.\nI have a key to secure my home, a key to secure my car. Where\u0026rsquo;s the key here? SSL and TLS use something known as public-and-private key encryption from a company called RSA . This is a different kind of key to the physical ones you use for your home or car. The most striking difference is that, whilst the same key is used to lock and unlock your front door, SSL uses one key to lock (encrypt) the information and another key to unlock it.\nThis feature is critical to its success. It means that there is no need to restrict access to or be secretive about the key used to lock the information as it is useless for unlocking the information. This key is therefore known as the public key. The unlocking key is known as the private key.\nIt is the openness surrounding the public key that means the general user is unaware of the process being undertaken. As there is no security risk associated with knowing the public key, your browser automatically requests the public key for locking information on secure web pages. It just goes ahead and locks it up.\nWalk me through this locking and unlocking process For anyone interested in mathematics, this whole cryptography revolution harks back to the work done on clock calculators by Gauss and on a theorem proved by Fermat – not his last one, but one known as Fermat\u0026rsquo;s Little Theorem. In hindsight, it\u0026rsquo;s amazingly simple.\nIf you ask anyone to add the numbers 9 and 4 you will get the answer 13. Similarly, if you ask them at 9 o\u0026rsquo;clock what the time will be in 4 hours, they will tell you 1 o\u0026rsquo;clock. Why do we get the answers 13 and 1 to very similar questions? In the instance of telling the time we know there are 12 hours on the clock, so we are actually adding 9 and 4 and, if it is greater than 12, subtracting 12. We keep moving round a clock with 12 numbers.\nAnother question could be \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s 9 o\u0026rsquo;clock now, what time will it be in 20 hours?\u0026rdquo; in which case the answer is 9 + 20 - 12 - 12 = 5 o\u0026rsquo;clock. It seems we keeping subtracting twelves until we get an answer that lies between 0 and 12. This is known as modular arithmetic – a form of arithmetic where numbers are considered equal if they leave the same remainder when divided by the same number (modulus).\nIn modular arithmetic where the modulus is 12 (as for our clock example here):\n9 = 21 = 33 = 45 because\n12\u0026rsquo;s go into 21 once, leaving a remainder of 9 12\u0026rsquo;s go into 33 twice, leaving a remainder of 9 12\u0026rsquo;s go into 45 three times, leaving a remainder of 9. The slightly harder bit\u0026hellip; Gauss found an appealing characteristic related to an earlier discovery by Fermat if he undertook similar calculations using clocks with a prime number of hours on it instead of 12. A prime number is a number than cannot be divided exactly by any other number except itself and 1. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and 19 are all prime numbers. All the other numbers up to 20 are not prime as they can be divided exactly by other numbers. For example 15 can be divided exactly by itself and 1, but also by 3 and 5.\nWhen using a prime number clock with P hours, if you take a number X and raise it to the power P then you get back to the same number you started with.\nFor example, using the 7-hour clock shown here (P=7) and the initial number 3 (X=3), then 3 to the power 7 = 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 2187.\nSevens go into this number 312 times leave a remainder of 3. Back where we started. Or to put it another way, we go forward 2187 hours on our 7-hour clock and see what time we come to – 3 o\u0026rsquo;clock.\nAlthough Fermat claimed to have proved this theorem, he died before telling anyone how! It was left to another distinguished mathematician, Leonard Euler, to provide the proof in 1736 that this worked for all prime numbers and any number X.\nEuler took things further by looking at semiprime numbers too. A semiprime can only be divided by itself, 1 and two prime numbers. In other words, a semiprime N = p x q where both p and q are prime numbers. For semiprime number clocks, Euler found that the pattern got back to the beginning after raising the original number to the power of (p-1) x (q-1) + 1.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s go shopping We are now nearly there. Let\u0026rsquo;s look at how you give Amazon your credit card number, securely.\nAmazon\u0026rsquo;s computers select two very large prime numbers, p and q, of around 60 digits each and multiply them together to make a third number N. We are therefore using a clock with a massive number of hours. Massive. In fact, the number is usually bigger than there are atoms in the universe!\nThe number N is published as part of the public key, but p and q are kept secret. It is very very difficult, almost impossible without many years and an incredibly powerful computer, to work out what p and q are from N. In fact it is so secure that Amazon will continue to use the same number N for several months.\nThe other part of the public key is called the encoding number, E. So now what happens to your credit card number C (or you might consider C to stand for the digital representation of any content to be secured)?\nYour browser does a calculation on C based on the clock with the massive number of hours and the encoding number E. It raises C to the power E and works out what the number is on the clock in the same way we did for much smaller numbers above, and transmits this number to Amazon. In other words, your browser has used the public key to encrypt your credit card number.\nIf anyone intercepted the transmission they could not calculate your credit card number. They know Amazon\u0026rsquo;s public key (N and E) but you cannot use these to reverse the calculation.\nHowever, Amazon can calculate the credit card number because they know p and q, the private key. They know that if your credit card number was raised to the power of (p-1) x (q-1) + 1, that the same number reappears.\nAs your browser has raised the number to the power of E already, it simply remains for Amazon\u0026rsquo;s computer to raise the result further, by (p-1) x (q-1) + 1 - E on the same clock with N hours, to get back to the same number. Mission accomplished, and Stephen Hawking\u0026rsquo;s God Invented the Integers will be dropping on your doormat soon. That\u0026rsquo;s what you were shopping for right?\nNext time you\u0026rsquo;re securely online, think of Fermat, Gauss and Euler, and the three mathematicians at RSA who brought this work from the 17th Century and applied it to the world of the Internet - Rivest, Shamir and Adleman.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/a-non-techie-explanation-of-how-web-pages-are-secured/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI first published this overview back in 2004. I\u0026rsquo;m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it\u0026rsquo;s interesting. No seriously, it is.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"when-is-a-web-page-secure\"\u003eWhen is a web page secure?\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eContent on a web page is secured when the URL starts \u0026ldquo;https://\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;http://\u0026rdquo;. Saying that, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that \u003cem\u003eall\u003c/em\u003e content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you\u0026rsquo;re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2011/01/a-non-techie-explanation-of-how-web-pages-are-secured/amazon_https/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"https\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/amazon_https.png\" title=\"https\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A non-techie explanation of how web pages are secured"},{"content":"The CIPR \u0026rsquo;s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group\u0026rsquo;s chair, I\u0026rsquo;d better get my skates on. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick look at the main thrust of our report.\nSocial media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what\u0026rsquo;s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn\u0026rsquo;t it, except that the view of what\u0026rsquo;s important and what\u0026rsquo;s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience.\nTake the announcement this week from Sainsbury\u0026rsquo;s, one of the UK\u0026rsquo;s top supermarkets:\nImage via Wikipedia Best-ever Christmas, completes another strong quarter\nTotal sales for third quarter up 7.5 per cent (6.0 per cent excluding fuel) Like-for-like sales for the quarter up 5.4 per cent (3.6 per cent excluding fuel) Two year like-for-like sales growth of 7.4 per cent excluding fuel Christmas week transactions at all time high of over 24.5 million 700,000 sq ft new space added, with nearly 6,000 new jobs created Justin King, Chief Executive, said, “\u0026hellip;We are delighted that we delivered a record Christmas performance and have grown market share over the quarter, up 0.3 per cent to 16.6 per cent.\u0026quot;\nCongratulations to the Sainsbury\u0026rsquo;s team. But let\u0026rsquo;s look at some (fictitious) examples of what we didn\u0026rsquo;t see in that bullet list:\nTraffic to our corporate website up 1.12% year on year Twitter followers up 8.2% Best ever quarter for retweets – an average of 17 RTs per tweet, up 11% quarter on quarter Early to Quora with three questions posed and seventeen answered New Android app downloaded 1300 times in the last four weeks of the quarter, with 36% translating into regular weekly users. Am I being facetious? Yes, a little. But contrasting the big important metrics reported by the Chief Executive with the day-to-day obsessions of marketing and PR practitioners reminds us of the linkage required of the two, or perhaps too frequently the absence of any such linkage.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s important? Well every organisation should have a mission (why we exist?), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be?), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there). And given that measurement isn\u0026rsquo;t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool of itself, a powerful way to secure alignment of the day-to-day activities of each and every employee with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly. People perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.\nAnd as each marketplace is unique and your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by. Perhaps the same metric (eg, share of voice, number of conversations, sentiment) will be adopted by more than one company, but its precise definition will be tailored to your needs and it will sit amongst a balanced portfolio of metrics that will be uniquely bespoke.\nFortunately, all this was recognised by pioneers in business performance management, such as Kaplan and Norton of Balanced Scorecard fame, long before we were blogging, \u0026ldquo;liking\u0026rdquo; things, tweeting, or becoming mayors of our local Sainsbury\u0026rsquo;s coffee shop.\nKeep an eye out here, and follow @sheldrake and @cipr_uk , for notification of the report\u0026rsquo;s availability. And my book, The Business of Influence, out with Wiley in April, will explore this topic in more detail.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/social-media-measurement--easy-once-you-recognise-its-not/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" title=\"CIPR\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group\u0026rsquo;s chair, I\u0026rsquo;d better get my skates on. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick look at the main thrust of our report.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what\u0026rsquo;s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn\u0026rsquo;t it, except that the view of what\u0026rsquo;s important and what\u0026rsquo;s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTake the announcement this week from Sainsbury\u0026rsquo;s, one of the UK\u0026rsquo;s top supermarkets:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it's not"},{"content":"Let\u0026rsquo;s talk strategy.\nWithout thorough strategy, one is resigned to contribute nothing to living up to your organisation\u0026rsquo;s mission and pursuing its vision. Thoroughly resigned. And the turn of the year is an apt time to take the strategic long view.\nBut let\u0026rsquo;s begin with the shortest view. David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s latest book \u0026lsquo;Real-time Marketing and PR\u0026rsquo; (book review ) emphasises that being attuned to the second by second deliberations, assertions and flippancy of the social Web is nothing short of imperative for many organisations. Nevertheless, he also points out that we need our approach to be informed by the organisation\u0026rsquo;s over-arching needs and guided by sound and consistent policy.\nThe title of a post by Brian Solis this week articulates the challenge succinctly, \u0026ldquo;failing to plan is planning to fail \u0026rdquo; and Vanessa DiMauro also calls for proper diligence in her post, \u0026ldquo;not so fast! \u0026rdquo;\nSo how do you know if you\u0026rsquo;re doing OK, or going hand to mouth? Why do too many of the leaders I work with consider they have this licked and yet discover otherwise?\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an acid test. Grab a handful of colleagues in your marketing and PR teams this afternoon for fifteen minutes and ask the following four questions:\n1. Can you articulate our mission (why we exist) and vision (what we want to be)?\n2. Can you tell me, in terms of your department / group / team, how you help us live up to the mission and pursue the vision? What\u0026rsquo;s the strategy?\n3. How do you know when you\u0026rsquo;re making progress or falling short, personally and as a team?\n4. Can you walk me through your activity this past week in this context and take a guess at how much time results in concrete progress rather than fires fought?\nThe greater the degree of stumbling answer, the greater the inconsistency, confusion and bamboozlement, the more attention you need to pay strategy this month, and the communication of strategy, and the alignment of activity with strategy. 2011 will work out the better for it.\nWishing you a prosperous one, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nFor Immediate Release marks 6th anniversary with evaluation of BP’s Deepwater Horizon crisis by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nCongratulations to Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz who celebrate the sixth anniversary of their podcast For Immediate Release this week. Each week Hobson and Holtz spend an hour digging under the headlines in communications and PR. It has become a regular part of my media diet.\nHobson and Holtz recently recorded a special show with two communication professionals involved in the response to the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill arguably one of the largest crisis communication efforts of the last year. More\u0026hellip; Shaq Googled Big House Outside of Boston by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLast night the big man from the Boston Celtics, Shaquille O\u0026rsquo;Neal, was on David Letterman\u0026rsquo;s talk show. I live in Boston and it is amazing how quickly fans have embraced Shaq. I had a chance to watch him in action a few weeks ago from courtside. Amazing.\nAnyway, Shaq told Letterman that he found his house on Google with the phrase: \u0026ldquo;Big house outside of Boston.\u0026rdquo;\nSome smart real-estate person scored big time with that one!\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll hear the Google reference at about 2:25 in the video: More\u0026hellip; In Social Media, Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI’ve received a series of inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. There are a series of discussions hitting the blogosphere and the Twitterverse exploring this very topic, some elementary and others on the right path. I contacted Gartner earlier this week and the problem is, that this data isn’t new at all. In fact, these discussions are fueled by information originally published in 2008 and in early 2010. More\u0026hellip; Britain’s newspapers leading world in media innovation, says The Economist by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nBy most conventional measures Britain’s newspapers look doomed, according to The Economist (disclosure: client), as readers abandon print for the Internet and TV. But The Economist finds Britain’s papers are being “exceptionally innovative, busily testing new formats and sizes.”\nIn an article in this week’s issue it examines three different strategies being played out by newspaper publishers:\nNews Corporation – pay wall and direct sales via initiatives such as The Sunday Times wine club Daily Mail – More\u0026hellip; All set for Social Media in 2011? Not so fast! by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nIt\u0026rsquo;s 2011. You\u0026rsquo;ve made launching your social media initiative one of the top business resolutions for the year. It\u0026rsquo;s easy, it\u0026rsquo;s quick, you\u0026rsquo;re rarin\u0026rsquo; to go, let\u0026rsquo;s jump in, right? Not so fast!\nAre you really ready? There are three things you must do to be sure your company or organization is prepared to engage with your audience in the social sphere.\nFirst and foremost, do you have a social business strategy? Do you know what your social efforts should achieve? Creating a social strategy means applying your professional business skills to identify the goals and objectives for your social initiatives. More\u0026hellip; The future is bright in 2011 and the future is digital by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nJohn Wren, chief executive of Omnicom was quoted recently in the FT that the advertising group planned to introduce a technical education programme for all its 63,000 employees to teach them the ways of Google, Facebook and other online media. According the the FT, Omnicom is to accelerate its push into digital media and marketing in 2011 by focusing on new partnerships with technology companies and large-scale training for its staff.\nSome of John Wren’s other quotes from Tim Bradshaw’s article amused me slightly, such as\nAdvertising space on social media such as Facebook is not yet “fully priced”, he says. More\u0026hellip; Exploring the Twitterverse by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nHappy New Year!\nTwitter officially launched to the public in July 2006. By 2008, the universe of applications developed to enhance the Twitter experience was boundless. Not only was the ecosystem burgeoning with apps, the ability to track and manage the apps designed for specific purposes was elusive.\nI spent the better part of Fall 2008 studying and organizing the available Twitter apps available for new marketing, community management, and customer service professionals. Once organized, I published Twitter Tools for Marketing and Community Professionals on October 17, 2008. More\u0026hellip; You cannot control your brand by Dave Harkins of Dave Harkins\u0026rsquo; Blog\nA company, like an individual, can only control its intention, its action and its reaction. If you think about it, this is only about 1/4 of a brand’s value through in daily interactions between the customer and the company. The customer controls the remaining 3/4 of the brand’s value based on their perceptions of how the company delivers, whether it be product quality, service and fit with the customers needs, values and expectations.\nCompanies influence their brand value through interactions. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/the-2011-plan/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s talk strategy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWithout thorough strategy, one is resigned to contribute nothing to living up to your organisation\u0026rsquo;s mission and pursuing its vision. Thoroughly resigned. And the turn of the year is an apt time to take the strategic long view.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut let\u0026rsquo;s begin with the shortest view. David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s latest book \u0026lsquo;Real-time Marketing and PR\u0026rsquo; (\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/12/book-reviews-or-what-to-give-a-marketing-and-pr-professional-for-christmas/\"\u003ebook review\u003c/a\u003e\n) emphasises that being attuned to the second by second deliberations, assertions and flippancy of the social Web is nothing short of imperative for many organisations. Nevertheless, he also points out that we need our approach to be informed by the organisation\u0026rsquo;s over-arching needs and guided by sound and consistent policy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title of a post by Brian Solis this week articulates the challenge succinctly, \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/in-social-media-failing-to-plan-is-planning-to-fail\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efailing to plan is planning to fail\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; and Vanessa DiMauro also calls for proper diligence in her post, \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/vanessa.dimauro/all-set-for-social-media-in-2011-not-so-fast\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003enot so fast!\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo how do you know if you\u0026rsquo;re doing OK, or going hand to mouth? Why do too many of the leaders I work with consider they have this licked and yet discover otherwise?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s an acid test. Grab a handful of colleagues in your marketing and PR teams this afternoon for fifteen minutes and ask the following four questions:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The 2011 Plan"},{"content":"In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.\nReading. Lots. Lots of books. Here\u0026rsquo;s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.\nReal-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR, by David Meerman Scott Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.\nI got my copy of Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I\u0026rsquo;ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it\u0026rsquo;s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David\u0026rsquo;s latest books).\nLet\u0026rsquo;s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.\nImage via Wikipedia The book is structured in three parts. Part one sets the scene, spanning a wide number of topics from United Breaks Guitars to Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into the real-time scene, from the shapes of meme diffusion (my words not David\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; he\u0026rsquo;s much more disciplined at avoiding jargon), to the transformation of media relations and social Web analytics . I got particularly excited reading about the latter because David quotes me. Cool.\nDavid calls those shapes of meme diffusion \u0026ldquo;the real-time power law\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the real-time law of normal distribution\u0026rdquo;. And, being pedantic, this is the only part of the book I felt uncomfortable with, if only because my best exam result at university was in mathematics. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t happily follow David\u0026rsquo;s assertion that these probability density functions map onto the topic in question – but fortunately that won\u0026rsquo;t really detract from the message for the vast majority of readers.\nPart one rounds off with an interesting overview of crowdsourcing.\nPart two consists of three chapters covering real-time conversation with customers, the rise of the mobile device as the dominant channel, and real-time delivery of products and services. Again, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to let this book wash over you, and David has this uncanny knack of getting the reader to think about the personal ramifications of case studies without feeling like you\u0026rsquo;re being force fed. He\u0026rsquo;s what book reviewers would call \u0026lsquo;accessible\u0026rsquo; I guess. I\u0026rsquo;d say \u0026lsquo;very useful\u0026rsquo;.\nPart three drills down into the practicalities. How exactly do you effect change and get everyone in your organisation onboard? Despite having broached the issue in the incredibly best-selling The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR in 2007, I agree with David\u0026rsquo;s reemphasis here on social media policy formulation, communication and training. In my opinion, too many organisations still neglect this must-do; or get it wrong. This really shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be difficult and David leaves you feeling like you could do it yourself by ten o\u0026rsquo;clock Monday morning.\nYou have to wait until the penultimate chapter before confronting the first (and only) figure that looks like it belongs in a management textbook. Not a criticism, more of surprise to me that David has to lean on diagrams so rarely to get his point over. (I can only assume my book will be read as having a different tenor!) The figure relates to the technological potential for real-time business in combining CRM, Web analytics, social Web analytics, marketing automation, and media intelligence. (This is the point at which the book comes closest to mine\u0026hellip; I discuss something similar that I refer to with just a little tongue in cheek as Awesome Analytics Advantage, or \u0026rsquo;triple-A\u0026rsquo; for short.)\nThe last chapter seeks to embed some of the lessons of earlier chapters by covering three case studies: GM, Hubspot and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls getting stuck in Iceland when the volcano erupted in April 2010. Honestly, it does make sense when you read it, and it makes you think. The number one take away in my own words =\u0026gt; you get back what you put in.\nThis book can be read on Boxing Day, even allowing for a break for bubble and squeak . I recommend you do (read the book that is; you may decide to eat something else).\nChaotics, by Philip Kotler and John Caslione Subtitle: The business of managing and marketing in the age of turbulence\nJames Gleick\u0026rsquo;s Chaos , is the best-selling seminal introduction to chaos theory, the science. Kotler\u0026rsquo;s and Caslione\u0026rsquo;s Chaotics is the first attempt I\u0026rsquo;ve come across examining how one might best prepare to manage business in uncertain times, and approach marketing in particular. Published in 2009, I read this book for reference in my own.\nThe book was obviously catalysed by the storm that hit end-07 / beginning-08 and lingers today after the best part of 15 years of steady state economics. Moreover, I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced, and neither are the authors, or Meerman Scott come to that, that marketing and PR will be able to \u0026ldquo;return to normal\u0026rdquo; – this is the new normal. Real-time. Fast-changing. Uncertain. Chaotic. Demanding nimble response and deft management processes.\nGiven the calibre of the authors you won\u0026rsquo;t be surprised to hear be conclude that Chaotics is a worthwhile read, although I have some caveats to that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile because it explores the new normal, thumping it home in case you were in any doubt. It brilliantly advocates that you determine the wrong responses to different scenarios in advance so that when you inevitably encounter choppy waters you don\u0026rsquo;t have to waste precious time working out what might be wrong when you should be motoring on doing what\u0026rsquo;s right.\nThe authors present a framework for building what they refer to as an early-warning system, sensitising an organisation to upcoming storms to avoid simply sailing right into them. They then have a chapter on designing management systems for resilience to such stormy weather, in terms of the finance function, IT, operations, purchasing and procurement, and HR. And then a chapter on designing marketing systems for resilience.\nAnd this is a big ask given their starting point\u0026hellip; here\u0026rsquo;s a quote describing their opinion of today\u0026rsquo;s typical marketing system:\nToday, the typical company operates a marketing system that has emerged from years of trial and error. It has developed policies, strategies, and tactics for using marketing research, pricing, the sales force, advertising, promotions, trade shows, and other marketing tools. These practices are likely to persist because they deliver a feeling of safety and predictability. They worked in the past and are assumed to work in the future.\nNeed I continue but to say the authors assert most strongly that this status quo has about as much chance of surviving let alone thriving going forward as a koala in the middle of the Atlantic. Mmmm, not sure where that metaphor came from, but I\u0026rsquo;ve written it now and I can\u0026rsquo;t get the picture out of my head.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s the caveat I referred to earlier? Well, I just felt the book stopped short of where I wanted it to go. It didn\u0026rsquo;t appear to abut typical organisational life in a way that I felt was immediately actionable in the way Meerman Scott achieves. I felt the chasm left between the picture they paint and where most readers will find their organisation today was left too wide to attempt the leap. One could have dedicated the whole of the book to management systems or marketing systems, but they perhaps broke off more than they could handle in trying to crack both in a book this size.\nYet I can also empathise with the challenge they faced. My own manuscript attempts to break things down fundamentally and build it back up again to an operational whole, and this is no mean ambition in less than 60,000 words. Perhaps Kotler and Caslione will need to write follow-up texts in much the same way Kaplan and Norton have for the Balanced Scorecard philosophy for example. And perhaps I might need to too (should the first book sell sufficiently of course!)\nThe Marketing Century Subtitle: How Marketing Drives Business And Shapes Society\nLastly, a book you might like to consider pre-ordering\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s available mid-February (Amazon ). Celebrating the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing , the book reviews marketing from 1911 to 2011. As the publisher\u0026rsquo;s description attests, it also describes the 21st Century – \u0026ldquo;a time when the ability to understand and connect with customers is more rewarding, complex and valuable than ever. It explains:\nThe three forces shaping the past, present and future of marketing: globalization, technology and ethics How people behave and connect – and how businesses can benefit from these insights The need to manage for the long-term as well as the short-term Marketing′s impact on business strategy and leadership.\u0026rdquo; Personally, I\u0026rsquo;m as interested in the history of marketing and PR as the current and future. I advocate a thorough understanding of the history of marketing and PR as a foundation to delivering best practice today, particularly now that we\u0026rsquo;re putting the public back into public relations (to paraphrase the title of the book by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge).\nEach chapter of The Marketing Century is written by a guest author, and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be amongst them:\nStrategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , Peppers \u0026amp; Rogers Group) Customer Relationship Management (Professor Merlin Stone ) Segmentation (Professor Malcolm McDonald ) Innovation (Professors John Saunders and Veronica Wong ) Public Relations (Paul Mylrea , Head of Press and Media Relations at BBC) Branding (Graham Hales , Managing Director, Interbrand London) Advertising (Jonathan Gabay ) Digital Marketing (Philip Sheldrake ) Sales and Business Development (Beth Rogers ) Sustainability (John Grant ) Internal Marketing (Keith Glanfield ) Social Marketing (Paul White and Veronica Sharp). Interestingly, John Saunders and Veronica Wong have been co-authors of Philip Kotler (of Chaotics above) of various editions of the seminal text, Principles of Marketing.\nHappy reading and Merry Christmas.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/12/book-reviews-or-what-to-give-a-marketing-and-pr-professional-for-christmas/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReading. Lots. Lots of books. Here\u0026rsquo;s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"real-time-marketing--prreal-time-marketing--pr-by-david-meerman-scott\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470645954.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/real-time.jpg\" title=\"Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nReal-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR, by David Meerman Scott\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSubtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI got my copy of \u003ca href=\"http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470645954.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eReal-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\u003c/a\u003e\n end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I\u0026rsquo;ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it\u0026rsquo;s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David\u0026rsquo;s latest books).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Book reviews, or what to give a marketing and PR professional for Christmas"},{"content":"If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;curation\u0026rdquo;. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.\nUntil recently, people we don\u0026rsquo;t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.\nNow a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.\nApple has just awarded Flipboard its iPad App of the Year 2010 award. Flipboard is a social magazine unique to you. It employs your Twitter network to populate the magazine with stuff your network has chosen to tweet about\u0026hellip; or in other words, a magazine with content curated by the people you follow.\nPulse is a similar product for iPhone, Android and iPad, but in this instance it consists of RSS sources you subscribe to\u0026hellip; think of it as the latest generation of RSS newsreader.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m most excited about My Taptu , currently available for iPhone (right) and Android. Why? Because My Taptu gets closest to allowing me to curate content from the widest possible sources. You can subscribe with RSS or follow the shares from your Twitter and Facebook networks. You can subscribe to topic-defined streams of content pulling the best content in from multiple sources, and even create a new stream yourself by leaning on Taptu\u0026rsquo;s extensive legacy in mobile search.\nI consider this to be the kind of power and flexibility we\u0026rsquo;ll all demand of this nascent type of service to the point where I decided earlier this year to work with the Taptu team in defining and leading this market. I\u0026rsquo;d be absolutely delighted to hear what you think of the app, and should this really pique your interest, you can listen to an interview Robert Scoble conducted with Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar this morning.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nMarketing using Business Christmas Cards by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nCorporate greeting cards can be used in many ways to promote your business and to show appreciation to supportive clients; some traditional and some a bit more creative. However, there are some rules and tips you should keep in mind to get the best return on your investment of sending out a Business Christmas card:\n1. Procedure/mailing list\nMake sure you keep your company contact information up-to-date on a regular basis and take your time to add new contacts you gain throughout the year. More\u0026hellip; Canadian Social Media Marketing in Perspective by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nWhen most industry analysts profile digital marketing and online advertising in North America, the focus is typically on the U.S. market. That said, Canada has a relatively high internet access penetration and growing social network usage rates.\nAccording to a recent eMarketer report, Canadian social network users view social media as their online home \u0026ndash; a hub for communication, entertainment and information.\n\u0026ldquo;Canadians readily adopt social network activities, often at rates higher than users in the U.S., but gaining the trust of users on a social network is a brand manager\u0026rsquo;s biggest obstacle,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; (R)evolution: Katie Couric on Social Media and Real-Time Journalism by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAs as I say at the beginning of this interview, I don’t even know where to begin, so let’s just go ahead and jump right in. In a special three-part series, I’m joined by none other than Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC, correspondent for 60 MINUTES and anchor of CBS News primetime specials.\nWhen the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC debuted on September 5, 2006, Couric became the first female solo anchor of a weekday network evening news broadcast. More\u0026hellip; KPMG attempts to make sense of media fragmentation: no appetite for paywalls, apps show promise, and print resilient by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nAnother week and another report attempts to make sense of UK media land. This one is from management consultancy KPMG. There’s confirmation that paywalls are unpopular, with only two percent of web users willing to pay for desktop access to a print publication. The majority of consumers faced with a paywall, says KPMG, seek out similar content for free elsewhere.\nApp-driven media on mobile devices is providing publishers with a potentially lucrative digital revenue stream (see my blog last week). More\u0026hellip; The Joys of JELL-O and brand journalism in the 1960s by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI ran across a terrific little 96-page book called Joys of JELL-O published by General Foods Corporation.\nIt features dozens of recipes, tips and tricks for molding, flaking, and cubing, and ideas for party planning all using JELL-O BRAND Gelatin Dessert. Based on the images in the book my guess is that it is from the late 1960s.\nTurn on some Herb Alpert \u0026amp; the Tijuana Brass, we\u0026rsquo;re having a party! Let\u0026rsquo;s play Twister!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s very interesting to me that companies have been marketing via brand journalism for many decades before the Web made it so darned easy to do. More\u0026hellip; Somebody likes PR\u0026hellip;who isn’t in PR by Simon Hilliard of Racepoint Group\nThere was a fantastically satisfying read for anyone who works in PR in today’s FT - an endorsement of the value well thought out campaigns can bring to businesses from Luke Johnson. He’s not some two-bit nobody by the way, he runs private equity firm Capital Partners, and is also chairman of the Royal Society of Arts. To steal a phrase from my American cousins, ‘he’s kind of a big deal’.\nThe article shows a genuine understanding of how PR should work, differentiates between engaging content and advertising “puff pieces” More\u0026hellip; Wikileaks and internet censorship by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nSo you thought that internet was open and democratic, enabling any person to share information with anyone else, anywhere. Not a bit. Two posts in my RSS feed this morning cite concerns for the future of democracy citing the speed with which businesses have removed support for Wikileaks when pressurised by the US establishment.\nHere’s Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick.\n“Whatever you think of Mr Assange’s leaks, the one thing that has got all “Net Neutral” people a-twitter is how easily some of the Big Names in the online world rolled over to a bit of (unofficial) US strong-arming. More\u0026hellip; FT.com Publishes ‘Mobile in the Boardroom’ Report by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nNew report finds that business professionals are significantly more willing to pay for online mobile content than consumers.\n60 per cent of business professionals use their handsets to browse content on the mobile web Over 40 per cent of business professionals use their handsets to access news and current affairs content iPhone is dramatically changing the way business users consume content LONDON: 9 December 2010: FT.com today announces the launch of its inaugural ‘Mobile in the Boardroom’ More\u0026hellip; Meltwater expected to appeal High Court decision on NLA web licensing by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI caught up with Intellectual Property \u0026amp; Media lawyer Steve Kuncewicz (@stevekuncewicz) of HBJ Gateley Wareing at the Somecomms awards in Manchester tonight. He’s the author of Legal Issues of Web 2.0 and Social Media, published in June. I was keen to get his view on the recent High Court judgement that found in favour of the NLA’s web licensing scheme.\nSteve believes that Meltwater will appeal the judgement and that it could result in a reappraisal of copyright law to deal specifically with the Internet. In his own words: More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/12/its-all-about-curation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;curation\u0026rdquo;. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUntil recently, people we don\u0026rsquo;t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"It's all about curation"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;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.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s my presentation \u0026ldquo;Marketing and Communications in the Internetome\u0026rdquo;:\nMarketing and Communications in the Internetome View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/12/marketing-and-communications-in-the-internetome/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of \u003ca href=\"http://6uk.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e6UK\u003c/a\u003e\n for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK\u0026rsquo;s first Internet of Things conference, \u003ca href=\"http://www.internetome.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternetome\u003c/a\u003e\n. Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s my presentation \u0026ldquo;Marketing and Communications in the Internetome\u0026rdquo;:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/philip-sheldrake-internetomepresentation\" title=\"Marketing and Communications in the Internetome\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarketing and Communications in the Internetome\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Marketing and Communications in the Internetome"},{"content":"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\u0026rsquo;s changed relates.\nThe 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.\nEverything 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.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;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.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;s the end of 2010, it\u0026rsquo;s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that\u0026rsquo;s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition\u0026rsquo;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.\nAnd as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I\u0026rsquo;d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.\nHope to see you on the 10th :-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nU.S. Mobile Advertising and Marketing Forecast by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nOnce again, analysts are predicting that advertising targeted to U.S. mobile phone service subscribers will be embraced by the mainstream American marketer, according to the latest market study by eMarketer.\nU.S. mobile ad spending will be up 79 percent in the U.S. market to reach $743 million, based upon the current eMarketer forecast. However, growth will slow somewhat as advertising spending reaches $1.1 billion in 2011 \u0026ndash; and potentially more than $2.5 billion by 2014.\n\u0026ldquo;The expansion of the smartphone market and the attractive usage and demographic profile of smartphone owners have forced more marketers to pay closer attention to mobile,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Mobile Marketing Fragmentation: What marketers need to know by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nFragmentation. Sounds painful, and for those planning and implementing mobile campaigns and services, it presents a real and present challenge. It’s the technical term for the fact that we all have different phones, and that these phones tend to work differently. Take a look around a meeting room or a pub table: iPhones, Blackberrys, Nokias, each with their own operating system, applications and ways of displaying the web. For now and the medium term, there is no common format, apart from voice and text messaging that will work, 100%, across all your customers’ More\u0026hellip; The Business Guide to Facebook Part 1: Your Brand Page for the Social Web by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFacebook is, at the moment, the most important social network in the world. Over 500 million people connect to one another in the “Social Network.” And, with the introduction of the Open Graph, we are interacting with our Facebook connections on our favorite websites where our social graph and the corresponding activity of Likes, interaction, and commentary become the centerpiece for social curation and more importantly, our focused attention. We are putting our social network to work and we are learning how to share, discover, and collaborate in public. More\u0026hellip; Real time, data driven marketing and sales by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMy first job was on a bond trading floor at a Wall Street investment bank. It\u0026rsquo;s impossible to overstate the impact of innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets in the 1980s.\nWithin a decade finance was transformed from a clubby, old-boys\u0026rsquo; network to a 24-hour global trading system.\nWith that revolutionary shift a new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second—real time.\nToday, no financial professional would ever consider making a transaction without understanding where the markets are trading right now and what’s happening in the news at that precise moment. More\u0026hellip; The RapLeaf backlash proves consumers still do not trust advertisers with their data by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nOver the last few days, there has been a lot of discussion about a new service called RapLeaf\nI first came across the service some months ago when I saw that a web crawler called “rapleaf” was regularly visiting my blog and crawling all of the content there. Quoting from a recent blog post where RapLeaf has been forced to defend themselves, they explain their service thus\n“Rapleaf works with information that is publicly-available about people online (similar to what would appear in public Google searches), and augments that data with various widely available offline databases — More\u0026hellip; Part 2 of Email Marketing Lifecycle Series: Conversion by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nKath Pay from The Email Academy continues her expert series about email marketing.\nShe will publish another 2 articles over the next few weeks.\n8 influencing factors for achieving conversion in email marketing\nThe most basic aim of sending an email is to get the recipient to open the email and action it in some way. Depending upon your definition of conversion for that particular campaign, it could be the action of simply clicking a link, driving the recipient to the website, requesting a whitepaper, entering a competition, attending event – More\u0026hellip; The Business Guide to Facebook Part 2: From E-Commerce to F-Commerce by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFacebook Founder and Chief Executive Office Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers. Indeed, Facebook is so much more than a social network. As a social utility, it changes the dynamics of relationships, how we communicate with one another, and how we discover, share and learn. Facebook and Social Media re redesigning the information super highway, forever altering how information travels and how people connect. More\u0026hellip; Why Brief is Better when it comes to B2B Email Copywriting by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nWriting B2B emails is one of your trickiest tasks as a copywriter.\nThey might be brief (100 words max). But that just means you’ve got more to pack into every word.\nBusiness people can be stressed and busy at the best of times. They don’t have time to patiently check through every message.\nIf you’re email isn’t relevant or interesting, it’s not going to be read.\nSo it’s vital that your email’s subject and headline hit them with benefits straight away. More\u0026hellip; CIPR Presidents Debate by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members\u0026rsquo; questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen. More\u0026hellip; Visible Technologies Unveils New Social Intelligence Platform by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nVisible Technologies Details Next-Generation Platform to Address the Changing Social Media Landscape\nBELLEVUE, Washington, October 28, 2010 — Visible Technologies today unveiled its vision for Social Intelligence, the ability to extract measurable business value from social conversations, enabling companies to capitalize on the rapidly growing and changing social media landscape. The company also announced today Visible Intelligence™, the cornerstone of its vision and the industry’s next-generation software platform built from the ground-up for the future of the social Web. More\u0026hellip; Five Cultural Trends Shaping Business Communications and Public Service by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nGuest writer Dr. Mark Drapeau is the Director of U.S. Public Sector Social Engagement at Microsoft, and the editor of SECTOR: PUBLIC, a new online magazine about how technology and innovation are affecting the public sector, public service, and social change.\nComing into my new role at Microsoft, I took on the task of reading more widely about business, communications, and other topics. I was very influenced by the new book Chief Culture Officer, written by Grant McCracken of MIT. It’s not about pop culture, and not about “cool hunting,” More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/the-next-big-big-thing-its-happening-now/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMarketing 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\u0026rsquo;s changed relates.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEverything 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow it\u0026rsquo;s the end of 2010, it\u0026rsquo;s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that\u0026rsquo;s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition\u0026rsquo;s. Join me at \u003ca href=\"http://www.internetome.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternetome, the Internet of Things Conference\u003c/a\u003e\n, in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I\u0026rsquo;d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHope to see you on the 10th :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The next big big thing: it's happening now"},{"content":"I enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR \u0026rsquo;s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members\u0026rsquo; questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/cipr-presidents-debate/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members\u0026rsquo; questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR Presidents Debate"},{"content":" David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s new book is out, Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;re interested in social news readers and I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;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!\nGetSatisfaction is procured and configured to tempt the world to hang out in \u0026lsquo;our place\u0026rsquo; to discuss things, but no organisation can insist the conversation takes place in one or two places of course\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;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.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve only just got my copy of David\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m just slightly chocker!) But I can vouch for a cracking few pages in David\u0026rsquo;s book on Social Web Analytics\u0026hellip; \u0026lsquo;cos he quotes me :-)\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a video of David presenting about real-time PR, and you can get the first chapter of his book here for free !\nReal-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/real-time-marketing-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/10/real-time-marketing-pr/real-time/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/real-time.jpg\" title=\"Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nDavid Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s new book is out, \u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470645954.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eReal-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR\u003c/a\u003e\n – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;re interested in social news readers and I\u0026rsquo;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 \u003ca href=\"http://en-us.nielsen.com/content/nielsen/en_us/product_families/nielsen_buzzmetrics.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNielsen Buzzmetrics\u003c/a\u003e\n, we have prepared all the search terms and we\u0026rsquo;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!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Real-Time Marketing \u0026 PR"},{"content":"I really enjoyed having the opportunity to ask Robert Phillips (@citizenrobert ), CEO Edelman UK, his opinion on the state of the PR profession. Robert believes that public relations is at a pivotal moment when, confronted by the brutal transparency of social media, the profession has the opportunity to embrace the public information and two-way symmetric models as the default rather than the exception, ditching the spin and persuasion attitudes and connotations. Resigning them to history, or at least to publicists.\nRobert emphasises the re-emergent role of the citizen, an idea that appears to have played a distant second fiddle to the consumer in recent decades. And if this rings your bell you might be interested in Robert\u0026rsquo;s Citizen Renaissance project.\nI was particularly interested in Robert\u0026rsquo;s assertion that social media is about behaviour; it is not a \u0026ldquo;channel\u0026rdquo;, and PRs who regard it as one are getting it wrong.\nAnd Robert capped this off by giving us his four outcomes for PR programmes (as opposed to outputs):\nIncrease trust – referring to Edelman\u0026rsquo;s annual Trust Barometer Deeper communities Driving behavioural change; of citizens, consumers, business And ultimately commercial success. Lastly, Ben Matthews (@benrmatthews ) gets a big thumbs up from Robert, and my co-host Stephen Waddington (@wadds ). FYI, they\u0026rsquo;re talking about Ben\u0026rsquo;s Bright One initiative (@brightonecomms ), a volunteer-run communications agency for the third sector.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/in-conversation-with-robert-phillips-ceo-edelman-uk/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI really enjoyed having the opportunity to ask Robert Phillips (\u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com/citizenrobert\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@citizenrobert\u003c/a\u003e\n), CEO \u003ca href=\"http://edelman.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEdelman\u003c/a\u003e\n UK, his opinion on the state of the PR profession. Robert believes that public relations is at a pivotal moment when, confronted by the brutal transparency of social media, the profession has the opportunity to embrace the public information and two-way symmetric models as the default rather than the exception, ditching the spin and persuasion attitudes and connotations. Resigning them to history, or at least to publicists.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK"},{"content":"Following establishment of the Barcelona principles in June this year and the annihilation of any idea that AVEs (advertising value equivalents) represent the value of public relations, AMEC (the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has moved on to ask two questions:\nWhat are the “validated metrics” to replace AVEs? How do you get started in measuring social media, and what are the definitions of relevant metrics? This work is being led by the US Agency Research Leaders Group chaired by Ketchum’s David Rockland, and formed a significant chunk of the conversation at last week\u0026rsquo;s IPR 8th Annual Measurement Summit .\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for one slidestack that walks you through the principles and explores the progress made to date in answering the questions above, check out this presentation: \u0026ldquo;Validated Metrics - Social Media Measurement\u0026rdquo;, delivered during the summit by Mike Daniels (Director, Report International and Chair, AMEC) and Tim Marklein (Executive Vice President, Measurement \u0026amp; Strategy, Weber Shandwick), and moderated by Peter Wengryn, CEO, VMS.\nIPR Measurement Summit \u0026ndash; Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations View more presentations from Institute for PR Measurement Commission .\nI think the work to date is most definitely going the right way; seeking to identify the desired outcomes of a public relations programme and working backwards so to speak to establish metrics that belie the programme\u0026rsquo;s success accordingly. And I was particularly pleased with slide 25 on influence rating / ranking which corroborates my recent contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, \u0026ldquo;the fallacy of the influentials \u0026rdquo;.\nThis jigsaw is coming together. We will have some operationally sound frameworks available next year, and I\u0026rsquo;m hoping my own book, \u0026ldquo;The Influence Professional\u0026rdquo;, might make some useful contribution when it emerges from the publishing process in Spring. Whatever the timeline, you should have begun winding down any remaining reliance you have on AVEs by now. It\u0026rsquo;s not a case of waiting to transition from mediocity to good; AVEs don\u0026rsquo;t even make the cut as mediocre, they are specious, misleading and unprofessional. Period.\nFacebook Groups Give Rise to Social Nicheworking by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFacebook announced a new platform for Facebook Groups recently. Rather than jump into the fray to share my immediate reactions, I opted to instead allow the news and its promise settle.\nLike many, my initial reaction was that of disappointment. After all, I was almost immediately bombarded with emails notifying my that I was added to groups where I did not request nor authorize membership. Plus, I was subsequently hammered with email updates as new group members added their commentary to the various group walls. More\u0026hellip; TV\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;The Spin Crowd\u0026rsquo; Puts PR Back 20 Years by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nIt\u0026rsquo;s quite a feat to put a profession back 20 years but that\u0026rsquo;s exactly what E!\u0026rsquo;s The Spin Crowd does for the public relations industry. Thanks guys :)\nThe Spin Crowd is a new \u0026lsquo;fly on the wall\u0026rsquo; TV series based around the overly dramatic day-to-day operations of Hollywood publicity outfit, Command PR.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s car-crash TV in the purest sense. At once strangely addictive but also seriously off-putting.\nBut then, Kim Kardashian is executive producer. \u0026lsquo;Nuff said. More\u0026hellip; [report] Consumers want incentives for review and recommendation by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nCredibility of reviews is unaffected when reviewers are rewarded\nNew research* published today by social media agency, immediate future, demonstrates a desire from consumers to be more involved in the review of products and services provided by online retailers.\nOver 60 per cent of the 2000 UK online shoppers who took part in the research, said they would be more likely to shop at a site that rewarded them for writing reviews or recommending products to friends.\nThe credibility of consumer reviews or recommendations that are incentivised by the retailer are largely unaffected. More\u0026hellip; Lifestyle blogger Bangs and a Bun on lessons for PRs by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nLeeds-based Muireann Carey-Campbell is the lifestyle blogger behind Bangs and a Bun. She published a letter of complaint this morning on her blog to PR agency Mission.\nThe letter sets out how she was mistreated by Mission in its efforts to engage with her on behalf of its client, Nokia, as she prepared for a half marathon. You can read it for yourself on Muireann’s blog along with a developing conversation between bloggers and PRs in the comments – and apologies from both Mission and Nokia. More\u0026hellip; Harnessing the Here and Now by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nA huge company has announced that it is acquiring one of your competitors. The news hit the wires five minutes ago.\nWhat would you do right now? Not tomorrow. Now!\nThese are the ideas I explore in my new book Real-Time Marketing \u0026amp; PR which releases on November 1, 2010.\nOver the next several months, I\u0026rsquo;ll be speaking about the ideas in the book, releasing a new ebook with surprising and fascinating original research, writing bylines, shooting video, and posting on Web Ink Now so I can share the concepts of real-time with you. More\u0026hellip; Introducing The Conversation Prism Version 3.0 by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nOn August 5, 2008 JESS3 and I introduced version 1.0 of The Conversation Prism. Today, I’m proud to announce The Conversation Prism Version 3.0. With the introduction of 3.0, our view of the social media panorama is updated and also reflective of the real world is embracing and organizing the social Web.\nOne of the aspects that make social media so fascinating is the conversations that define the culture and value of each community. While many of us operate on the information that fill public streams, sometimes the most interesting aspects of a story take place in the back channel. More\u0026hellip; Tom Foremski on the future of media by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nSpeed’s Simon Hill is in San Francisco this week where he caught up with Tom Foremski (@tomforemski) to seek his views on the future of media business models as part of the book project that Steve Earl and I have underway. Tom is a former Financial Times journalist and reports on the business of media and technology at Silicon Valley Watcher. Q. When do you expect the last newspaper to be printed? A. There will always be newspapers just not quite so many of them. Paper or electronic the distribution doesn’t matter if you can build and maintain a business model. More\u0026hellip; Sticky start to Vaseline\u0026rsquo;s 140th Anniversary promotion by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nBy accident I came across a promotion for Vaseline\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;140th birthday\u0026rdquo;. It\u0026rsquo;s a product owned by Unilever - a company which boasts 1H2010 sales of €21.9 billion, \u0026ldquo;underlying volume growth 6.6%, underlying sales growth 3.8% and underlying price growth (2.6)%, underlying operating margin up 30bps with continuing strong gross margins offset by significant investment in advertising and promotional expenditure, up 180bps and a net cash flow from operating activities €2.2 billion, up €0.2 billion\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/friday-roundup--goodbye-aves/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFollowing establishment of \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/news-opinion/presidents-blog/4912/barcelona-principles-the-end-of-ave-\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe Barcelona principles\u003c/a\u003e\n in June this year and the annihilation of any idea that AVEs (advertising value equivalents) represent the value of public relations, \u003ca href=\"http://www.amecorg.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n (the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has moved on to ask two questions:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat are the “validated metrics” to replace AVEs?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow do you get started in measuring social media, and what are the definitions of relevant metrics?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis work is being led by the US Agency Research Leaders Group chaired by Ketchum’s David Rockland, and formed a significant chunk of the conversation at last week\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.instituteforpr.com/education/summit_measure/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIPR 8th Annual Measurement Summit\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for one slidestack that walks you through the principles and explores the progress made to date in answering the questions above, check out this presentation: \u0026ldquo;Validated Metrics - Social Media Measurement\u0026rdquo;, delivered during the summit by Mike Daniels (Director, Report International and Chair, AMEC) and \u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com/tmarklein\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTim Marklein\u003c/a\u003e\n (Executive Vice President, Measurement \u0026amp; Strategy, Weber Shandwick), and moderated by Peter Wengryn, CEO, VMS.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/iprmeasure/barcelona-principles-taskforce-recommendations-oct710\" title=\"IPR Measurement Summit -- Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIPR Measurement Summit \u0026ndash; Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more presentations from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/iprmeasure\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInstitute for PR Measurement Commission\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think the work to date is most definitely going the right way; seeking to identify the desired outcomes of a public relations programme and working backwards so to speak to establish metrics that belie the programme\u0026rsquo;s success accordingly. And I was particularly pleased with slide 25 on influence rating / ranking which corroborates my recent contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"../2010/10/the-fallacy-of-the-influentials/\"\u003ethe fallacy of the influentials\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis jigsaw is coming together. We will have some operationally sound frameworks available next year, and I\u0026rsquo;m hoping my own book, \u0026ldquo;The Influence Professional\u0026rdquo;, might make some useful contribution when it emerges from the publishing process in Spring. Whatever the timeline, you should have begun winding down any remaining reliance you have on AVEs by now. It\u0026rsquo;s not a case of waiting to transition from mediocity to good; AVEs don\u0026rsquo;t even make the cut as mediocre, they are specious, misleading and unprofessional. Period.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup – Goodbye AVEs"},{"content":" Life\u0026rsquo;s complicated, so we better get used to it. That\u0026rsquo;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.\nWe 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.\nLife is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we\u0026rsquo;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:\nReferences David Armano at TEDxPennQuarter 2010 , 8 minutes 10 seconds in Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, Razorfish, 2009 Consumers Pushing Companies into Social Media, Invoke Solutions, August 2010 Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Tweets, Harris Interactive, 3rd June 2010 , Table 5 Paul Adams, Google, Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network , slides 131-140 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/the-fallacy-of-the-influentials/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/10/the-fallacy-of-the-influentials/monitoring_social_media_boston_2010/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Monitoring Social Media Boston 2010\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/monitoring_social_media_boston_2010.png\" title=\"Monitoring Social Media Boston 2010\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLife\u0026rsquo;s complicated, so we better get used to it. That\u0026rsquo;s my remote contribution to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/boston/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMonitoring Social Media conference, Boston 2010\u003c/a\u003e\n. In other words, your marketing and PR campaign does not pivot around finding and persuading 10, 20 or 50 so-called influentials.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe should de-emphasise the application of \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial Web analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n (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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLife is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we\u0026rsquo;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:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The fallacy of the influentials"},{"content":"Thanks for your permission to email you with the Friday Roundup today.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been over a decade since Seth Godin published Permission Marketing and as the Wikipedia entry for the book and the term says, the undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. In short, if you have to interrupt me without my permission in order to attract my attention, then all you\u0026rsquo;ve done is distracted me from what I was otherwise interested in. And if you do that, you simply risk putting your brand on the back foot as a result.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been interrupted a lot this week.\nFirstly there was the first episode of this season\u0026rsquo;s must-watch period TV drama on British TV (I know, but what can I say, I like them!) Downton Abbey has the perfect stoneware pudding bowl full of characters and plot lines, but it also had something else in abundance, and to a saturation uncommon for Britain, adverts. The Guardian was none too pleased either.\nSecond, how many of you enjoy those ads that take up your entire browser when all you want is the content? I\u0026rsquo;ve been counting\u0026hellip; 9 this week.\nThird, I followed a link to a video a friend said I\u0026rsquo;d like. Unfortunately, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I do because I had no intention waiting for a 60 second car advert to show, particularly as I\u0026rsquo;ve just bought a car and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t interested in the marque interrupting me anyway.\nSurely there must be better ways to connect marketers and content. I know the adverts pay for the dramas we love, but I won\u0026rsquo;t be watching any of the ads now; I\u0026rsquo;ll \u0026rsquo;time-shift\u0026rsquo; episode 2. Better four classy, memorable one-minute adds in the hour than seven bundles of hectic 30-second rubbish. I\u0026rsquo;d watch it live then.\nAnd this all goes to show that I can empathise just a little with those poor journalists on the receiving end of so-called PR spam. Non-relevant interruptions to their day caused by the spray-and-pray practices of the lesser practitioner. If this matter concerns you, if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to be annoying the very people you hope to influence, do check out the Media Spamming Charter published this week by the CIPR, PRCA and IRS. If you know what\u0026rsquo;s good for business, do make sure your PR team subscribes to it and has the discipline to stick to it.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nContent Marketing: Paid, Owned and Earned Media by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes There are three kinds of content marketing \u0026ndash; paid, owned and earned media. Paid media is advertising inserted next to another publisher\u0026rsquo;s content; owned media is brand-created content; and earned media is when an independent publisher provides content about a product or service.\n\u0026ldquo;Each medium offers distinct advantages, and it is important that all work together,\u0026rdquo; said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst. \u0026ldquo;The best approach is holistic, where each channel supports the others, as when paid advertising produces earned word-of-mouth, which stimulates traffic to owned microsites.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Should you be using White Papers for B2B lead generation? by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nA white paper has long been seen as a ‘serious’ way for a B2B business to position itself as a thought leader in its niche. Reading an Economist article recently about the glut of white papers (and my comment) being produced by management consultancies under the guise of research and new thinking, made me reflect on the number of white papers I’ve had cause to author, promote and release to clients’ databases of contacts.\nWhy do it?\nThe usual rationale for writing and publishing elegantly-crafted, well-researched opinion statements is that it positions your organisation as a leader in its field. More\u0026hellip; The twitter tax and what it really says about your business by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nBoth Lucy Kellaway (whom I have never met but would like to) and Jonathan Salem Baskin (with whom I shared an enjoyable dinner in London a few months ago) have written excellent pieces on the use of twitter for customer service. I also wrote a piece about this 12 months ago. Jonathan talks in his article for Ad Age titled simply “the twitter tax” of his epiphany after speaking to a colleague who had used twitter to complain about poor customer service.\n“Tools like Twitter aren’t some dream of customer empowerment, but rather the nightmare reality of the broken relationships between consumers and brands. More\u0026hellip; Banks behaving bravely - ASB Bank\u0026rsquo;s FaceBranch by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nASB Bank\u0026rsquo;s Facebranch, said to be \u0026ldquo;the first \u0026lsquo;Virtual Branch\u0026rsquo; application of its kind to be launched by a bank on Facebook\u0026rdquo;, isn\u0026rsquo;t especially interesting to me for its Facebook functionality but rather for its fronting up to the usual corporate fears of social media.\nThe three most common themes among business executives hesitant about social media are still:\nhow do we \u0026ldquo;protect\u0026rdquo; the brand? what control do we have over people saying bad things about us? How do we control what our staff can say?\nBad Banks recently nominated ASB Bank for the 2009 Roger Award, given annually to the \u0026ldquo;Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; Crowdsourced Q\u0026amp;A with CIPR President Jay O’Connor by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe last 18-months have been a turbulent period for the CIPR. But change is in the air at the headquarters in Russell Square.\nA new CEO has been appointed, a new web site and online Continuous Professional Development (CPD) scheme have been launched, there’s the social media panel, and a series of committees have scrutinised almost every aspect of the CIPR’s internal workings in a bid to connect the professional membership organisation with its members.\nI should disclose at this point that I’m a member of the social media panel and have contributed to one of the committees that have examined the relevancy of the CIPR to its members. More\u0026hellip; The Social Network: Ecosystem vs. Egosystem by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nOf all the social networks competing for our online persona and social graph, Twitter is special. The culture and self-governing rules of engagement shaped by the “me” in social media, create a personalized experience that looks and feels less like a “social” network and instead, creates as an empowering information exchange.\nTwitter is at the heart of the Web’s evolving egosystem and its archetype is powerful and quite understated. For better or worse, Twitter introduces the notion of notion of popularity, whereby the numbers of followers and also the friend to follower ratio we possess indicate ones stature within Twitterverse. More\u0026hellip; Guest post: Small changes the PR industry should make to generate SEO revenue by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI’ve been debating for the last three-months or so whether the PR industry has missed an opportunity in search engine optimisation (SEO). The rise of a multi-million pound industry alongside the PR industry indicates that this is almost certainly the case.\nIn the guest post that follows Kelvin Newman, SiteVisibility’s Creative Director, makes the case that SEO offers a revenue opportunity for the PR industry. He’s also the editor of the UK’s most listened to Marketing Podcast (according to iTunes). More\u0026hellip; CIPR TV featuring the High Priest of Publicity, Mark Borkowski by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nWadds and I benefited once again from the excellent work of the team at Markettiers4dc and another great guest this show, Mark Borkowski, MD of the eponymous Borkowski. Not exactly renowned for being a wallflower, Mark tells it how he sees it. We had some great questions submitted live via Twitter, and to be honest we could have chatted for twice the time!\nMy favourite comment relates to the attentiveness of advertising account managers to their clients needs. The quote won\u0026rsquo;t pass you by :-) More\u0026hellip; BOOK REVIEW: Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nOkay, this would have to be one of the coolest business book titles ever: MARKETING LESSONS FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD.\nThe concept is also interesting - authors David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan draw parallels between the way the iconic rock band the Grateful Dead operated in the 60s (and 70s, 80s and 90s) and how successful businesses market their brands in today\u0026rsquo;s hyper-connected environment.\nFollowing is an excerpt of a post I wrote for the SWEAT EQUITY blog:\nFirstly, I really enjoyed the book. More\u0026hellip; Internal Enterprise Communities - Your Time Has Come! by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nIntranets, or what some call enterprise communities, are getting the short end of the social media stick- they offer all the great benefits of knowledge-based collaboration and enables an organization to leverage its finest assets - its people. A success corporate intranet can yield a stronger, more powerful and productive work environment and enable peers to collaborate and co-create for the benefit of the company. A successful intranet is the demarcation of a company that is well poised to succeed strategically long-term. More\u0026hellip; Is the term Social Media holding you back? by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhen I tweeted this today, I got a bunch of reactions, so I decided to expand on the idea in this post:\nIn many companies the term \u0026ldquo;Social Media\u0026rdquo; has a negative connotation so I use \u0026ldquo;Real-Time Media\u0026rdquo; instead and management pays attention.\nAs I travel the world talking about marketing strategies, I\u0026rsquo;m hearing from many people that there is strong pushback from management about \u0026ldquo;social media.\u0026rdquo;\nThe bosses say that social media is frivolous. They obsess about ROI. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/10/friday-roundup-thanks-for-your-permission/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThanks for your permission to email you with the Friday Roundup today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s been over a decade since Seth Godin published \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePermission Marketing\u003c/a\u003e\n and as the Wikipedia entry for the book and the term says, the undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. In short, if you have to interrupt me without my permission in order to attract my attention, then all you\u0026rsquo;ve done is distracted me from what I was otherwise interested in. And if you do that, you simply risk putting your brand on the back foot as a result.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been interrupted a lot this week.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/10/friday-roundup-thanks-for-your-permission/downton_abbey/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Downton Abbey\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/downton_abbey.png\" title=\"Downton Abbey\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nFirstly there was the first episode of this season\u0026rsquo;s must-watch period TV drama on British TV (I know, but what can I say, I like them!) \u003ca href=\"http://www.itv.com/dramapremieres/downtonabbey/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDownton Abbey\u003c/a\u003e\n has the perfect stoneware pudding bowl full of characters and plot lines, but it also had something else in abundance, and to a saturation uncommon for Britain, adverts. \u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/27/downton-abbey-adverts-itv\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Guardian\u003c/a\u003e\n was none too pleased either.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSecond, how many of you enjoy those ads that take up your entire browser when all you want is the content? I\u0026rsquo;ve been counting\u0026hellip; 9 this week.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThird, I followed a link to a video a friend said I\u0026rsquo;d like. Unfortunately, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I do because I had no intention waiting for a 60 second car advert to show, particularly as I\u0026rsquo;ve just bought a car and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t interested in the marque interrupting me anyway.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSurely there must be better ways to connect marketers and content. I know the adverts pay for the dramas we love, but I won\u0026rsquo;t be watching any of the ads now; I\u0026rsquo;ll \u0026rsquo;time-shift\u0026rsquo; episode 2. Better four classy, memorable one-minute adds in the hour than seven bundles of hectic 30-second rubbish. I\u0026rsquo;d watch it live then.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd this all goes to show that I can empathise just a little with those poor journalists on the receiving end of so-called PR spam. Non-relevant interruptions to their day caused by the spray-and-pray practices of the lesser practitioner. If this matter concerns you, if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to be annoying the very people you hope to influence, do check out the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/news-opinion/press-releases/5359/pr-profession-launches-media-spamming-charter\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMedia Spamming Charter\u003c/a\u003e\n published this week by the CIPR, PRCA and IRS. If you know what\u0026rsquo;s good for business, do make sure your PR team subscribes to it and has the discipline to stick to it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup: Thanks for your permission"},{"content":"Wadds and I benefited once again from the excellent work of the team at Markettiers4dc and another great guest this show, Mark Borkowski, MD of the eponymous Borkowski . Not exactly renowned for being a wallflower, Mark tells it how he sees it. We had some great questions submitted live via Twitter, and to be honest we could have chatted for twice the time!\nMy favourite comment relates to the attentiveness of advertising account managers to their clients needs. The quote won\u0026rsquo;t pass you by :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/09/cipr-tv-featuring-the-high-priest-of-publicity-mark-borkowski/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWadds and I benefited once again from the excellent work of the team at \u003ca href=\"http://markettiers4dc.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarkettiers4dc\u003c/a\u003e\n and another great guest this show, Mark Borkowski, MD of the eponymous \u003ca href=\"http://www.borkowski.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBorkowski\u003c/a\u003e\n. Not exactly renowned for being a wallflower, Mark tells it how he sees it. We had some great questions submitted live via Twitter, and to be honest we could have chatted for twice the time!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy favourite comment relates to the attentiveness of advertising account managers to their clients needs. The quote won\u0026rsquo;t pass you by :-)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR TV featuring the High Priest of Publicity, Mark Borkowski"},{"content":"Public relations isn\u0026rsquo;t just media relations. Marketing isn\u0026rsquo;t just promotion. Promotion isn\u0026rsquo;t just advertising. PR isn\u0026rsquo;t just one-way. Digital isn\u0026rsquo;t just Web.\nI\u0026rsquo;m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. It\u0026rsquo;s about influence and a new role in the marketing and PR mix. It\u0026rsquo;s also about taking a good look at where marketing and public relations got to in the 20th Century, what happened in the last ten years, and what will happen in the coming decade that will make the last ten look like we were just taking it easy.\nMost intriguingly, on talking to as many people as I can, not only have I found little useful understanding amongst those looking in on our professions, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found inconsistent definitions and misunderstandings between our respective disciplines.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen marketing bodies (incorrectly) claim that PR is a subset of marketing to the point where it\u0026rsquo;s inserted as part of the promotional toolbox; a completely misguided conclusion. And public relations academics using terms like \u0026ldquo;marketing public relations\u0026rdquo; to describe those PR practitioners who most often wield the tools of publicity such as press releases and events.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve chatted to advertising pros who hadn\u0026rsquo;t come across the phrase interruption marketing. And PR consultants who haven\u0026rsquo;t grasped that their role is to be influenced and represent stakeholders within an organisation, as much as it is to influence. To seek to understand as well as seek to be understood.\nIn an attempt then to be more rigorous in my analysis, so that I might present statistics rather than hearsay, I have created a research questionnaire that I really hope you\u0026rsquo;ll find time to complete. I would cherish your participation and recognise that participation in the book. It\u0026rsquo;s at:\nMany thanks in advance.\nPhilip and the MarCom Professional team.\nTargeting the Youth with Direct Mail and Right Writer review by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nI know my blog’s output has been poor over the last few months. So to try and make amends, I’ve got a double whammy of posts for you: UK’s youth the most engaged with direct mail\nWith all the fuss over how social media and the internet is giving young people the attention spans of goldfish, you’d think you’d have no hope of persuading anyone under 25 to read a couple of hundred words of printed copy. Well, according to Experian research the age group most engaged with direct mail in the UK is, wait for it…15-24 year olds. More\u0026hellip; Young Americans are Viewing Less Live TV by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that traditional television broadcasters in the U.S. must respond to a growing trend. As TV program time-shifting and online over-the-top (OTT) video viewing have both increased in importance, there\u0026rsquo;s been a corresponding decrease in interest with \u0026ldquo;live\u0026rdquo; broadcast TV.\nFurthermore, the TV set isn\u0026rsquo;t the focal point that it used to be in America. According to a report from market researcher Morpace, nearly three in five U.S. consumers watch at least some video on a device other than a television. More\u0026hellip; The Decline of Asocial Shopping and the Rise of Social Commerce by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\n500 million Facebook denizens are plotting their social graphs.\n145 million Twitter users Tweet and ReTweet.\n3 million people are checking-in on FourSquare.\nBrands are flocking to social networks, some with strategies and others simply experimenting with community building. What’s clear is that the 3F’s (friends, fans, and followers) are not created equal. Those brands who examine the composition of their existing community will find that many are simply seeking access to exclusive specials and content. More\u0026hellip; Setting Up Your Forum: Top Tips for Using Get Satisfaction by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nRecently, I started a short series of blog post on using a community forum to exchange with your users. In this second part, we’ll look at why we chose a particular platform and how we’ve used it since launch.\nPart I: Why and when should I start my own community forum? Part II: Setting up your forum: Top tips for using Get Satisfaction Part III: Making the most of user feedback\nWhy we chose Get Satisfaction\nFrom the first time I came across Get Satisfaction in 2007, I’ve been looking for a suitable context in which to use it but the opportunity never came until now. More\u0026hellip; Borders Books into Foursquare by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nRetail chain Borders has become one of the first major brands in Australia to run a promotional campaign based around the location-sharing platform, Foursquare.\nThe promotion, developed by Borders’ digital agency Tangent One, focuses on rewarding check-in loyalty (DISCLOSURE: Tangent One is a client of my company parkyoung).\nFor every third check-in at a Borders store, customers will receive a 10% discount off all full-priced books.\nAccording to Borders, the Foursquare promotion will be rolled out to all 26 of its stores and will stay in the market for an initial two months with more offers and campaigns already planned. More\u0026hellip; August ABCs: further falls for print by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe ABC circulation figures for the national print media in August and in and with the exception of the Daily Mail, its drama across the board with year-on-year falls. Here are the headlines.\nSix national newspapers have suffered double-digit falls in print circulation The circulation of The Times fell below 500,000 for the first time The Daily Mail held-up strongest with a fall of less than 0.1 per cent Stripping out bulk circulation (copies distributed by third-parties such as airports and hotels, typically for free) has exaggerated the downward trend for many publications There’s further analysis here in Press Gazette and here is the data in full. More\u0026hellip; Evolution of video contest marketing at Cisco by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMany organizations, both B2B and consumer, consider running video contests to promote products, services, and ideas. But until now, it has been difficult to get accurate metrics. That\u0026rsquo;s why I am excited that the marketers at Cisco have collaborated to share with us the results of three elaborate video contests they’ve run over the past two years to get the word out. Anyone considering a video contest needs to study this showcase of best practices and the overall impact of social media video contests. More\u0026hellip; Making of the audiobook Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nToday the audiobook version of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History was released on Audible. On the #GDbook Audible page, you can listen to several chapters free. Find the link just under the book cover image.\nMy co-author Brian Halligan and I went into the studio to read the book ourselves. We sort of felt like rock stars. To give you a taste if what the experience was like, we made this short video documentary. Direct link to video on Vimeo. More\u0026hellip; The New Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nOn Monday, I received a message from the short and simple message from the Twitter team, “You are invited to attend a special event at Twitter HQ tomorrow afternoon, RSVP Yes or No.”\nI had just finalized my travel from San Francisco to New York and thought for a moment, that it might be worth reconsidering. The message could only mean one thing, Twitter was going to announce something new and given that they don’t usually host live conferences for just any new feature, it would carry a level of importance that would see the likes of tech’s top press and industry leaders in attendance. More\u0026hellip; 12 Search Engine metrics for brands using social media by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage by bragadocchio via Flickr Surveys are frequently used by companies as a market research tool. Doing surveys is a great way for Brand Managers to cross-check the marketing tools you are using. We frequently take surveys in order to check\nAre your marketing tools up to date? What new services could you be using? EConsultancy did a survey on behalf of SEMPO the search engine marketing professional organisation which was very instructive. It taught us a lot about both the search engines available and the ways in which search engines can be used for marketing. More\u0026hellip; Strange Brew by Paul Greenhalgh of Searched, Designed, Developed\nStood at the bus stop, I noticed something familiar about this advert. No, not the bud logo or typeface (I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of bland American beer) but something else. Can you spot it?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s right, there\u0026rsquo;s the little Facebook \u0026ldquo;f\u0026rdquo; in the corner.\nThis is interesting for a few reasons. Taking a branding perspective, there is no mention of Facebook on the advert; there is no context and the full word does not even appear. However, it has already been established that f is for Facebook in the Google instant alphabet and Facebook\u0026rsquo;s estimated 500 million users are, I\u0026rsquo;m sure, more than familiar with the icon from their tab bars and bookmarks so it\u0026rsquo;s understandable, if a bit arrogant!\nIt also makes me wonder what the connection is between Facebook and beer. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/09/friday-roundup-are-you-an-influence-professional/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePublic relations isn\u0026rsquo;t just media relations. Marketing isn\u0026rsquo;t just promotion. Promotion isn\u0026rsquo;t just advertising. PR isn\u0026rsquo;t just one-way. Digital isn\u0026rsquo;t just Web.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. It\u0026rsquo;s about influence and a new role in the marketing and PR mix. It\u0026rsquo;s also about taking a good look at where marketing and public relations got to in the 20th Century, what happened in the last ten years, and what will happen in the coming decade that will make the last ten look like we were just taking it easy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost intriguingly, on talking to as many people as I can, not only have I found little useful understanding amongst those looking in on our professions, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found inconsistent definitions and misunderstandings between our respective disciplines.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup: Are you an Influence Professional?"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;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.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , and I\u0026rsquo;d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It\u0026rsquo;s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you\u0026rsquo;re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can\u0026rsquo;t help but learn more as you do it.\nI need you\u0026hellip; But now it\u0026rsquo;s time to collaborate. I need your input, insights, experiences and assessment of the current state of affairs in marketing and PR. I\u0026rsquo;d love you to complete my research questionnaire before the end of September; it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t take more than 10-12 minutes. I\u0026rsquo;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.\nThe ebook still attracts over a thousand downloads every month, and it\u0026rsquo;s just about to break through 90,000. Whilst the second half, focused on vendor information, is now out of date, I\u0026rsquo;m pleased to say the first half still makes sense. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping I can match its success this time round, with your help!\nThanks. #inflpro ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/09/contribute-to-the-influence-professional-book/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Web Analytics eBook 2008\u003c/a\u003e\n, and I\u0026rsquo;d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It\u0026rsquo;s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you\u0026rsquo;re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can\u0026rsquo;t help but learn more as you do it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Contribute to the Influence Professional book"},{"content":"CIPR TV is underway!\nI 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\u0026rsquo;s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s response to the ASA\u0026rsquo;s misguided stance towards social media , and his plans for the CIPR next year.\nAnd our second advantage was simply working with the highly professional markettiers4dc team. Thanks guys for making us feel like we were in safe hands!\nBookmark www.cipr.tv and track #ciprtv too.\nAnd join us again at 5pm on the 29th when we\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;t quite go to plan. But I\u0026rsquo;m most looking forward to grilling Mark on the repositioning of his firm:\nBorkowski 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.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/09/the-1st-cipr-tv-show/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eCIPR TV is underway!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with \u003ca href=\"http://www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/wadds/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStephen Waddington\u003c/a\u003e\n (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/wadds\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@wadds\u003c/a\u003e\n) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC\u0026rsquo;s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s response to the \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/09/the-asas-misstep/\"\u003eASA\u0026rsquo;s misguided stance towards social media\u003c/a\u003e\n, and his plans for the CIPR next year.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The 1st CIPR TV show"},{"content":"Some things aren\u0026rsquo;t quite as simple as first they seem. And when this is the case, it\u0026rsquo;s good practice to consult widely. And on this count, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA ) has failed.\nOn 1st September, the ASA announced: \u0026ldquo;Landmark agreement extends ASA\u0026rsquo;s digital remit \u0026rdquo;. The scope of its Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for the CAP Code governing UK advertising, will extend to \u0026ldquo;apply in full to marketing communications online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.\u0026rdquo;\nNow who could possibly argue with that?\nIndeed, the Digital Marketing Association simply repeated the news on its website. Hugh Burkitt, Chief Executive of the Marketing Society, conveyed his full support in a letter to the FT . No word yet (or that I can find) from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s the problem?\nWell, being a founding member of the CIPR \u0026rsquo;s Social Media panel, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be a little biased, but it appears to me that no-one else has grasped exactly what\u0026rsquo;s going on here. Indeed, the CIPR is the only dissenting voice I know of so far. Despite having received reassurances back in May that the CIPR would be consulted, the ASA\u0026rsquo;s announcement this week did not get run by the CIPR.\nAnd what contribution would the CIPR make? Well, I can only speak for myself here, for the moment, and it goes something like this.\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t agree more that deceptive, dishonest, opaque or misleading marketing communications should be frowned upon. We should do everything we can to help organisations of all types, governmental, for-profit and non-profit, to become transparent and open. To engage in honest and forthright communications with all stakeholders. To seek to influence, sure, but also to seek to be influenced. To be porous to the world, to sensitise everyone in the organisation to the zeitgeist, to humanise the corporates and, in a turn of phrase I picked up from Brian Solis, to socialise them.\nThis has been a hard slog to date. The 20th Century climate of control has been difficult to shrug off, despite the widespread adoption of social media signalling quite clearly that the world has changed. Information technology has revolutionised the marketplace, and in the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the market is now a conversation.\nThe marketing team is no longer solely responsible for or in control of marketing. The PR team is no longer solely responsible for or in control of PR. Both will set out the strategies to best achieve the business objectives, but execution demands they harness the support of the entire organisation, the oft-called ecosystem of channel, partners and suppliers, and the wider publics.\nThis process is cathartic. A new daylight illuminates the issues and, some might say, disinfects some of the odious practices that went undetected in previous times. Hey, some companies actually apologise when they mess up nowadays!\nWhen you think about it, deception and dishonesty actually take some doing. They demand control. They demand isolation. Precisely the characteristics of the influence supply chain (and again, I use \u0026lsquo;influence\u0026rsquo; to mean influence flows in all directions) that are rendered impossible upon socialising the organisation.\nBut the announcement this week by the ASA potentially halts this disinfection in its tracks. Perhaps they thought it was working too slowly, but perhaps, without talking to the CIPR, they weren\u0026rsquo;t cognizant of it in the first place. Rather, their intended role, from 1st March 2011, may only serve to make organisations more nervous about ceding control to the wider organisation, more anxious about opening up and empowering everyone to take part in the conversation.\nLord Smith, the former Labour culture secretary who is chairman of the ASA, claims: \u0026ldquo;This significant extension of the ASA\u0026rsquo;s remit has the protection of children and consumers at its heart.\u0026rdquo; It may well have it at its heart Lord Smith, but some things aren\u0026rsquo;t quite as simple as first they seem, and your plans may have precisely the opposite effect.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s talk.\n2D or not 2D? That is not the question. by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nI got involved in a debate around 1D and 2D (or QR) Mobile Codes some time back on a Guardian blog (I know, my life is pretty new media rock and roll these days). Anyway, 1D codes are your standard flavour barcode, found on a can of beans and pretty much all FMCG goods, as well as CDs, books etc. 2D or QR codes are those square blocky codes, found on the cover of Wired Magazine and all over Japan. Quite a lot of fuss was made over 2D codes some time back, as they looked like a great way to short-cut to content. More\u0026hellip; What Small Companies Can Teach the Big Guys About Marketing by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nThe race is on for the hearts and minds of your customers\u0026hellip;are you even on the starting blocks?\nOkay, blatant plug time\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve recently relaunched my \u0026lsquo;sideline\u0026rsquo; blog SWEAT EQUITY. Please feel free to check it out, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your thoughts :)\nEssentially, the website is forming the basis of a book I\u0026rsquo;m researching and writing called SWEAT EQUITY: What Small Companies Can Teach the Big Guys About Marketing.\nSWEAT EQUITY is a marketing manifesto for a hyper-connected world. More\u0026hellip; Preview of Google TV by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia ibo.posterous.com More\u0026hellip; TED Talk: The beauty of data visualization by David McCandless by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia lenkendall.posterous.com I’ve met David a couple of times now and its incredible just how he visualises complex datasets in to beautiful visuals. Oh and buy his book, its brills. More\u0026hellip; What Makes an Influencer? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nInfluence is the subject of some of important conversations lately. Each time we surface questions, answers and new thinking that starts to reshape the landscape for how businesses view, define, and embrace influence.\nThe socialization has democratized content and equalized influence. As such, we are at the inception of an an era when everyday people are presented with an opportunity to earn authority, trust, and leadership based on their actions and words.\nI’ve partnered with Vocus to take the conversation to you. More\u0026hellip; How To Find Your Thought Leadership Voice Online by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThere is plenty of information online about using social media for thought leadership. The returns and values have been well-calculated and, in some cases, well-articulated. One great example is our friends over at Bloom Group, who are the thought leaders for thought leadership.\nFew seasoned marketing professionals would argue that online thought leadership is a waste of time or money. Most would say it\u0026rsquo;s an imperative. But while the \u0026ldquo;Must dos!\u0026rdquo; on this topic are whizzing past, the instructions on \u0026ldquo;How?\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Video: Bringing a Brand to Life in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWe’re approaching the last bits of this enlivening conversations where Chris Beck, founder of 26dottwo (@26dottwo) and I examined the state and future of social media.\nIn this installment we review the various aspects and formalities of bringing a brand alive, truly alive in social media. Everything begins with establishing the rules of engagement in order to define the boundaries, context, and objectives for conversations. Guidelines such as “don’t be stupid,” “use common sense,” More\u0026hellip; Are Smartphones Transforming Our Social Media Interactions? by Anna Manasova of Pepsmedia Ltd\nI’ve made it one of my goals recently to try and get a bit more involved with local events and the local community, meet new people and get contacts in the industries I’m interested in. Cambridge is a good place to do this as it hosts many events and meetups, catering to technology geeks, creative people, internationals and whatever else may take my fancy.\nSo I started going, and I’m really enjoying it so far, most recently at last week’s CamCreative MeetUp.\nBut surprisingly, there’s one thing that has made the biggest impact on my experience of the events so far: More\u0026hellip; Girls Fight Back… with video by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSeptember is National Campus Safety Awareness Month. And this week millions of college students in North America will move into their dorms or apartments for the new academic year.\nIn this spirit, I\u0026rsquo;d like to talk about Erin Weed and her terrific program called Girls Fight Back.\nGFB empowers girls and women from around the world through personal safety and self-defense techniques. The information is delivered via in person sessions on university campuses, at high schools and workplaces. More\u0026hellip; CIPR calls for clarity on ASA’s digital remit by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe CIPR has hit out at the ASA for not consulting the PR industry on its proposed regulation of brands in social networks. In a statement issued by the CIPR (disclosure: I’m a member of the CIPR panel) it said that it was given an undertaking in May that the views of the PR industry would be heard.\n\u0026ldquo;We are disappointed this action has been taken without our involvement,” says Ann Mealor, Interim CEO at the CIPR. “We are writing to the ASA regarding our concerns and advocating the need for closer working relationships on this issue.” More\u0026hellip; Social Rebranding by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been drinking coffee from a glass recently. The last time I did that was a few years ago and the experience wasn\u0026rsquo;t altogether satisfactory. Unlike my previous experience in Marylebone, however, this time I was in Spain. In Spain, real men drink their coffee black. I\u0026rsquo;d tried ordering a white coffee (\u0026lsquo;con leche\u0026rsquo;) but had been laughed out of the bar on the grounds of questionable sexual orientation. Real men definitively drink their coffee black in Spain. Black, and bastard strong. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/09/the-asas-misstep/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSome things aren\u0026rsquo;t quite as simple as first they seem. And when this is the case, it\u0026rsquo;s good practice to consult widely. And on this count, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (\u003ca href=\"http://asa.org.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eASA\u003c/a\u003e\n) has failed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 1st September, the ASA announced: \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://asa.org.uk/Media-Centre/2010/ASA-digital-remit-extension.aspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLandmark agreement extends ASA\u0026rsquo;s digital remit\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;. The scope of its Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for the CAP Code governing UK advertising, will extend to \u0026ldquo;apply in full to marketing communications online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow who could possibly argue with that?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Friday Roundup: The ASA's misstep"},{"content":"Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:\nCompanies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they\u0026rsquo;ll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF \u0026amp; the semantic web #CIPRSM [link ]\nMy 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.\nMy 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\u0026rsquo;s a man who knows his PR and semantics for sure.\nAnd it appears I may have achieved my objective. As @jonnystark and @Mark_Wyatt put it:\n@Sheldrake thanks for the talk. Sat with @dewilded and still talking about it. [link ]\n@Sheldrake Many thanks for the talk yesterday. Really engaged and informative. Discussion carried on late into the night with @dewilded [link ]\n[Note: the video links in the presentation don\u0026rsquo;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.]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/intro-to-web-3-0-and-the-internet-of-things-at-the-cipr-social-summer-session/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/intro-to-web-30-and-the-internet-of-things\" title=\"Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIntro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentations\u003c/a\u003e\n from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com/dewilded\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@dewilded\u003c/a\u003e\n summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCompanies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they\u0026rsquo;ll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF \u0026amp; the semantic web #CIPRSM [\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/dewilded/status/22194286642\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elink\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web \u003cem\u003eand\u003c/em\u003e the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session"},{"content":"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo\u0026feature=player _embedded\nThe last time I was on TV it was the BBC\u0026rsquo;s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe\u0026rsquo;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.\nFast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn\u0026rsquo;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!\nAnd now we have .\nThis is just the latest in a series of social / digital initiatives from the CIPR this year. We\u0026rsquo;ve had the super new website, the formation of the CIPR Social Media Panel , the continous professional development tracker going online, and the design and delivery of the via public wiki.\nWhat is CIPR TV? Well Stephen Waddington and I are hosting a live streaming video event every three weeks starting 5pm Wednesday 8th September in partnership with Howard Kosky , Russell Goldsmith , Natalie Jackson and the fab production team at Markettiers4DC .\nOur first guest will be Paul Mylrea, next year\u0026rsquo;s CIPR President and Head of Press and Media Relations at the BBC. We\u0026rsquo;ll be talking with him about this new phrase \u0026ldquo;reputation washing\u0026rdquo;, what it means and how our profession must respond, and of course we\u0026rsquo;ll be inviting his views on the CIPR and the profession for 2011. And to think that eight years ago it was the BBC challenging me with the questions! :-)\nBeing a live format (gulp!), we\u0026rsquo;ll be encouraging a simultaneous Twitter dialogue at #ciprtv to add that vital social dimension to the event and so we can incorporate your questions and comments into the show.\nAs the trailer says, hope to see you 8th September, \u0026ldquo;live at five\u0026rdquo;.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/hosting-cipr-tv-live-at-five/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo\u0026amp;feature=player\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo\u0026feature=player\u003c/a\u003e\n_embedded\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe last time I was on TV it was the BBC\u0026rsquo;s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn\u0026rsquo;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!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd now we have .\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Hosting CIPR TV... live at five!"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;d like to quote you.\nWithout doubt, the marketing and PR professions are in revolutionary flux right now. I reckon that if we didn\u0026rsquo;t have these disciplines to date but just realised here and now that we actually wanted to influence what people think and do, and ensure we\u0026rsquo;re influenced straight back, that we\u0026rsquo;d design things very much differently to the status quo we\u0026rsquo;ve inherited.\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted that Wiley has invited me to write a book on just this topic. It\u0026rsquo;s going to focus on the much needed transformation of marketing and PR strategies, and the related disciplines in the influence mix, for the current and future digital age.\nThe book explains what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming up. It points to the changes of direction organisations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant.\nAnd in the spirit of a marketer honing a product’s positioning, I’ll tell you what this book is not. This book is not a social media ‘how to’. Rather, it\u0026rsquo;s about your organisation, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organisation and personal careers, whilst the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to quote you. Please do get in touch if you\u0026rsquo;d like to share your viewpoint and experiences\u0026hellip; the book will only be improved by your contributions. Seriously, do it!\nAnd if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the bit about what\u0026rsquo;s coming up, I\u0026rsquo;m running a session this coming Thursday in London at the CIPR on the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things if you\u0026rsquo;d like to join us.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\n5 Not-So-Easy Steps to Managing Your Brand Online by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nUnless you literally run your business with your ears plugged and your eyes covered, you are aware of the importance of social media and its impact on both brand and bottom line. However, while social media is the topic du jour in mainstream news, on blogs, in books, at conferences and at your local Starbucks, we may still underestimate its overall promise and potential.\nThe socialization of business is comparable to the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the red pill in the Matrix. If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. More\u0026hellip; Video documentaries as brand journalism by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nA short online video documentary is a terrific form of brand journalism for any organization. Brian Halligan and I recently finished out \u0026ldquo;follow the band book tour\u0026rdquo; to launch our new book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History.\nI created this mini-documentary to illustrate how the Dead freed their music, cultivated a relationship with fans, and built a social network before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. Near the end of the video, Brian and I discuss how every business can use these ideas. More\u0026hellip; Building your personal reputation online (and getting hired) – lessons from recent graduates by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nIndividuals that want to get ahead in digital PR should use social media to build their personal reputation. At least that was the conclusion of the CIPR Summer Social workshop that I led last week on getting ahead and getting hired in digital. I included examples from recent graduates such as Ben Cotton, Jed Hallam, Laura Tosney and Matt Watson that have used digital techniques to build their personal reputation during the last two to three years.\nTheir experiences getting hired into some of the UK’s leading PR and social media agencies are inspirational and worth sharing more widely. More\u0026hellip; Marketing Metrics and Myopic Usage of Analytics by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nMost U.S. marketers are using analytics. They recognize the importance of measuring marketing effectiveness, especially when they are asked to justify their spending. However, according to a report by eMarketer, there is room for improvement in formalizing approaches and communicating results.\nAccording to a survey of senior marketing executives by Forbes Insights and MarketShare Partners, nearly seven in ten said they used analytics to measure marketing effectiveness. Marketers with large budgets were significantly more likely to do so than those with spending of less than $1 million. More\u0026hellip; TAC Straps in for a Terrific Integrated Campaign by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nIn the communications game it\u0026rsquo;s important to ensure you have plenty of \u0026rsquo;layers\u0026rsquo; to the stories you tell on behalf of your clients (if agency) or organisation (if in-house).\nThat\u0026rsquo;s often the job of the PR and/or advertising team - to bring a story to life so that it resonates with audiences. To do this, you need to be able to identify and add layers of interest, to \u0026lsquo;join the dots\u0026rsquo; of a story and then leverage via a multitude of different channels.\nSometimes a bit of luck can fall your way and the elements come together beautifully, thus ensuring the communication enjoys maximum impact. More\u0026hellip; Does the average UK Facebook user spend 24 hours per month on the site? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAccording to Hitwise, the average amount of time spent on Facebook by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27.36 minutes during June and July 2010.\nAccording to Google, the average session time was 26.40 mins – not wildly dissimilar to Hitwise’s estimate. Perhaps even more interesting, Google claims that the average number of visits per UK Facebook user last month was 51 (worldwide average is 33). On Google’s figures, that would suggest the average UK Facebook user spent 1360 minutes on the site last month – More\u0026hellip; The Difference Between Doing Social Vs. Being Social by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThere is a rather large difference between companies \u0026ldquo;doing\u0026rdquo; social and \u0026ldquo;being\u0026rdquo; social. For a company to succeed at this new business model, they must learn how to do social and also, enable their people to be social.\nDoing social is the imperative part of the equation. This means making plans, defining objectives complete with outcomes, tracking and measuring success and making adjustments to the plan along the way. Most companies start doing social within their marketing and sales departments to drive traffic to their site and raise awareness about their products or services. More\u0026hellip; Educating your salespeople about the new B2B sales cycle by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI spent most of my career in B2B marketing, although for four years I was in B2B sales. So I\u0026rsquo;ve seen both sides. Back in the mid 1990\u0026rsquo;s it was hard to find evidence of love between marketing and sales. At many business-to-business companies the relationship was downright adversarial. Often, the tension extends all the way up to senior management.\nIt all stemmed from the sales process involving a \u0026ldquo;handoff.\u0026rdquo; Marketing generated leads, handed them over to sales and then the sales team owned them until close. More\u0026hellip; Ethics in PR Measurement by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post \u0026ldquo;Influence: From BS to Best Practice\u0026rdquo; set the scene nicely.\nAt the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR, PRSA and CPRS. More\u0026hellip; Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches by Andrew Smith of escherman\nThe SEO vs PR debate continues to rumble on. However, on a very tactical level, it occurred to me that certain SEO practitioners are starting to emulate some of PR’s worst habits – specifically, the bad pitch. Or at least it’s SEO equivalent – the poor Backlink Request. The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.\nJournalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests. More\u0026hellip; What your Bounce Rate Says About You by Paul Greenhalgh of Searched, Designed, Developed\nle Analytics is a very powerful tool but sometimes its results can be misleading. It is very easy to see a green improvement percent and think that all is well. Even metrics that we have benchmarks for don\u0026rsquo;t always mean what we think they do. A good example of this is Bounce Rate. If you\u0026rsquo;ve never heard of Bounce Rate before, check out the Analytics glossary at the bottom of the page.Bounce Rate benchmark\nIf a Bounce Rate is over than 40%, I take it as an indication that site visitors are not getting involved with site content. More\u0026hellip; Video: The Great Advertising Disconnect? From Campaign to Continuum by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn part eight of a series of conversations exploring the state and future of social media, Chris Beck, founder of 26dottwo (@26dottwo) and I discuss the changing landscape of advertising and engagement.\nAdvertising and marketing is experimenting with campaigns and engagement programs that essentially brings creative to life. It’s the fusion of influence and confluence that will define their success over time.\nBut how do we define success?\nSuccess stories in social are now common, but can we truly use them as templates for our unique market dynamics? In order to measure the success of our programs, we must design metrics and desired outcomes into the plan. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/friday-roundup-id-like-to-quote-you/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d like to quote you.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWithout doubt, the marketing and PR professions are in revolutionary flux right now. I reckon that if we didn\u0026rsquo;t have these disciplines to date but just realised here and now that we actually wanted to influence what people think and do, and ensure we\u0026rsquo;re influenced straight back, that we\u0026rsquo;d design things very much differently to the status quo we\u0026rsquo;ve inherited.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted that \u003ca href=\"http://eu.wiley.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWiley\u003c/a\u003e\n has invited me to write a book on just this topic. It\u0026rsquo;s going to focus on the much needed transformation of marketing and PR strategies, and the related disciplines in the influence mix, for the current and future digital age.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book explains what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming up. It points to the changes of direction organisations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd in the spirit of a marketer honing a product’s positioning, I’ll tell you what this book is not. This book is not a social media ‘how to’. Rather, it\u0026rsquo;s about your organisation, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organisation and personal careers, whilst the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d like to quote you. Please do get in touch if you\u0026rsquo;d like to share your viewpoint and experiences\u0026hellip; the book will only be improved by your contributions. Seriously, do it!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the bit about what\u0026rsquo;s coming up, I\u0026rsquo;m running a session this coming Thursday in London \u003ca href=\"http://ciprsm.wikispaces.com/Here\u0026#43;Comes\u0026#43;Web\u0026#43;3.0\u0026#43;and\u0026#43;the\u0026#43;Internet\u0026#43;of\u0026#43;Things\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eat the CIPR on the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things\u003c/a\u003e\n if you\u0026rsquo;d like to join us.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup: I'd like to quote you"},{"content":" I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post \u0026ldquo;Influence: From BS to Best Practice \u0026rdquo; set the scene nicely.\nAt the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS .\nIn one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman\u0026rsquo;s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:\nRT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? \u0026lt;\u0026ndash; Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what\u0026rsquo;s acceptable to them!? #measurepr At Shonali\u0026rsquo;s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today\u0026hellip;\nQuestions Does PR\u0026rsquo;s use of social analytics need a good reputation itself? If so, what might this entail? How aware do we think our stakeholders are about the monitoring and analytical capabilities at our fingertips? Would something like Mozilla\u0026rsquo;s Privacy Icon project help us and our stakeholders be clear about what\u0026rsquo;s acceptable behaviour? Rather than explain here some of the behaviour that appears to be, in my opinion, bordering on the unethical, I\u0026rsquo;ll point you instead to a fascinating series started at the Wall Street Journal, \u0026ldquo;The Web\u0026rsquo;s New Goldmine: Your Secrets \u0026rdquo;, which does a much more thorough job of it. You may also like to read my previous post \u0026ldquo;My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics \u0026rdquo;.\nTraining and extending the codes of conduct I felt that the topic today was lost on one or two participants (or perhaps simply uninteresting?), and when you think that those taking part in Twitter chats like these are amongst the early majority, that\u0026rsquo;s cause for concern. The simple fact is, the vast majority of PR practitioners have next to no idea how the Internet or the Web function (yes, they are different), and therefore have equally little comprehension of how the social monitoring and analytics services they are being sold may compromise their reputation amongst consumers and all stakeholders when, inevitably, the digital shit hits the digital fan.\nHowever, ignorance is no excuse. Another of my tweets today:\nNow is the time to get our house in order. Would you like your organisation to be defending, apologising or leading? #measurepr So we need training. The CIPR Social Summer has started to scratch the surface in the UK, and I know the CIPR is keen to build on this mini-success. And as the lead on the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s social measurement group, I\u0026rsquo;m keen to ensure our group defines acceptable and unacceptable practice, and of course we are equally keen to align our thinking with the PRSA, CPRS, IPR, IAB and similar institutions and societies.\nFor now, I\u0026rsquo;ll quote two more of my tweets from today\u0026rsquo;s Twitter chat:\nWhat about setting some principles here\u0026hellip; the first principles following the Barcelona Principles? #measurepr and\nHowsabout \u0026ldquo;Be Open And Ask Nicely\u0026rdquo;? Surely that\u0026rsquo;s a good principle for PR cookie based analytics #measurepr In the meantime If, as a consumer, as a Web user, you are concerned that your fellow marketers are not being transparent and authentic with you; if you think they\u0026rsquo;re trying to log everything you do and everywhere you go (and they are); then you need to research how to improve your browser privacy settings.\nThese are, however, unlikely to keep every attempt at bay. Code-geeks, disconnected from the ethics and codes of conduct that might be of concern to those of us in the reputation management profession, have already designed software to reinstate those cookies you delete as quickly as you can delete them. Gawd bless\u0026rsquo;em and all those PR professionals who avoid asking hard questions.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you then with links to Beef Taco and Taco , two Firefox extensions designed to fend off advertising cookies.\nI feel this debate is just starting.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/ethics-in-pr-measurement/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/08/ethics-in-pr-measurement/headshot-personal-small/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Shonali Burke\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/headshot-personal-small.jpg\" title=\"Shonali Burke\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nI took part in the \u003ca href=\"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23measurepr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e#measurepr\u003c/a\u003e\n Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by \u003ca href=\"http://www.waxingunlyrical.com/about/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eShonali Burke\u003c/a\u003e\n and her blog post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.waxingunlyrical.com/2010/08/16/influence-from-bs-to-best-practice/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluence: From BS to Best Practice\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; set the scene nicely.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/membership-networking/code-conduct\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/Ethics/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePRSA\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.cprs.ca/aboutus/code_ethic.aspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCPRS\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman\u0026rsquo;s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRT @\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/kseniacoffman\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ekseniacoffman\u003c/a\u003e\n: Q2: Where do you go for best practices? \u0026lt;\u0026ndash; Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what\u0026rsquo;s acceptable to them!? \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/search?q=%23measurepr\" title=\"#measurepr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e#measurepr\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt Shonali\u0026rsquo;s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ethics in PR Measurement"},{"content":"A very interesting thing happened at the end of July.\nIt affects every single practitioner in the public relations industry, indeed practitioners across all marketing disciplines.\nAnd yet I haven\u0026rsquo;t found one reference to it amongst the PR digerati yet, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to put that right. Now.\nThe subtleties of digital At its core, this digital world is just a set of 1s and 0s that have been applied with increasing sophistication and power. It revolutionised the more numerical professions first, such as accounting and engineering in the seventies, before moving through manufacturing in the eighties and retail in the nineties.\nIn the noughties, \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; arrived big style in the lives of marketing and PR professionals simply because it arrived big style in the lives of the stakeholders we look to communicate with, learn from and influence.\nThe bleeding edge of \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; can now be expressed as the kind of things you\u0026rsquo;d almost think something that was digital would be least suited to. The kind of things that are considerably more subtle than the binary genesis of the digital world. Take our attempts to get machines to understand facial expressions for example, or codify our speech, or indeed simply interpret the sentiment expressed online by millions of people in words and pictures and video.\nAnd so here we are, slap bang in the world of communication, persuasion and influence. We\u0026rsquo;re in the domain encompassing how people feel about things. This is the world of feelings.\nEnter EmotionML 1.0 stage left EmotionML stands for Emotion Markup Language, and version 1.0 of the Working Draft was published by W3C on 29th July 2010.\nWhat is it?\nWell let\u0026rsquo;s skedaddle over to Wikipedia for an explanation of the \u0026ldquo;markup language\u0026rdquo; bit:\nA markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the \u0026ldquo;marking up\u0026rdquo; of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors\u0026rsquo; manuscripts. \u0026hellip;Markup is typically omitted from the version of the text which is displayed for end-user consumption. Some markup languages, like HTML have presentation semantics, meaning their specification prescribes how the structured data is to be presented, but other markup languages, like XML, have no predefined semantics.\nSo that would make Emotion Markup Language an attempt to allow us to markup any emotional content (anything that expresses feelings) with data describing those emotions.\nSo what? Well having EmotionML is not the same as using it. That\u0026rsquo;s why I was hosting a workshop in London on the day the EmotionML 1.0 working draft was published looking to do just that. We are looking at practical applications, and the challenges of facilitating the power of EmotionML without bamboozling social web participants. The ramifications are manifold.\nIf you are interested in finding out more and wish to contribute to this work, please do read my blog post from the workshop and get in touch.\nOtherwise, if you just wish to be kept abreast, watch this space :-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nReach versus engagement: the new online battleground for PR and media by Andrew Smith of escherman\nFor decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising. Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – More\u0026hellip; My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nPrivacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit. It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. More\u0026hellip; Believe in the Concept by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nI have had a busy summer shouting at stupid people. Having received a brief for a European corporate ‘Awareness Campaign’, I duly presented the accumulated wisdom of my many years of awareness campaigning to Sir and a considerable flock of subordinates, (including a slightly sallow, moist and inexplicably flaking representative from a media agency…). The client expressed his “disappointment” that I hadn’t addressed their need for a “value proposition”. More\u0026hellip; Email Marketing Goes Social: Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nEmail, we love to hate it, yet we hate to love it. For better or for worse, we are tethered to our inbox and continue to send messages and respond to those individuals and organizations to which we’re tied or vested. Over the years, I’ve labeled email as the worlds largest untapped social network and even though many services attempted to socialize the inbox over the years, email, for the large part, remains regressive.\nFor the time being, brands and organizations continue to rely on email to connect and stay connected with various stakeholder communities. More\u0026hellip; The Humanness of Moderating Online Communities by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nEffective community moderation often requires the ability to engage in (sometimes shameless) acts of human exchange. This has long been understood by experienced moderators.\nWe understand that modeling conversations is critical to getting people to engage with each other. We reach out to people by phone and email to ask their opinions and ideas, we search countless databases trying to find commonalities among people. We make jokes, we make friends, and perhaps most importantly we make human connections all mediated, to some degree, by the computer screen. More\u0026hellip; Which online news sites are right for your audience? by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nSome really interesting mini-research out today from Realwire’s Adam Parker and Andrew Smith of Escherman.\nThey took 50 online news sites from across different industry sectors and analysed them against three key areas: readership per article (average numbers of UK page views per Google indexed url per month), engagement (time spent per page to indicate how long a reader is likely to be spending reading that content when they get there) and UK relevance (what proportion of the sites readers as a whole come from the UK and would therefore be likely to be relevant if you were trying to reach a UK audience). More\u0026hellip; Influence is Bliss: The Gender Divide of Influence on Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nInfluence is a controversial topic and its measurement and definition is increasingly scrutinized as social media democratizes one’s ability to earn stature and prominence in new online societies. There’s a clear delineation between influence and popularity and it’s important to understand that in social networks, influence is not derived by the quantity of followers, friends, clicks, or “likes.” Nor is it discernible by the frequency of which one participates in their respective communities. More\u0026hellip; 10 Reasons Why You Are Not Getting The Results You Want Out Of Your Marketing by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nYou spent countless hours crafting your marketing campaign investing money and hiring marketing experts to help guide you through the process. You get ready to push the launch button, waiting for emails and phone calls come pouring in, then…\nNothing happens. But what could go wrong?\nYou did the things that the marketing “experts” said you should do with your keywords, putting up blog articles day after day, uploading videos and sending out email newsletters.\nWhy?\nHere are 10 reasons why you’re not getting the attention, buzz and most importantly - the sales conversion. More\u0026hellip; What can YOUR business learn from the Grateful Dead? by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nRegular readers of this blog know that my co-author Brian Halligan and I are nearing the end of our book tour for Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I’ll temper my Grateful Dead obsession and get back to writing about varied marketing and PR ideas starting next week… Thanks for indulging me with this series of Grateful Dead posts for the past few weeks.\nIf you’re completely fed up with all this Grateful Dead stuff, you MUST read this article by Terence Blacker in The Independent (UK): More\u0026hellip; The future of newspapers could be the iPad by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nOn my recent trip to Sydney, I picked up an iPad (around £100 cheaper in Australia given I could claim back the 10% GST as I was taking it out of the country, and it is not subject to the “cost of doing business in the UK” Apple tax). What has amazed me is that everyone that has seen it has been ooh-ing and ahh-ing as if I had a new born baby sitting on the table in front of me. As the proud father of a beautiful 4 year old daughter, I know what this feeling is like.\nThe number one question I get from people who both own the iPad and those that are thinking of purchasing one is “what do you do on it?”. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/friday-roundup-lets-get-emotional-a-milestone-for-pr-and-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA very interesting thing happened at the end of July.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt affects every single practitioner in the public relations industry, indeed practitioners across all marketing disciplines.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet I haven\u0026rsquo;t found one reference to it amongst the PR digerati yet, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to put that right. Now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"the-subtleties-of-digital\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe subtleties of digital\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt its core, this digital world is just a set of 1s and 0s that have been applied with increasing sophistication and power. It revolutionised the more numerical professions first, such as accounting and engineering in the seventies, before moving through manufacturing in the eighties and retail in the nineties.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the noughties, \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; arrived big style in the lives of marketing and PR professionals simply because it arrived big style in the lives of the stakeholders we look to communicate with, learn from and influence.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup: Let's get emotional... a milestone for PR and marketing"},{"content":"Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as \u0026ldquo;off grid\u0026rdquo; as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg ! And one of these is your browser history\u0026hellip; the log that lists every webpage you visit.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It\u0026rsquo;s this list you might visit when you\u0026rsquo;re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It\u0026rsquo;s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).\nMy browser history is mine. My wife\u0026rsquo;s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.\nBut whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.\nHas your browser history been \u0026ldquo;sniffed\u0026rdquo; recently You wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been known for nearly a decade now that the feature of a browser that conveniently tries to show visited and unvisited links differently courtesy of your browser history leaves that history open to being \u0026ldquo;sniffed\u0026rdquo;. Specifically, if I want to know if you\u0026rsquo;ve visited www.example.com before visiting my website, all I have to do is include that link on my webpage and, with a little bit of code, I can get my webpage to tell me what colour your browser is trying to use to display the URL. Purple? Then you\u0026rsquo;ve been there.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, I can make sure you don\u0026rsquo;t even see I\u0026rsquo;m trying to display this link, or hundreds of others. In simple terms, a webpage layout is a grid with references setting how far from the left and how far down from the top something appears. So if I set the horizontal position of the links to something like -999 (minus 999) it is effectively \u0026lsquo;displayed\u0026rsquo; to the left of your visible screen. In other words, invisible to you.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s try it now, but so you can see it plain and clear. Visit the slightly over-exaggeratedly named www.whattheInternetknowsaboutyou.com now and it will check to see which of some 5000 popular websites your browser betrays you as having visited. (I\u0026rsquo;m happy to point you to this harmless website as its raison d\u0026rsquo;etre is simply to educate you about this matter.)\nAnalytics and metrics So, you\u0026rsquo;re in marketing and PR and you want to \u0026ldquo;close the loop\u0026rdquo;. You want to determine if all those places on the web where you\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get exposure for your brand, paid and unpaid, actually drive people to drop by your website.\nSo, you\u0026rsquo;re in marketing and PR and you want to see which of your competitors\u0026rsquo; websites a visitor to your website has been to before.\nSo, you\u0026rsquo;re in marketing and PR, and you want to check if visitors to your website hang out at certain websites.\nOf course, if they clicked links at these places through to your website then your web analytics will log the referring webpage accordingly, but what if the visitor left a few days between going to these webpages, and therefore potentially seeing or reading stuff about you, and deciding to pop by today?\nWell first up, congratulations on having the ambition to \u0026ldquo;close the loop\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; regular readers know how passionate I am for analytics, measurement and evaluation. But is this the way to do it? Is this ethical? After all, you\u0026rsquo;re sniffing behind the visitors\u0026rsquo; backs\u0026hellip; which actually isn\u0026rsquo;t all that pleasant a metaphor.\nSocial Media Metrics, the book There are two things I don\u0026rsquo;t like about Jim Sterne\u0026rsquo;s otherwise most excellent book, \u0026ldquo;Social Media Metrics: How To Measure And Optimize Your Marketing Investment \u0026rdquo;. First up, he feels compelled to take up the best part of six pages in the introduction listing David Berkowitz\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;100 Ways to Measure Social Media\u0026rdquo;, despite the fact that the vast majority represent outputs and not outcomes, not best practice and now at odds with the 5th of the Barcelona Principles .\nJim does however report David\u0026rsquo;s advice that the metrics must be applied in context with your business objectives, and goes on to some super stuff in later chapters. I particularly love his deft management of sentiment analysis in Chapter 4\u0026hellip; in fact, my criticisms here aside, I still recommend you buy the book!\nBut to return to the main theme of this blog post, Jim\u0026rsquo;s most grievous error in my opinion comes in Chapter 5 (page 117 in my edition) where he refers to the potential for browser history sniffing and the associated capabilities of a service from a company called Tealium, without the faintest reference to any ethical considerations.\nTealium does try to limit misuse (unethical application) of its service by way of its terms of service, providing a plain English explanation here . The most important assertions are that they don\u0026rsquo;t collect personal identifying information, that they determine which URLs to check for, not the client, and that they tell clients not to abuse their system.\nBut this policy does not address the potential to associate \u0026lsquo;sniffed\u0026rsquo; histories with visitors\u0026rsquo; clickstreams, and therefore identity, via timestamps and cookies for example. Nor does it indicate how Tealium polices its clients\u0026rsquo; potential abuses.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an idea If there\u0026rsquo;s one word that sums up the journey we\u0026rsquo;ve been on in the last ten years it\u0026rsquo;s authenticity. As David Meerman Scott writes in \u0026ldquo;The New Rules of Marketing and PR \u0026rdquo;: \u0026ldquo;People want authenticity, not spin.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd interpreting the Oxford English Dictionary, authenticity refers to having the quality of an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s an idea. If you want to know where people have been before they got to you, so you can \u0026ldquo;close the loop\u0026rdquo; and inform your marketing research, why not just ask them nicely? You could even offer something useful to them in return. Why not say something like this?\u0026hellip;\nHi, thanks for dropping by. Ask any company and they\u0026rsquo;ll say you dropping by is important to them, but we feel more strongly about it. We really want to understand what makes you tick so we can do better at developing our products and services, so we can improve our ability to listen and understand your needs and answer any questions you might have.\nKnowing if you\u0026rsquo;ve been to a few dozen specific websites before coming here today would help us a lot, but if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to that\u0026rsquo;s no problem at all. If you do, we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to share with you how your potential trips to these websites compare to others who\u0026rsquo;ve shared this information with us, and perhaps there\u0026rsquo;s a great site or two in there you\u0026rsquo;ve yet to discover!\nJust click here and we\u0026rsquo;ll check your browser history now (or click here to find out how this is done, which websites we\u0026rsquo;re interested in, and how our privacy policy guides our use of this capability).\nGet yourself a modern browser Disclosure: I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with and advised Mozilla, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox browser, since 2003.\n[caption id=\u0026quot;\u0026quot; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;180\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Image via Wikipedia\u0026rdquo;] [/caption]\nBrowser history sniffing has not been a common problem until companies like Tealium started to \u0026lsquo;productize\u0026rsquo; the capability. It\u0026rsquo;s for this reason that Mozilla lists the way Firefox deals with colouring hyperlinks, like other browsers, as a bug, and it\u0026rsquo;s for this reason the bug was fixed this past week subject to quality assurance verification. It\u0026rsquo;s attention to detail like this that makes me happy to recommend Firefox as the most secure browser, including its regard for personal privacy.\nBe open and ask nicely If other browsers catch up, then my idea above has a limited shelf life. You\u0026rsquo;ll only be able to ask visitors to share this information with you in an automated fashion only when you\u0026rsquo;ve first detected that they use a browser that still has this bug. But the underlying principle of being open and asking permission is timeless, and will become increasingly important as the opportunities to collect \u0026lsquo;digital detritus\u0026rsquo; unknowingly and unethically grows massively in coming years.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/08/my-browser-history-is-my-own-so-back-off-with-your-unethical-social-media-metrics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePrivacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as \u0026ldquo;off grid\u0026rdquo; as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even \u003ca href=\"http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarc Zuckerberg\u003c/a\u003e\n! And one of these is your browser history\u0026hellip; the log that lists every webpage you visit.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It\u0026rsquo;s this list you might visit when you\u0026rsquo;re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It\u0026rsquo;s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy browser history is mine. My wife\u0026rsquo;s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"has-your-browser-history-been-sniffed-recently\"\u003eHas your browser history been \u0026ldquo;sniffed\u0026rdquo; recently\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;m a fan of Web 3.0. Perhaps obsessed is a more accurate description.\nWeb 1.0 is the Web of documents. Web 2.0 is the social and user content Web. Web 3.0 is the point at which the Web itself understands that content and social interaction. Some call it the semantic Web, and some call it the Web of data, but regardless of naming conventions, it\u0026rsquo;s going to mess up a hell of a lot of business models, and create some fascinating new business and public-benefit opportunities. And it\u0026rsquo;ll transform reputation management too.\nIf you think \u0026lsquo;atoms of influence\u0026rsquo; trickle far and wide courtesy of human expressions and understanding with social media acting as loyal conduit, just wait until machines understand these contributions too.\nThe PR Semantic Web Workshop Image via Wikipedia The genesis for the workshop this week was described in my February blog post \u0026ldquo;PR and Web 3.0… a call to action \u0026rdquo;. To cut to the quick, when data is added to content to describe its meaning, it needs to refer to a vocabulary (or an \u0026ldquo;ontology\u0026rdquo; if you want to be posh about it) in order to be widely understood and reusable. There are an increasing number of public vocabularies extant today, but none we can find relating to PR and marketing processes, nor one to help social media participants describe their feelings. And if the expression and communication of feelings isn\u0026rsquo;t core to reputation management I don\u0026rsquo;t know what is.\nThe two-day workshop this week aimed to provide an indepth perspective on the semantic Web to a bunch of interesting and interested people, more so than the overview I delivered back one evening in April. \u0026ldquo;The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain \u0026rdquo; is the blog post I wrote then, and the corresponding slidestack has been viewed 2,800 times since on slideshare (and is embedded below for your convenience).\nStephen Waddington (@wadds ), David Phillips (@DavidGHPhillips ), Will Voelcker, Jay Fretwell, Simon Huhtala, Anshul Doshi and I convened at the offices of Prime Focus in Soho to be taken throught the finer points of resource description frameworks, triple stores, sparql, and semantic browsers by Talis \u0026rsquo; Keith Alexander.\nIn conclusion We identified four ontologies we\u0026rsquo;re now intent on developing, openly. But first up we\u0026rsquo;re prioritising the Ontology For Feelings About Things.Why? Well it\u0026rsquo;s the most fun and the one we feel most confident we can get licked sooner than later.\nMore about our work here in future posts, but please get in touch should you wish to join us.\nThe PR and Web 3.0 slideshare **PR and Web 3.0 **View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/the-web-of-data-is-a-web-of-influence/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/07/the-web-of-data-is-a-web-of-influence/pr_web3_375/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PR and Web 3.0\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/pr_web3_375.png\" title=\"pr_web3_375\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m a fan of Web 3.0. Perhaps obsessed is a more accurate description.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWeb 1.0 is the Web of documents. Web 2.0 is the social and user content Web. Web 3.0 is the point at which the Web itself understands that content and social interaction. Some call it the semantic Web, and some call it the Web of data, but regardless of naming conventions, it\u0026rsquo;s going to mess up a hell of a lot of business models, and create some fascinating new business and public-benefit opportunities. And it\u0026rsquo;ll transform reputation management too.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you think \u0026lsquo;atoms of influence\u0026rsquo; trickle far and wide courtesy of human expressions and understanding with social media acting as loyal conduit, just wait until machines understand these contributions too.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Web of data is a Web of influence"},{"content":"Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a \u0026ldquo;Human Seismograph\u0026rdquo;?\nBrian Solis won\u0026rsquo;t mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It\u0026rsquo;s a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.\nAnd two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.\nFirstly, Brian\u0026rsquo;s post \u0026ldquo;Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter \u0026rdquo; reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine.\n(As a quick aside I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure how the oil spill is Obama\u0026rsquo;s fault. US voters can\u0026rsquo;t reasonably expect him to dive down and plug the leak with his presidential finger can they? But there you go, Brian didn\u0026rsquo;t call Twitter the Rational Human Seismograph.)\nImage via Wikipedia Second up, Vanessa DiMauro takes a good look at Apple\u0026rsquo;s handling of the iPhone 4 antenna debacle , and it appears the social Web has moved the needle when it comes to Apple\u0026rsquo;s share price\u0026hellip; to the tune of tens of billions of US dollars! Never let anyone ever question the ROI of PR again. (And on that topic, do take 3 minutes to listen to David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s ROI rant !)\nWhen an account director left my consultancy to join the Apple UK PR team some years back, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but wonder what that entailed exactly. Apple is, after all, renowned for having \u0026ldquo;no comment\u0026rdquo; until Steve Jobs elects to take the stage. In fact, when advising clients on their social media strategy I often find myself saying that Apple is the one exception to the rulebook.\nBut perhaps they\u0026rsquo;re not. That was when times were good.\nApple isn\u0026rsquo;t used to things going wrong (and credit to them for that), but this has left them bereft of appropriate PR and social media skills. They did not seem to be geared up to listening to and acting upon the early indications of the antenna problem. And the company does not seem to have trained their PR and customer service teams in what\u0026rsquo;s acceptable and what\u0026rsquo;s not\u0026hellip; and deleting threads from its support forums is a BIG BIG NO-NO!\nIs your company / are your clients ready?\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nNew book! Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOur secret is out.\nFor the past four months, I have been quietly working on a book with my friend Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot on a book project.\nMarketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History\nThe book came off the printer today and will begin shipping from online bookstores next week. It will be in stores throughout North America first week of August.\nYou can participate in our Follow the Band Book Tour (hashtag #GDbook). More\u0026hellip; linkto.tv’s video hotspots drive web sales by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI don’t know about you but I never use my TV’s tediously slow red button. Interactive it ain’t.\nMore dynamic interactive video formats are in the works. One example is linkto.tv developed by the How to TV.\nI caught up with How to TV’s Russell Goldsmith yesterday and he explained how linkto.tv enabled a video producer to create linkable hotspots in video content.\nHave a look at these videos for Jaegar, Pantene and the Westfield Shopping Centre.\nThe application is available as a tool to Brightcove and Ooyala users or as a do-it-yourself application on the linkto.tv site. More\u0026hellip; The 2010 Australian Twitter Election by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nI landed in Sydney at 5:30am on Saturday from London and by the time I had arrived at the hotel and checked in, the TV channels were buzzing with the news that the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard was about to call a Federal Election. All of the commentators were calling this the “twitter election” as apparently Julia had tweeted that people should enrol to vote.\n[in Australia, voting is compulsory, and you must enrol to vote before the writs are issued.]\nIn today’s weekend papers, More\u0026hellip; Bad Social: Impact of Social Media on the IPhone 4 \u0026amp; AAPL Stock by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nBy Ryck Lent: \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the antenna, stupid!\u0026rdquo;\nWell, sure it is. But Apple\u0026rsquo;s (AAPL) handling of this product problem in the new world of social media and social commerce is worth considering in detail. Here\u0026rsquo;s the key statistic:\nDuring seven trading days, from the Friday (July 9th) prior to Consumer Reports\u0026rsquo; confirmation of the antenna problem and the \u0026ldquo;Not Recommended\u0026rdquo; review (Monday July 12) through Monday, July 19th, AAPL stock dropped around $15 per share. With a little over 900M shares outstanding, this means AAPL lost $12 BILLION in market capitalization \u0026ndash; a 5% decline. More\u0026hellip; Long but awesome: The Making of the Old Spice commercial by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia stephanie.posterous.com More\u0026hellip; Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThis week BP successfully recapped its ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Test results are favorable and show that oil and gas are, for the time being, confined. This news inspires cautious optimism in the hearts of residents and spectators alike. Online, however, the social effect continues to flow across social networks and social graphs, echoing anger, hope, and the demand for resolution and prevention from BP and the Obama administration.\nIf we were to look back and examine the extent of these online conversations and the associated sentiment related to this catastrophic event, we realize just how pervasive social networking is becoming to society. More\u0026hellip; 5 Keys to Incorporate Social Media in Your Business by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nLast year BusinessWeek published its 100 Best Global Brands 2009 and to no surprise, financial brands were largely untrusted which dragged down all brands across the board with them. Moving forward, brands are rethinking how they can win back the trust focusing on the psychological aspect of marketing and advertising in an attempt to rebuild its relationship with customers.\nYou can see from the gradual shift in magazine ads and TV commercials using regular everyday people to lead advertising campaigns instead of celebrities with messages such as the “we’re here for you in this economy” More\u0026hellip; The 12 Principles of Brand Strategy by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nIn a situation where you’re selling to multiple personalities, it’s best to first connect everyone on a common ground then articulate clearly what’s in it for each of them. The goal is to stimulate an engaging conversation that allows us to change perception, diagnose expectations and bring clarity to the dialogue.\nThat’s the essence of developing a brand strategy – the foundation of your communication that builds authentic relationships between you and your audience. More\u0026hellip; An interview with Seth Godin – PR not publicity by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nSeth Godin is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me… and of course he is. With a dozen titles to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.\nSeth packs in several super observations in just ten short minutes. More\u0026hellip; Facebook Connects 500 Million People: Defining a New Era of Digital Society by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nOn July 22nd 2010, Facebook officially announced that it had surpassed 500 million users around the world. This significant achievement represents a significant milestone for Zuckerberg and Co. as well as for social networking and more importantly for global societies overall.\nTo celebrate this achievement, Facebook released Facebook Stories, a new service to spotlight users stories from around the world and the impact Facebook has had on their lives.\nIn Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “We’re launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world.” More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/friday-roundup-twitter-the-human-seismograph/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEver considered Twitter in terms of it being a \u0026ldquo;Human Seismograph\u0026rdquo;?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrian Solis won\u0026rsquo;t mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It\u0026rsquo;s a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirstly, Brian\u0026rsquo;s post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/oil-spill-report-bp-and-white-house-sentiment-spills-onto-twitter\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph"},{"content":"[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_27421\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;250\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Seth Godin - www.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/\" ] [/caption]\nSeth Godin is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me\u0026hellip; and of course he is.\nWith a dozen titles to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.\nInterview with Seth Godin Seth packs in several super observations in just ten short minutes.\nDescribing PR, historically, as \u0026ldquo;a human form of spam\u0026rdquo; is always going to grab your attention, but Seth doesn\u0026rsquo;t dwell on the negatives for long. Rather, he is upbeat about the prospects for public relations in re-establishing itself as the profession responsible for forging relationships, for listening and conversing, and for caring for reputations, thereby differentiating itself clearly from publicity.\nAnd it seems the PR profession is starting to attend to its own reputation. When talking with the teams at the CIPR and PRSA for example, I\u0026rsquo;m seeing action and results in putting clear blue water between the PR profession and what the popular press loves to call \u0026ldquo;spin\u0026rdquo;.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never felt a connection between what I do and \u0026ldquo;spin\u0026rdquo;, so the sooner perception catches up with reality the better. And if that means leaving an assortment of practitioners behind, or more specifically in the publicity camp, then let\u0026rsquo;s simply keep making that distinction.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/an-interview-with-seth-godin-pr-not-publicity/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_27421\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;250\u0026rdquo; caption=\u0026ldquo;Seth Godin - \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/%22\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/\"\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/07/an-interview-with-seth-godin-pr-not-publicity/seth_godin/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Seth Godin\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/seth_godin-300x166.jpg\" title=\"Seth Godin\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n[/caption]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.sethgodin.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSeth Godin\u003c/a\u003e\n is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me\u0026hellip; and of course he is.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith a \u003ca href=\"http://sethgodin.com/sg/books.asp\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003edozen titles\u003c/a\u003e\n to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/Seth%20Godin%20interview%2023rd%20June%202010.mp3\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInterview with Seth Godin\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An interview with Seth Godin - PR not publicity"},{"content":" Last night the CIPR Social Summer series hosted a session on all things TweetDeck . If you haven\u0026rsquo;t tried TweetDeck, try it now. It\u0026rsquo;s free!\nAccording to Twitstat.com today, after simply tweeting at twitter.com, Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client globally. Here\u0026rsquo;s the stats I just grabbed from Twitstat:\nRank Client % of users Tweets/user 1 (1) web 16.80 % 2.90 2 (2) TweetDeck 9.50 % 3.17 3 (6) twitterfeed 5.90 % 5.58 4 (3) foursquare 5.85 % 1.49 5 (4) Twitter for iPhone 5.85 % 2.38 6 (5) HootSuite 5.39 % 2.68 7 (8) Echofon 3.22 % 3.25 8 (25) API 2.76 % 6.66 9 (7) Tweetie for Mac 2.55 % 2.38 10 (9) Seesmic 2.16 % 3.02 But TweetDeck is more than a nice way to shepherd incoming tweets and craft your own. TweetDeck is rapidly becoming the most powerful way to manage your social networking without ever having to log onto each and every social network yourself. It aggregates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare, and it even lets you watch YouTube videos brought to your attention by your social network in situ.\nSo I was particularly delighted when TweetDeck MD Iain Dodsworth (@iaindodsworth ) accepted our invitation to join us for one of our sessions to share his insights and answer our questions.\nIf I was to try to explain the success Iain and his team have experienced to date in one sentence it\u0026rsquo;s this: unswerving focus on the user experience. And here\u0026rsquo;s one of those acid tests usability experts emphasise\u0026hellip; can the application be wielded as easily by a newbie who doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet need the powerful bells and whistles as the social networking pro who does? The answer is yes, TweetDeck achieves this with aplomb.\nIain comes from the financial world where he developed ways to display market information to traders and their ilk, an environment where data visualisation is critical in facilitating great and very timely decision making based on masses and masses of real-time data. That now sounds like a very familiar environment to public relations pros staring down the social media firehose!\nCurrently available on PC and Mac, and for iPhone and iPad, the Android (a new mobile operating system, and the fastest growing one this year) community is awaiting TweetDeck for Android, and Iain was good enough to demo the nearly finished app to me and Wolfstar\u0026rsquo;s Stuart Bruce. Ooooh, it\u0026rsquo;s lovely, but Iain asked that I don\u0026rsquo;t take the wind out of their sails just yet and tell you why it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;oooooh lovely\u0026rsquo; exactly.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re busy trying to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, get TweetDeck now.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re trying to keep up with different conversations and different groups of people on any one of these, get TweetDeck now.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re a social analytics vendor looking to extend the monitoring functionality of your service into the workflow side of things, get in touch. I\u0026rsquo;d like to get you and Iain in a room and tease out some interesting opportunities together.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/tweetdecks-iain-dodsworth-at-cipr-social-summer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/07/tweetdecks-iain-dodsworth-at-cipr-social-summer/tweetdeck/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"TweetDeck\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/tweetdeck-e1279271448911.png\" title=\"TweetDeck\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLast night the CIPR Social Summer series hosted a session on all things \u003ca href=\"http://www.tweetdeck.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTweetDeck\u003c/a\u003e\n. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t tried TweetDeck, try it now. It\u0026rsquo;s free!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to \u003ca href=\"http://www.twitstat.com/twitterclientusers.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitstat.com\u003c/a\u003e\n today, after simply tweeting at twitter.com, Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client globally. Here\u0026rsquo;s the stats I just grabbed from Twitstat:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ctable\u003e\n  \u003cthead\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003cth\u003eRank\u003c/th\u003e\n          \u003cth\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\n          \u003cth\u003eClient\u003c/th\u003e\n          \u003cth\u003e% of users\u003c/th\u003e\n          \u003cth\u003eTweets/user\u003c/th\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n  \u003c/thead\u003e\n  \u003ctbody\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e1\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(1)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003eweb\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e16.80 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.90\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(2)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.tweetdeck.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTweetDeck\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e9.50 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e3.17\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e3\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(6)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://twitterfeed.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitterfeed\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5.90 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5.58\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e4\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(3)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://foursquare.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efoursquare\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5.85 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e1.49\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(4)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitter for iPhone\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5.85 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.38\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e6\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(5)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.hootsuite.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHootSuite\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e5.39 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.68\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e7\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(8)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.echofon.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eEchofon\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e3.22 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e3.25\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e8\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(25)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://dev.twitter.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAPI\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.76 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e6.66\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e9\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(7)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTweetie for Mac\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.55 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.38\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n      \u003ctr\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e10\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e(9)\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.seesmic.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSeesmic\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e2.16 %\u003c/td\u003e\n          \u003ctd\u003e3.02\u003c/td\u003e\n      \u003c/tr\u003e\n  \u003c/tbody\u003e\n\u003c/table\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut TweetDeck is more than a nice way to shepherd incoming tweets and craft your own. TweetDeck is rapidly becoming the most powerful way to manage your social networking without ever having to log onto each and every social network yourself. It aggregates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare, and it even lets you watch YouTube videos brought to your attention by your social network in situ.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I was particularly delighted when TweetDeck MD Iain Dodsworth (\u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com/iaindodsworth\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@iaindodsworth\u003c/a\u003e\n) accepted our invitation to join us for one of our sessions to share his insights and answer our questions.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth at CIPR Social Summer"},{"content":" Image by affiliatesummit via Flickr\nI interviewed Brian Solis for the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website recently. Brian is one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist and futurist, Solis helps practitioners get to grips with the effects of emerging media on marketing, communications and publishing.\nHis perspectives are well worth a listen:\nBrian Solis interview 20th June 2010 One quote I\u0026rsquo;d pick out is this:\nPR used to be right there at the top, but we slipped into publicity and media relations and spin, and forgot the opportunity to steer and shape perception, just such an opportunity afforded by participation and engagement in social media.\nBrian\u0026rsquo;s conclusion on this issue are optimistic however. When I asked him if this was a renaissance moment for PR, he basically claimed it to be a renaissance moment for every discipline in the \u0026ldquo;socialisation\u0026rdquo; (or is that with a \u0026ldquo;z\u0026rdquo;?) of business.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/an-interview-with-brian-solis/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/10086019@N08/3846975530\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Brian Solis at Affiliate Summit East 2009\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/3846975530_03c46d54bb_m.jpg\" title=\"Brian Solis at Affiliate Summit East 2009\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImage by \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/10086019@N08/3846975530\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eaffiliatesummit\u003c/a\u003e\n via Flickr\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI interviewed \u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBrian Solis\u003c/a\u003e\n for the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website recently. Brian is one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist and futurist, Solis helps practitioners get to grips with the effects of emerging media on marketing, communications and publishing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis perspectives are well worth a listen:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An interview with Brian Solis"},{"content":"My recent post \u0026ldquo;Where\u0026rsquo;s your brain at? Where\u0026rsquo;s your consultancy at? \u0026rdquo; was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession\u0026rsquo;s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.\nWell personally I\u0026rsquo;m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I\u0026rsquo;m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I\u0026rsquo;ve just found.\nRand Fishkin, SEOmoz\u0026rsquo;s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. \u0026ldquo;The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web \u0026rdquo; identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity:\n1993 - 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Nearly every link created has an editorial, reference purpose behind it. A link is one page telling its viewers that another page has useful, interesting or worthwhile information about a specific topic.\n2001 - 2005: As the web commercializes at an accelerated pace and PageRank becomes a familiar concept, links drift further away from editorial votes and more towards self-interested endorsements, often with financial motivations.\n2006 - 2010: The web\u0026rsquo;s link graph swings further away from editorial references towards ever-more commercial interests. Meanwhile, the social web rises with the popularity of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter \u0026amp; LinkedIn. These communities often contain a much higher percentage of editorial citations, particularly those that contain smaller communities inside them (LinkedIn groups, pockets of Twitter users and Facebook friends)\nRand continues to conclude that SEO has come to the point where \u0026ldquo;social media marketing is a no brainer\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; most definitely Rand! Do take the time to find out how he arrives at this conclusion.\nEric Enge, President of SEO consultancy Stone Temple , is equally excited. In a response on Search Engine Watch to Rand\u0026rsquo;s post, titled \u0026ldquo;The death of natural linking \u0026rdquo;, Eric expands on the situation and then reaches a stunning conclusion:\nI like doing PR, both via press release and the old fashioned manual way, syndicating high quality content, identifying link rich market segments from competitive analysis, and strategies of these types. This approach has worked extremely well.\nAs for social media, you need to be investing in this. How quickly it will become a significant ranking factor isn\u0026rsquo;t clear, and I don\u0026rsquo;t expect it to happen overnight, but it\u0026rsquo;s time will come.\nEven so, links will still be a big factor. Bear in mind, if 20 percent of the web\u0026rsquo;s links exist to influence search results, than that means that 80 percent do not. Still a lot of meat there for the search engines.\nSo there we have it. The SEO community is grabbing at public relations. Interestingly, imho, they are likely to have as much of a clue about what PR truly entails as the typical PR professional does about the intricacies of SEO. Knowing quite a bit about both, I\u0026rsquo;d say the web-savvy PR professional is more likely to get to grips with SEO faster than the other way round, my only concern is that they don\u0026rsquo;t seem to want to.\nLastly, if you\u0026rsquo;d like to find out more about social search, here\u0026rsquo;s a post I wrote a couple of years back but has stood the tests of time. In fact, Rand and Eric just appear to have validated it: \u0026ldquo;The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today .\u0026rdquo;\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s the remarkable Graham Jones\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Search is on its deathbed\u0026hellip; bye bye SEO \u0026rdquo; and David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;SEO and your crap filled site \u0026rdquo;!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/seo-changing-up-its-game-its-called-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy recent post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/07/wheres-your-brain-at-wheres-your-consultancy-at/\"\u003eWhere\u0026rsquo;s your brain at? Where\u0026rsquo;s your consultancy at?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the \u003ca href=\"http://ciprsm.wikispaces.com/Social\u0026#43;Summer\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR Social Summer session\u003c/a\u003e\n on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession\u0026rsquo;s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell personally I\u0026rsquo;m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I\u0026rsquo;m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I\u0026rsquo;ve just found.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.seomoz.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"seomoz logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/seomoz.png\" title=\"seomoz logo\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nRand Fishkin, SEOmoz\u0026rsquo;s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-death-and-rebirth-of-editorial-citation-on-the-web\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"SEO changing up its game... it's called PR"},{"content":"Is social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked in my consultants\u0026rsquo; capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the BBC\u0026rsquo;s Question Time ? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it\u0026rsquo;s simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme\u0026rsquo;s fans as the Twitter backchannel has allowed us all to join the debate.\nBut is social media \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo;?\nI hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen Stephen Waddington\u0026rsquo;s post this week about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of \u0026ldquo;digital rubber necking\u0026rdquo; makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn\u0026rsquo;t too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer\u0026rsquo;s facebook page now has 17,000 members.\nSo, my answer?\nWell, first up, I qualified that no such technological or societal movement can be entirely good or entirely bad, and perhaps we should focus on the net impact, accepting that regardless of the net outcome significant attention must be paid to any extreme negatives.\nWhilst my response could take many forms and take up many volumes I focused on the rebalancing of power between corporate and consumer, and government and citizen. The size and power of corporates and governments towards the end of the 20th Century massively overwhelmed the consumer / citizen. It\u0026rsquo;s not for nothing that the metaphor \u0026ldquo;little cog in a big wheel\u0026rdquo; occurred so frequently in 20th Century lexicon and social media facilitates a rebalancing of power here.\nFor the first time, consumers and citizens have been able to coalesce and join forces independent of geography or time or wealth or status, and share stories and opinions about the best and worst products and services, and their experiences with government, for-profits and non-profits.\nThis exerts a new force on these large organisations, an additional force in the process of Darwinian survival of the fittest. Governments and corporates have to respond else find their support at the ballot box or in the shops wither, and this hard light of accountability can only serve to kill the weaker organisations faster and drive the better ones to innovate and improve more quickly.\nAnd from my point of view, that is overwhelmingly a net benefit, and the sooner we can bring the digitally-excluded into the fold the better.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nFinding Your Rock Stars: Why a Community Outreach Program is Important by Kari Rippetoe of Tuvel Communications\nHow do you use PR to reach your buyers? Do you issue press releases and pitch to your media list of journalists, hoping to get a write-up or some sort of media exposure? Or do you reach out directly to the people who are actively buying and evangelizing your products or services and influencing hundreds or thousands (hundreds of thousands, even) other buyers via blogs, forums, social networks, news sites, podcasts, and other consumer communities – your rock stars?\nLet me ask you another question: More\u0026hellip; The 2010 World Cup Inspires Creativity in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWorld Cup Fever is certainly a pandemic with champions spreading enthusiasm and passion around the world. It’s not only circulating from country to country and person to personal, World Cup Fever is also propagating through the social graphs of fans in social networks around the world.\nOn Twitter, for instance, it is because of the World Cup that a new Tweet record was established. On Thursday June 24th during the Japan vs. Denmark match, 3,282 Tweets flew across the stream every second beating the previous record by almost 200. More\u0026hellip; McKinsey: B2B customers prefer fewer, more meaningful interactions by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nIn the recent McKinsey article The basics of business-to-business sales success the B2B customers surveyed said \u0026ldquo;they care most about product and price, but what they really want is a great sales experience\u0026rdquo;.\nAnd in particular they want sales reps with \u0026ldquo;adequate product knowledge\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;fewer, more meaningful interactions\u0026rdquo; (only 3 percent said they weren\u0026rsquo;t contacted enough).\nMcKinsey goes on to say:\n\u0026ldquo;Striking the right balance between contacting customers too much and too little requires understanding their stated and actual needs. More\u0026hellip; Are Your Ears Burning? In Social Networks, One-Third of Consumers Talk Brands Every Week by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSocial media didn’t invent conversations, it provided us with tools to surface and organize them. Conversations about brands predates the mediums used to connect messages and aspirations with consumers.\nThe motivation for brands to engage in social networks varies based on the culture and agility of each company, but what is constant is the aspiration to connect with customers and prospects to earn awareness, attention and connections. On the other hand, B2B and B2C consumers have also expressed desire to connect with those brands whose intent is genuine and beneficial to the each engagement and the overall relationship. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Marketing: Lead with Talent, not Policies by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nWho should lead our social media marketing activity? It\u0026rsquo;s a question being asked frequently, but the answer can vary greatly from one organization to another. Initially, it\u0026rsquo;s wise to focus on the skilled people within your qualified talent pool \u0026ndash; or, talent puddle, as the case may be \u0026ndash; rather than choosing a functional group.\nMeaning, the possession of proven experience should be a key deciding factor in leader selection.\neMarketer reports that it\u0026rsquo;s quickly becoming common wisdom among marketers that a meaningful strategy is required to apply social media tools effectively. More\u0026hellip; (Via comScore) The iPhone Reality in Europe: Low Overall Penetration, Enormous Impact by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\ncomScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today outlined the impact the first three generations of Apple’s iPhone have had on the European mobile market, in light of record pre-sales and extraordinary consumer demand for the iPhone 4, which launches tomorrow. The iPhone currently represents just 4 percent of the EU5 (U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy) mobile market, but 18 percent of the overall EU5 smartphone market. However, the iPhone has facilitated fundamental change in mobile user behaviour and ignited fierce competition among device and operating system (OS) providers. More\u0026hellip; The number 1 question for lead generation by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nif you are part of a business development team trying to build new enquiries and new clients some of your time will be spent on lead generation. That’s starting conversations with new organisations who haven’t done work with your company before. But, unless you are very lucky, few will respond to your first approach or your first request for a meeting.\nThe reason is that in order to get that first meeting with a new prospect, you have to answer one question\nWhy should I invest my time to meet with you?\nPut yourself into the shoes of your prospective marketing director – More\u0026hellip; Media monitoring beyond the paywall by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPR agencies and brands needing to see what has been written about them on national newspaper web sites face a quieter couple of months given the new News International paywall and The Financial Times (FT) digital archive. Content from News International titles has been withdrawn from media monitoring agencies and aggregator services and won’t be available until the launch of the Newspaper Licensing Authority’s (NLA) eClips platform, expected sometime in September.\nNLA channel partners such as Cision, Durrants and Precise will provide their clients with News International content via the eClips platform as part of their monitoring services. More\u0026hellip; Earned media as a distinct form of media by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nI\u0026rsquo;m a bit late to the party and wasn\u0026rsquo;t really on top of exactly what \u0026ldquo;earned media\u0026rdquo; is - so I have to admit to dragging my heels. I\u0026rsquo;d read the Nielsen/Facebook report which showed that earned media significantly increased ad and brand awareness and intent to purchase. That was back in April.\nWikipedia gives a definition, although it is surprisingly sparse. And Brian Shin CEO of Invisible Measures gives a good account in \u0026ldquo;How \u0026lsquo;Earned Media\u0026rsquo; is Providing Value to Brand Marketers\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; One Web. Many social networks. Facebook\u0026rsquo;s Achille\u0026rsquo;s heel. by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nFacebook will die.\nBridging the gap between our online and offline social network\nView more presentations from Paul Adams.\nWhen it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook\u0026rsquo;s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!\nBut social networks aren\u0026rsquo;t subject to the same dynamics as the \u0026lsquo;irrational exuberance\u0026rsquo; More\u0026hellip; Reporting from Rothbury: social media goes feral by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nTwo years ago my family moved from Ealing, London, to a tiny village in Northumberland on the edge of Rothbury. I continue to work in London and travel back and forth splitting my time between the two locations. It’s a hellish commute but the benefits of raising a young family in a tranquil rural location with a strong community and extended family nearby are immeasurable.\nBut since Tuesday that tranquillity has been destroyed and Rothbury has become the focus of a massive media story as the police search for Raoul Moat. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/friday-roundup-is-social-media-good/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIs social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked in my consultants\u0026rsquo; capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/questiontime/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBBC\u0026rsquo;s Question Time\u003c/a\u003e\n? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it\u0026rsquo;s simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme\u0026rsquo;s fans as \u003ca href=\"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23bbqt\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe Twitter backchannel\u003c/a\u003e\n has allowed us all to join the debate.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut is social media \u0026ldquo;\u003cstrong\u003egood\u003c/strong\u003e\u0026rdquo;?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/stephen.waddington/reporting-from-rothbury-social-media-goes-feral\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStephen Waddington\u0026rsquo;s post this week\u003c/a\u003e\n about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of \u0026ldquo;digital rubber necking\u0026rdquo; makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn\u0026rsquo;t too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer\u0026rsquo;s facebook page now has 17,000 members.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, my answer?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - is social media good?"},{"content":"Facebook will die.\nWhen it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook\u0026rsquo;s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!\nBut social networks aren\u0026rsquo;t subject to the same dynamics as the \u0026lsquo;irrational exuberance\u0026rsquo; that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of \u0026lsquo;softer\u0026rsquo; issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and \u0026lsquo;harder\u0026rsquo; issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.\nEconomics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called \u0026rsquo;network effect\u0026rsquo; eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market\u0026rsquo;s network effect first. But that\u0026rsquo;s more ecommerce than social networking.\nLinking the human and technological factors of social networks is the philosophy of the network host / owner, and this may be articulated rigorously as founding and guiding principles, or just reflected implicitly in the actions that simply feel natural to the leadership responsible for the network\u0026rsquo;s evolution. Interestingly, if David Kirkpatrick\u0026rsquo;s upcoming book on Facebook is to be believed, the latter appears to fit Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg.\nJust over two years ago I was interviewed by Ecommerce Times about the prospects for B2B social networking, and I referred to people\u0026rsquo;s innate recognition that they actually have different social networks, in an offline context, and that this will ultimately be reflected online too. Specifically:\nThe 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.\nBut, we won\u0026rsquo;t have to establish our profile from scratch on each of these, nor our network of friends, as developments such as OpenSocial allow us to take our profile with us. This interoperability will also permit much easier control over our engagement in each network.\nWhen I facilitate workshops on social media I always ask delegates to name the \u0026lsquo;biggest\u0026rsquo; social network, and depending on the year, they name Friendster or Myspace or, latterly, Facebook. Regardless, I always respond by saying that the Web itself is the largest social network.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s with great interest then that this morning I stumbled upon the work of Paul Adams , Senior User Experience Researcher at Google, courtesy of @litmanlive . Paul has written a book called Social Circles due out in August, and he has published a presentation of his user research on slideshare (above).\nImage credit: Paul Adams .\nIt\u0026rsquo;s spot on. And with Google lead champions of OpenSocial, you can rest assured that Google won\u0026rsquo;t try and keep you strapped into \u0026lsquo;GoogleBook\u0026rsquo; or whatever their future social networking programme might be called. It also appears to marry some of the thinking behind and aspects of the work underway at Diaspora , and by all accounts at Automattic .\nPaul and I also appear to agree on the over-emphasis placed by public relations practitioners on \u0026ldquo;influencers\u0026rdquo; (see slide 131 of his slideshare). For regular readers of my blog, or indeed anyone who\u0026rsquo;s discussed these things with me at conferences, you\u0026rsquo;ll know I advocate influence-centric approaches to social media, and not influencer-centric . But back to Facebook\u0026hellip;\nFacebook has got it wrong. Facebook has backed itself into a corner from the perspectives of technological architecture and its philosophy, first implied now explicit, that \u0026lsquo;public\u0026rsquo; is the new \u0026lsquo;private\u0026rsquo; (see ZDNet article ).\nFacebook will die.\nOh OK, it will shrivel at least!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/one-web-many-social-networks-facebooks-achilles-heel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFacebook will die.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook\u0026rsquo;s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/padday/bridging-the-gap-between-our-online-and-offline-social-network\" title=\"Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut social networks aren\u0026rsquo;t subject to the same dynamics as the \u0026lsquo;irrational exuberance\u0026rsquo; that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of \u0026lsquo;softer\u0026rsquo; issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and \u0026lsquo;harder\u0026rsquo; issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEconomics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called \u0026rsquo;network effect\u0026rsquo; eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market\u0026rsquo;s network effect first. But that\u0026rsquo;s more ecommerce than social networking.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"One Web. Many social networks. Facebook's Achille's heel."},{"content":"Continuous professional development. Bloody important. Guess that\u0026rsquo;s why the CIPR just moved its whole system online. Brilliant.\nI mention it because I need some. Professional development that is. Look at the state of this Friday Roundup: it lists 16 great posts for goodness sake! Far too many! But they\u0026rsquo;re all so interesting (if I can say that about a list that includes one of my own).\nI need a course in editing to get the list down to, say, 10. I could propose some personalisation technology to the MarCom Professional team so you only get posts you\u0026rsquo;re really interested in. But then my post this week is about a new breed of consultant, an Influence Professional, who has to be savvy about everything going on out there in the world of exerting influence, and being influenced. So perhaps that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work. Mmmm.\nPerhaps then I can just help to keep this Roundup shorter than otherwise by just stopping this intro. Here.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nBook publisher goes real-time with Truman Fires MacArthur by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhen President Obama chose to replace General Stanley A. McChrystal following the fallout from the general\u0026rsquo;s controversial comments in a recent Rolling Stone article, the media was in a frenzy. Because McChrystal was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, over 13,000 mainstream media stories and blog posts were written in just a few days.\nBut what about books? It takes a more than a year to write and publish a book, right? So how can a book author jump into the fray?\nA real-time ebook\nJust two days after the Obama fires McChrystal news broke, book publisher Simon \u0026amp; More\u0026hellip; UK Online Advertiser Spending Gains Momentum by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that UK advertising spending suffered a double-digit drop in 2009, according to several sources. However, the Internet defied this downward trend. UK advertisers spent £3.54 billion ($5.56 billion) online in 2009 \u0026ndash; 5.7 percent more than in 2008.\nOnline spending growth will speed up in 2010 to 7 percent before moderating in 2011. The London Olympics in 2012 will also provide a boost in spending increases.\n\u0026ldquo;On the whole, digital marketers in the UK rose to the challenge of budget restraint with sound strategies and imagination,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Understanding the Social Customer. Presentation by Ryan Turner by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nMore\u0026hellip; Viral success = creativity + skill – Andy Murray viral hits 600k views by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nAs you may have picked up, I’m a big tennis fan. So I was interested to see the following viral video from Head featuring Scotland’s own Andy Murray:\nIt’s a great little video and has apparently already hit the 600k view mark – pretty impressive.\nFinger’s crossed Andy can repeat these skills on centre court in the Wimbledon final on Sunday!\nMore\u0026hellip; Where\u0026rsquo;s your brain at? Where\u0026rsquo;s your consultancy at? by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nDo you \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that\u0026rsquo;s how it should be.\nNixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening\u0026rsquo;s CIPR Social Summer conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid. More\u0026hellip; The Last Mile: The Socialization of Business by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI’m working on developing new ideas and wanted to share them here with you for your review and also to seek your feedback…\nEverything begins with a shift in perspective from viewing stakeholders as a separate entity, “us vs. them,” to a singular view of “us ” as this enlivens a new era of community-focused marketing and engagement.\nSocial media introduces a new problem of sorts, one where the answer is lost in the politics and corresponding burrows of debate as to who owns social media within the organization. More\u0026hellip; Who Owns Social Media And Why It Should Not Be You by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nby Vanessa DiMauro and Ryck Lent\nDetermining who is in charge of social media can be a daunting task. Even when social leadership is channeled through the executive suite, it does not stop at the executive level. Often the question becomes “who owns social media?” within the organization.\nFor many new initiatives, he who first touches the new “thing” becomes its ultimate owner. The department which leads the first or most visible social media project establishes the initial beachhead of control over its eventual programmatic development. More\u0026hellip; How to integrate social media into a conference or event by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe conference as we used to know it was very stiff, structured and didactic.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been the same since Cicero—the speaker spoke and the audience listened. Maybe the audience had a chance to ask questions at the end, or chat about the content at coffee break, but like television it was essentially one-way communication.\nI speak at about 50 conferences and events all over the world each year. The best are those that integrate the physical event.\nIntegrate Social Media at your event\nNow, at conferences all over the world, audience members connect with one another in real time while speakers are up at the podium. More\u0026hellip; The Future of Newspapers: Depth and Personality by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nProducing unique content that adds depth and personality to its brand is something Melbourne\u0026rsquo;s biggest-selling newspaper the Herald Sun is experimenting with as it makes the transition from \u0026lsquo;old media\u0026rsquo; to \u0026rsquo;new media\u0026rsquo;.\nThe Herald Sun\u0026rsquo;s owner News Corporation signalled some 12 months ago it intended to start charging for access to its global network of news sites, with News Corp head honcho Rupert Murdoch pledging to shake up the newspaper industry by charging for editorial content. More\u0026hellip; Why Channel Partners should connect with vendors and current customers in social media by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nBeth Vanni – Director, Market Intelligence at Amazon Consulting (not related to Amazon.com) recently wrote:\n\u0026hellip;doesn’t it stand to reason that solution providers will be more effective selling the technology, building custom applications around it and helping customers with the supporting business process if they themselves understand the power of collaboration and social networking?\nIt sure does, we\u0026rsquo;re with you Beth!\nBeth goes on the say that in their 2009 study focused on Partner Collaboration and the Role of Social Media, nearly 50% of solution providers indicated they are only \u0026ldquo;opportunistically\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Tech in the Park: Making Clever Use of Teens’ Love of Music by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nRecently, I’ve taken a particular interest in technology in public places, probably due to spending too much time pondering my surroundings while waiting for the train. This latest example, discovered thanks to Michael Dales, is close to home just North of Cambridge. It’s so simple and it’s bound to make a lot of young people happy this summer.\nWondering what this is? It’s a rather clever contraption, apparently installed by Monster Play, a Hertfordshire-based company. More\u0026hellip; Want to to increase your email’s click throughs? Make it easy to share by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nWith 55 million updates on Twitter every day and several million more on Facebook, it’s no wonder marketers are excited about social media.\nWhilst making a message that goes ‘viral’ is more pot luck than a defined strategy, you can certainly improve your message’s chances of being shared by including links to social media sites.\nYou’d have thought adding links to Facebook and Twitter in B2C marketing emails was a no brainer these days. It doesn’t cost anything to do, and it offers pure, sweet ROI. More\u0026hellip; Insight from Hitwise on News International firewall by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s early analysis from Hitwise on the impact of the News International firewall on thetimes.co.uk (see dark blue line). According to analysis by Robin Goard the title’s market share has dropped from 4.37% during the week ending 22 May (pre-firewall) to 2.67% (post-firewall) during the week ending 19 June.\nMore\u0026hellip; Customer Experience: Do You Really Know Your Audience? by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nIt’s no surprise that the increasingly social web have enabled customers to be heard while helping to improve the very products and services they’ve purchased. As millions of people continue to search online for the product they need and the service they want, do you know how the recession has impacted your customer’s value perception? How are you going to improve the customer experience to optimize your products and services?\nYour customer may have already shifted their spending in favor of private label brands over name brands or reduce the quantity or frequency of buying altogether. More\u0026hellip; 5 Tips to Engage Social and Mobile Customers by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nf you’ve been keeping up with the current marketing trends, you should be in the process of exploring how to utilize social media to benefit your business. By now, most of the “how to use” social media content is everywhere especially from reputation resources such as Mashable, Social Media Examiner or Twitip to name a few. While most large organizations such as Fortune 500 companies are slow in adopting social media, many have started pilot programs to experiment with this new tool. More\u0026hellip; CIPR Summer Social debate finds PR and search marketing remain separate worlds by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe PR industry has failed to embrace search marketing. That was the conclusion of a group of PR, social media, and search marketing professionals that met yesterday as part of the CIPR’s Social Media Summer series to debate the issue. There are well-publicised exceptions highlighted by the recent NMA search league tables but the majority of the PR industry has seemingly yet to wake-up to even the basics of search marketing.\nAnalysis by ­Escherman’s Andrew Smith shows that the majority of the PR Week Top 150 agencies are failing to make even basic efforts to optimise their own web sites. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/friday-roundup-2nd-july-2010/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eContinuous professional development. Bloody important. Guess that\u0026rsquo;s why the CIPR just moved its whole system online. Brilliant.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI mention it because I need some. Professional development that is. Look at the state of this Friday Roundup: it lists 16 great posts for goodness sake! Far too many! But they\u0026rsquo;re all so interesting (if I can say that about a list that includes one of my own).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI need a course in editing to get the list down to, say, 10. I could propose some personalisation technology to the MarCom Professional team so you only get posts you\u0026rsquo;re really interested in. But then my post this week is about a new breed of consultant, an Influence Professional, who has to be savvy about everything going on out there in the world of exerting influence, and being influenced. So perhaps that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work. Mmmm.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePerhaps then I can just help to keep this Roundup shorter than otherwise by just stopping this intro. Here.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 2nd July 2010"},{"content":"Do you \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that\u0026rsquo;s how it should be.\nNixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening\u0026rsquo;s conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid.\nUnfortunately, such an obvious exhibit of a \u0026lsquo;ponkey\u0026rsquo; in the form of Escherman\u0026rsquo;s Andrew Smith was unavailable for us to examine more closely, and I pretended to know nothing about either topics when such prodding was mooted.\nSeriously though, from a simple business economics perspective, PR consultancies have well and truly lost out here. When I asked Seth Godin (in an interview to be published on the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website next week) what advice he had for PR professionals working in a highly competitive market, his simple and unavoidably logical response was: \u0026ldquo;do something else\u0026rdquo;. Yet that logic has escaped PR consultancy heads as every other breed of marketing consultancy walks away with the new, shiny and profitable service delivery.\nSo is it, as the image above portrays (excusing any and every anatomical error committed in the name of creating a nice looking attention-attracting blog post image) simply a case of artist-type meets scientist-type and never the twain shall meet?\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think so.\nFirst up, PR has become and is increasingly becoming data driven, as my post \u0026ldquo;Influence\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a numbers game \u0026rdquo; attests. This trend is unavoidable. I invite you to listen to a super interview I was able to record recently with Brian Solis in which, in response to my very first question, he asserts that the future of PR is data, research and analysis.\nSecondly, SEO is becoming softer. It\u0026rsquo;s becoming more about content creation (Daryl Willcox pointed out yesterday that 20% of the press releases his company distributes now originate from SEO companies; read his post here ). It\u0026rsquo;s becoming more about social context, particularly as organic search results become personalised and more real-time, two trends well under sail at both the two big search companies, Google and Microsoft.\nAnd this is the point in the evening where I was able to return to a drum I like to bang every opportunity I have, and that\u0026rsquo;s the rise and rise of the Influence Professional, an individual extremely well versed in unpaid (earned) and paid media, creativity and analytics, on- and off-line. He knows how to design the right mix of the right influence approaches at the right time, whether that\u0026rsquo;s SMS + outdoor, in-store + media relations, augmented reality + paid search, video + in-game advertising. He knows how to measure it too.\nHis boss? The Chief Influence Officer. She understands that the old differentiations and siloes of influence approaches are no longer fit for purpose and has irradicated them from her organisation and influence supply chain. She has socialised her entire organisation and sensitised it to its stakeholders in ways that make today\u0026rsquo;s efforts seem simply clumsy.\nBut back to SEO!\nNo, in fact. Instead I\u0026rsquo;ll just direct you to a great write-up of the evening by our host, Stephen Waddington . He\u0026rsquo;s a right little ponkey!\n_____\nNow how can this post\u0026rsquo;s SEO be improved? Whack it in there. Run that. Ah, that\u0026rsquo;s a good idea. Tweak that phrase and get these two in there too. Lubbly jubbly. Job done.\nImage credit ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/07/wheres-your-brain-at-wheres-your-consultancy-at/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eDo you \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that\u0026rsquo;s how it should be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"SEO%2C%20search%20engine%20optimisation%2C%20left%20brain%2C%20right%20brain%2C%20PR\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/brain_seo_influence_professional.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNixon McInnes’\u003c/a\u003e\n managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening\u0026rsquo;s conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Where\u0026#039;s your brain at? Where\u0026#039;s your consultancy at?"},{"content":"The PR measurement and evaluation community came together in Barcelona 16th-18th June for the AMEC 2nd European Summit. AMEC is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and they played host to organisations such as the IPR , the PRSA , the ICCO ,the CIPR and the PR Global Alliance .\nI was there representing the CIPR in my capacity as chair of its measurement group.\nAMEC equipped all delegates with some nifty electronic voting gadgets with which votes were cast on seven foundation principles. The headline principles were approved, and AMEC has now taken the action to tweak the detail in line with delegate feedback before publishing in full.\nI won\u0026rsquo;t duplicate the contents of a post on the seven principles by CIPR President Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor , but I will convey here how delighted I am that one of the principles states simply:\nAdvertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of PR**\n**\n(Indeed, I see that Paul Holmes of the eponymous Holmes Report is delighted too, making the perspicacious observation that AVEs don\u0026rsquo;t measure the value of advertising either, just its cost !)\nI interviewed Barry Leggetter, AMEC Executive Director, and Katie Delahaye Paine of KD Paine \u0026amp; Partners, at the conclusion of the summit to get their thoughts, and you can listen to that interview on Jay\u0026rsquo;s blog post too, or here:\nInterview with Barry Leggetter and Katie Delahaye Paine, AMEC10 And another with Katie Delahaye Paine a few weeks before the summit:\nInterview with Katie Delahaye Paine, June 2010 Public Relations professionals have more data at their fingertips than they ever dreamed, and this data is increasing by the magnitude by the year. Therein lies the opportunity for measurement and evaluation. AVEs have been a metric in the \u0026ldquo;because we can, not because we should\u0026rdquo; camp, and even if best practice doesn\u0026rsquo;t turn out to be as simple or even as generic as AVE, we will at last have something of true value and practical insight to bring to the board table than a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain.\nOnwards and upwards :-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nHow to Integrate Email Marketing, SEO and Social Media by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nSocial media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay. In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.\nHowever; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. More\u0026hellip; What is Adding Value and How it Applies to Social Networking by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nAs a social media advocate I often discuss adding value to the conversations, to the communities or to the relationships. I guess I assumed everyone already knew what the term means and how it applies to them until I started to get questions from people.\nSo what exactly is adding value and how? Is it just an over-used marketing jargon? An illusion of a feel-good emotion? The more I use the term “value” the more I feel like it’s loosing its soul (I’m guilty as charged at times). More\u0026hellip; Engage was Written to Help You Find Answers in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI recently hosted a discussion on the need to reduce the weight we place on the social media case studies and “how to” posts that are now universal, as they won’t apply to the specific circumstances or context of our challenges, opportunities, and market dynamics. I believe that we should use them solely for inspiration, but not as templates for our work. The best advice that I or anyone for that matter, can offer, lies in our ability to help you define the questions you must ask and answer yourself. More\u0026hellip; McKinsey - social media critical issue for business leaders by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nWith the announcement of the Neilsen McKinsey Joint Venture NM Incite, the global managing director of McKinsey, Dominic Barton, said: \u0026ldquo;Social media is an increasingly critical issue for business leaders and an area of untapped opportunity for many of our clients. This joint venture will equip institutions with real-time insights to help their leaders drive better results\u0026rdquo;.\nI guess that statement just might be the last nail in the coffin of the \u0026ldquo;passing fad\u0026rdquo; brigade of social media for business doubters!\nSo where in particular does McKinsey see social media providing insights? They mention three in the press release: More\u0026hellip; 7 Keys to Creating Social Media Strategy for Your Brand by Eric Tsai of Designdamage\nIn the past few weeks I’ve experienced a decent amount of spam from social networking sites ranging from people marketing their books, selling “make money online” information, to promoting their personal brand. It\u0026rsquo;s indicative of the fact that individuals and businesses are viewing the space seriously as it takes on the mainstream spotlight.\nThere are many ways to utilize social media to boost your brand. The key is to have a strategy around building your social proof. More\u0026hellip; Neuromarketing, Imprinting \u0026amp; David Hasselhoff on Your Mind by Marc Narine of 3Brain Marketing\nThe foods you prefer, the music you like or whether you think David Hasselhoff is a really good singer or an insane reality tv judge who makes awesome youtube vides, are likely influenced by ‘imprints‘ embedded in your unconscious mind. ‘Imprints‘ can be defined as the subconscious rules that guides each of us depending on the culture in which we are raised. The combination of the experience and the accompanying emotion creates the imprint. The stronger the emotion, the deeper the imprint. More\u0026hellip; Top 5 Mobile Smartphone Apps in the U.S. Market by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nU.S. mobile phone service subscribers are finally becoming more sophisticated, like their counterparts in other more advanced mobile markets, using their smartphone applications (apps) at a higher rate.\neMarketer reports that according to the latest comScore study, the total number of mobile app users in the U.S. increased by 28 percent from April 2009 to April 2010.\nSeveral app categories saw usage grow much faster. Social networking apps grew their user base by 240 percent during the period, to more than 14.5 million mobile users. More\u0026hellip; Social media at Deloitte Australia by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nHow does a large professional services firm communicate using the tools of social media? For an answer, take a look at this excellent report Social Media at Deloitte. (Consider sending it to your boss.)\nDeloitte Australia has 12 offices and over 4,500 people and provides audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services to public and private clients across Australia.\nDeloitte Australia defaulted to one of its seven key values and went with \u0026rsquo;empower and trust'.\nFrom the report: More\u0026hellip; 7 Steps to Creating and Cultivating a Brand in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn business, we learn through everything we do and it influences all that we try and repeat. When something new comes along, we tend to view it with either enthusiasm or skepticism, or in some cases a bit of both. Such is true with the advent of Social Media.\nAs business, marketing and service leaders, we face new challenges. We’re not quite sure how or why to implement the lessons and promises of social media into what we’re already doing. Nor do we understand how to experiment with it in ways that are safe and useful. More\u0026hellip; Shortest marketing conference ever by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOn July 6 at 6:00 pm eastern, 60 thinkers speak for 60 seconds each about how to increase your digital influence.\nThe Influencer Project\nI’ll be one of the presenters. It is a stellar lineup.\nIt’s kind of liberating to only have 60 seconds to speak. I boiled down a typical one-hour keynote into one minute. And 59 others did the same.\nCool.\nThe organizers setup for our short talks was: We want to empower as many people as possible to make a big impact in the world—ideally while pursuing their deepest passions. More\u0026hellip; There are no blog how-tos for the hard stuff by Andrew Swenson of wordpost\nYou won’t find the secret to business success online. So stop looking.\nBecause everyone is scrambling to produce better content more often, there’s great incentive (eyeballs and wallets) to create new and better guides for business.\nI mean, Brian Solis told us how to create and cultivate a brand in social media in just seven steps.\nChris Brogan just shared a simple formula for blogging success that got him 50,000 subscribers.\nForbes thought it prudent to create a slideshow entitled “In Pictures: More\u0026hellip; ABC data shows continued growth in online news by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nAnother month and another set of results from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) that show a seemingly insatiable appetite for online news in the UK. The ABC Multi-Platform Report for May 2010 has MailOnline leading the pack with the largest online audience of 2.39 million. I’ve written before about the MailOnline’s pursuit of a Google-baiting-celeb agenda.\nThe Sun and The Times dropped out of the audit in May as News International readies itself to move to paid for access. Likewise FT.com isn’t included. More\u0026hellip; E-Commerce Report: Facebook and Twitter Users Make It Rain by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIf you want to get a glimpse of the economic future, focus on the emerging trends driven by those defining the evolution of the social Web. Social media is not only democratizing influence and upsetting the traditional media ecosystem, it is now an indicator for a potential economic resurgence.\nLeading metrics firm, comScore, released its Q1 U.S E-Commerce Spending Report recently, finding that online retail spending approached $34 billion in Q1 2010, which represents a 10 percent boost compared to last year. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/06/friday-roundup-amec-and-the-value-of-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe PR measurement and evaluation community came together in Barcelona 16th-18th June for the \u003ca href=\"http://www.amecorg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAMEC\u003c/a\u003e\n 2nd European Summit. AMEC is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and they played host to organisations such as the \u003ca href=\"http://www.instituteforpr.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.prsa.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePRSA\u003c/a\u003e\n, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iccopr.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eICCO\u003c/a\u003e\n,the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.globalalliancepr.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePR Global Alliance\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was there representing the CIPR in my capacity as chair of its measurement group.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAMEC equipped all delegates with some nifty electronic voting gadgets with which votes were cast on seven foundation principles. The headline principles were approved, and AMEC has now taken the action to tweak the detail in line with delegate feedback before publishing in full.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI won\u0026rsquo;t duplicate the contents of \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/news-opinion/presidents-blog/4912/barcelona-principles-the-end-of-ave-\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea post on the seven principles by CIPR President Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor\u003c/a\u003e\n, but I will convey here how delighted I am that one of the principles states simply:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAdvertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of PR**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - AMEC and the value of PR"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won\u0026rsquo;t be verbatim as I wasn\u0026rsquo;t party to it, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:\n_________\nMarketer: We need an iPhone app?\nMobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why\u0026rsquo;s that?\nMarketer: Because they\u0026rsquo;re really cool and cool\u0026rsquo;s where it\u0026rsquo;s at for our target demographic.\nMobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who\u0026rsquo;s the target?\nMarketer: Teenagers.\nMobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that\u0026rsquo;s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?\nMarketer: Oh :-(\n_________\nThe bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and \u0026lsquo;other\u0026rsquo;, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones.\nThe group\u0026rsquo;s understanding of mobile was wide-ranging, from those who had simply experimented with various devices as consumers, up to the experts Si Crowhurst (@sicrowhurst ) and Ben Scott-Robinson (@bcsr ) from WeLoveMobile . And so it was to Si and Ben that we turned for a presentation on some of the main issues and case studies, and their entertaining trump-card stylee approach to discussing the marketer\u0026rsquo;s mobile toolkit went down rather well indeed.\nGiven the topic, it was apt that I take out my utterly brilliant HTC Desire and Qik Ben presenting the last slide of his stack:\nIf you can\u0026rsquo;t read it clearly from my less than handy videography, the four points are:\nMobile applications to reach the right audience This point simply states the conclusion to the conversation thread above. Here\u0026rsquo;s a great story from earlier this year in which a government department commissioned and launched an iPhone app for the unemployed to keep abreast of job opportunities . \u0026ldquo;Charities attacked the move, saying the popular mobile phones were unaffordable for thousands of Britons living below the breadline who are looking for work.\u0026rdquo;\nCampaign must degrade to low end, mass market experience \u0026ldquo;Degrade\u0026rdquo;, as used here, is a software term describing the ability of an application to cater to different (less functionally capable) situations. In other words, the roll out of a mobile campaign may deliver one sort of experience most suited to my HTC, but deliver a far more simple execution on far more simple devices.\nAre there exceptions? Sure: 1. If you don\u0026rsquo;t mind one jot excluding people / customers / prospects; 2. If you\u0026rsquo;re, say, communicating with the \u0026ldquo;iPhone owners club\u0026rdquo;!\nExperiential mobile campaign requires it\u0026rsquo;s own marketing This is WeLoveMobile\u0026rsquo;s nod to integrated marketing. We\u0026rsquo;ve known for the best part of a decade now that \u0026ldquo;build it and they will come\u0026rdquo; does NOT apply to a website, so why should it apply to a mobile marketing campaign? If you have a whizz bang app, that\u0026rsquo;s great, but only if people know about it. Your marketing strategy must seek to tie it all together.\nTechnology should be driven by campaign objective Reminds me of my presentation to the Digital Impact conference in May in which I strongly asserted that digital or no digital, objectives must still cascade. Everything you do must have a visible and tangible link back up to your marketing objectives, to your business objectives, and a clear understanding in advance of how you intend to measure success (or failure).\nThanks Ben. Thanks Si.\niCriticise So why don\u0026rsquo;t I like the iPhone or the iPad? Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m a Chartered Engineer and love the engineering, I just have a problem with the philosophy that sits behind them.\nOur world has reaped the almost accidental benefit of an incredible infrastructure we call the Internet, to which we have connected computers on which we can do almost anything, and constructed this amazing Web thing to run on top of the Internet that\u0026rsquo;s open to all.\nThen along comes Apple and says: \u0026lsquo;But we know what\u0026rsquo;s good for you. We\u0026rsquo;ll build a walled garden and dictate what can and cannot grow in it, and who can and cannot come into it.\u0026rsquo;\nBut I for one would never want a computing device where I have to ask permission to run stuff on it, no matter how \u0026ldquo;lovely\u0026rdquo; the \u0026ldquo;experience\u0026rdquo; is. I would never make my business the development of software for a computing device where I had to ask someone else nicely if it was OK, not knowing what they were going to say , and then capitulate 30% of my revenues for the pleasure.\nThere is no other way of putting this\u0026hellip; it is a retrograde step.\nA good friend of mine has been waxing lyrical about his iPhone for years, and now the iPad. Gorgeous. So easy. Just what consumers want. (Already sounds too much like Aldous Huxley\u0026rsquo;s soma if you ask me!)\nAnyway, reality has just started to dawn. A client he helped commission a Flash-only website a while back has just pointed out that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t run on iPhones or iPads. Apple has fallen out with Adobe (the company behind Flash), so that\u0026rsquo;s that. No Flash tree is gonna grow in your iPhone garden.\nSo, do help support an open Web. It\u0026rsquo;s hard work keeping it open, but nowhere near as hard as it would prove to open again should we allow it to close off into little protectorates.\nAnd do join us for the next Social Summer, on the 24th, \u0026ldquo;What Has Google Ever Done For PR? \u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; hosted by Andrew Smith, a man who knows more about wielding Google for your marketing campaign success than any man alive who doesn\u0026rsquo;t work somewhere called a \u0026ldquo;plex\u0026rdquo;.\n_________\nP.S. And yes, for the informed out there, I know Android is not yet fully open, but the intent is expressed. And here\u0026rsquo;s looking forward to Nokia\u0026rsquo;s and Intel\u0026rsquo;s MeeGo mobile operating system too.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/06/cipr-social-summer-on-mobile-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t until yesterday evening at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won\u0026rsquo;t be verbatim as I wasn\u0026rsquo;t party to it, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMarketer\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eWe need an iPhone app?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMobile marketing expert\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eRighteo. Why\u0026rsquo;s that?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMarketer\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eBecause they\u0026rsquo;re really cool and cool\u0026rsquo;s where it\u0026rsquo;s at for our target demographic.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMobile marketing expert\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eCool, yes, and who\u0026rsquo;s the target?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMarketer\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eTeenagers.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMobile marketing expert\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eDo you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that\u0026rsquo;s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMarketer\u003c/em\u003e: \u003cstrong\u003eOh :-(\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and \u0026lsquo;other\u0026rsquo;, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing"},{"content":"Friday Roundup 11th June 2010\nSeriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one.\nBut you only have to read the 22 I\u0026rsquo;ve selected for the Friday Roundup! :-)\nSeriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme\u0026hellip; Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media.\nOn the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying \u0026ldquo;Social media is a waste of time \u0026rdquo;, but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with:\nHow Small Business uses Facebook for B2B LinkedIn gains B2B traction for business development Real-time blog post gets Eloqua CEO tons of B2B ink and a cracking video roundup of the B2B buyer process fundamentally changing Seriously, you\u0026rsquo;re always a step ahead with the Friday Roundup. Why not forward this list to everyone you know?.. well, in marketing and PR I guess.\nHave a great weekend.\nPhilip and the MarCom Professional team.\nP.S. I did look just now to see if Mr. Morgan had offered up a correction or qualification given that his reported attitude towards social media has caused quite a stir, ironically, on the social Web, but could find none.\nNerdy white papers vs hip and stylish ebooks by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOne of my favorite riffs is: \u0026ldquo;Ebooks are the hip and stylish younger sister of the nerdy white paper.\u0026rdquo; When I deliver the line to B2B marketing or technology audiences, it gets a lot of laughs. But there are also a few people who are incredulous. Their body language says: \u0026ldquo;How can David be so rude to white papers?\u0026rdquo;\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t say I am totally dismissive of white papers. However, I do not agree with how white papers are typically used, which is why I talk so much about the ebook as different. More\u0026hellip; Social Media is a relentless taskmaster: Why and how to regain control by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nSocial Media is a relentless taskmaster. Once you begin participating in a social media marketing or thought leadership effort, it is hard to stop posting \u0026ndash; even for a moment. It is a cognitive treadmill with no obvious stop button. At least, that’s what so many have been told.\nHowever, sometimes we must pause to regain control \u0026ndash; to buy time to think, to write with quality and assess the impact of what we have to say \u0026ndash; before we actually say it. There are certainly plenty of examples where someone should have stopped to think before sending. More\u0026hellip; 21 Rules of Engagement in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is a modified excerpt from Engage!, the complete guide for businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new Web.\nChapter 17\nSocial Media is reinventing marketing, communications, and the dissemination of information. For many businesses and organizations, social networks represent hallowed grounds, bringing together customers, prospects and the people who influence their decisions in a shared, balanced, and interactive medium. While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media however, lies in the direct connections that are forged between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest. More\u0026hellip; Daily Mail article on social media critical of companies that actively seek consumer feedback by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nIt must be a slow news week, because a recent Daily Mail article by Jason Lewis titled\nHow ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account: secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers seems to suggest that companies that are actively seeking our customer feedback on public websites like twitter are somehow “spying” on customers.\nNow I know that sensational claims like this sell newspapers, and hence advertising but I doubt the Daily Mail readers will see this as more than just a beat up. More\u0026hellip; Exclusive! Daily Mail actively using “prying” technology to influence reader behaviour by Andrew Smith of escherman\nVisitors to the Daily Mail website are having personal information about themselves captured for the purpose of influencing their behaviour to purchase goods and services, we can exclusively reveal. The Mail also admits that it will use information gathered on individuals to “deal with” comments made on the site. Extensive research carried out by a crack escherman web team can reveal that the Daily Mail deploys an array of sophisticated web analytics and tracking technologies including Omniture, Sophus3, Google Analytics and ComScore. More\u0026hellip; Social media, BMW and the way forward by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nSo here’s a little something I presented on behalf of BMW for AutomotiveWorld recently. The event was entitled ’Social networks and the global auto industry: the marketing opportunity’. I talked about social media trends from an automotive perspective with some key learnings from BMW.. and then answered a load of questions in one of those fancy Q\u0026amp;A things. I’ll admit that it was a moderately enjoyable experience on the whole.\nBizarrely, I was in quite illustrious company with the other two speakers being Leo Rayman (@leorayman), Head of Social Strategy at DDB UK and Mary Henige (@maryhenige), Director of Social Media and Digital Communications at General Motors. More\u0026hellip; Rolls Royce Corporate Comms Director: “Social media is a complete waste of time” by Andrew Smith of escherman\nWell, that’s how I interpreted the words of Rolls Royce Director of Communications Peter Morgan in the latest issue of Corp Comms Magazine. I appreciate that I didn’t attend the event where he is supposed to have made the statements below – but I don’t doubt that Corp Comms Editor Helen Dunne has faithfully recorded what he said. According to Morgan:“I was communications director at BT for five and a half years. I’ve been communications director at Rolls-Royce for about six months. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Internet – If Not Now, When? by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nIt would appear, that in matters of debate, I favour the alternative. Having been roundly thrashed proposing ‘the future of marketing was digital’ at the B2B Conference last year, imagine my enthusiasm when I was asked to propose the motion at the recent IDM B2B Conference, ‘This house believes that mobile marketing will be a crucial channel for B2B brands in the UK in the next 12 months’. I politely declined.\nMy reluctance to take the stage and wave my arms around in a passionate display of mobile affection wasn’t so much the fear of defeat (and the motion was squarely defeated…), it was more a response to the depressing realisation that the B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in market development. More\u0026hellip; How Small Business uses Facebook for B2B by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a question which is still asked everyday - isn\u0026rsquo;t Facebook for friends and consumer brands why would I use it for B2B?\nWe all know about the big B2C guys, the Starbucks, Pringles Adidas etc, but how about smaller businesses and B2B? The big B2B guys are all over Facebook e.g. Intel, Cisco, IBM, we\u0026rsquo;ll stick to small SMB examples.\nHere are 5 SMB B2B Facebook pages:\nHow about Mid West Laboratories, for \u0026ldquo;analysis you can trust\u0026rdquo;? Tied to their blog, a basic but functional one, they take full advantage of a Facebook presence. More\u0026hellip; How Cults Seduce: A guide to Cult Marketing by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia michaelbatistich.com More\u0026hellip; LinkedIn gains B2B traction for business development by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage via CrunchBase Anyone else notice that LinkedIn is really becoming the de facto source for business to business (B2B) personnel checking? When you are doing demand generation for your business – do you use LinkedIn to background check?\nI have been doing demand generation for my clients this week. And twice people I approached immediately went to LinkedIn and checked out my profile and invited me to connect with them. They also replied to my cold approach and invited me to present my client’s business to them. More\u0026hellip; Making sense of social analytics by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThis is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.\nAs I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:\nIf you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security. More\u0026hellip; The Economist on the survival of newsprint – “not dead yet” by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPositive comment on the future of newsprint is hard to come by yet an article in The Economist today (disclosure: Speed client) is optimistic. It finds that newspapers have escaped closure by cutting costs. The decline in the fortunes of print has been widely reported. Consumer appetite is in decline and classified advertising has moved online to sites such as eBay and social networks such as Facebook.\nThe Economist reports that the response from publishers has been to cuts costs (staff and paper), raise prices and use syndicated content. More\u0026hellip; Are IT journalists abandoning a sinking ship; is PR the lifeboat? by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire\nPR Week reports today that legendary IT journalist and editor of CIO magazine is leaving journalism for the verdant pastures of PR (with Bite).\nThis follows on the back of some other notable moves in a similar direction recently.\nSo what does this mean about the state of IT journalism and, indeed, the attraction of PR (an industry which many of these movers no doubt bemoaned on a regular basis!)?\nMedia woes\nThe problems the media face have been well documented by myself and others for a long time and need no re-evaluation. More\u0026hellip; How much is BP really paying for those “oil spill” PPC ads? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nBP ‘manipulating search results’ on Google following oil spill - so said The Times today.\nThe piece quoted Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times as saying: “What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill… and [BP are] paying big money for that.”\nEr, not quite.\nFirst, BP is buying PPC ads – so they are hardly bumping natural search results anywhere. Second, there is an assumption that BP must be paying “big money” More\u0026hellip; Lifestyles of the Rich and Social by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn June 2008, I presented at a conference in Southern California where I debuted The Essential Guide to Social Media. While it seems like a lifetime ago, I remember this event distinctly because a couple of the questions at the end of conference addressed luxury brands specifically. And, they’re questions that many ask or have yet to ask today.\nWhat role do luxury brands take on the social web and what is the corresponding voice and personality associated with the activity. When do luxury brands engage and does interaction take away from the stature and prestige of the brand?\nThe answer I gave then, I stand by today. More\u0026hellip; Real-time blog post gets Eloqua CEO tons of B2B ink by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nImagine a huge company announces it is to acquire one of your competitors. It hit the wires five minutes ago. What would you do right now?\nNot tomorrow. Now.\nHow about writing a blog post about it in real-time?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua did when Oracle announced the acquisition of Market2Lead, a company that is also in the marketing automation arena.\nI\u0026rsquo;m on the Eloqua advisory board and was having dinner with Joe, other advisory board members, and the Eloqua management team on May 24 in San Francisco when this went down. More\u0026hellip; So You Need To Hire A Community Manager - Now What? by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nThe Community Manager role is unlike any other position in the technology and online world. Rather than managing hardware or software, products, services or content, the Community Manager manages behaviors and interactions among the members – readers, clients, prospects, and analysts; whomever your community is designed to engage. It\u0026rsquo;s all about the members \u0026ndash; which means it\u0026rsquo;s about managing people.\nMore specifically, successful community management is about guiding those aspects of the interpersonal interactions that lead to greater engagement \u0026ndash; both the quantity of interactions between members (member-to-member) and between the member and the community or company (Company/Community-to-member). More\u0026hellip; Valuable Insights from Melbourne\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;Power Bloggers\u0026rsquo; (Videos) by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nSocial Media Club Melbourne this week held its biggest event yet (and the first time at 24 Moons in the city).\nThe event featured a panel of Melbourne-based \u0026lsquo;power bloggers\u0026rsquo; - Duncan Riley (@duncanriley), Pip Lincolne (@meetmeatmikes) and Darren Rowse (@problogger) - plus Yvonne Adele (@IdeasCulture) as MC.\nDarren is one of the world\u0026rsquo;s most popular bloggers - his Problogger site is jam-packed with information designed to help people generate revenue from their blogging efforts. More\u0026hellip; CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won\u0026rsquo;t be verbatim as I wasn\u0026rsquo;t party to it, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:\n_________\nMarketer: We need an iPhone app?\nMobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why\u0026rsquo;s that?\nMarketer: Because they\u0026rsquo;re really cool and cool\u0026rsquo;s where it\u0026rsquo;s at for our target demographic. More\u0026hellip; B2B buyer process fundamentally changing - video B2B stats by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nEarnest Agency has been publishing some valuable summaries of social media B2B marketing stats, particularly Vital Statistics for B2B Marketers. They\u0026rsquo;ve just released a video of the stats, it\u0026rsquo;s a great resource. They don\u0026rsquo;t make any claim that all the stats are consistent, or precise, just that these are stats which have been reported by reasonably reputable groups. In fact they highlight the contradictions in order to challenge us to think more.\nI loved the music Dave Brubeck\u0026rsquo;s Unsquare Dance, took me back many years, but I love more the opportunity the video provides for conversation with B2B clients. More\u0026hellip; Q\u0026amp;A: The Impact of Social Media in the Enterprise by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn the spirit of sharing dialog that transpires outside of this domain, I would like to invite you to read a recent discussion with good friend Jacob Morgan, co-author of Twitfaced (I contributed the foreword). While the discussion centered on Engage!, as you’ll soon see, it expanded to analyze the effects of social media in the enterprise.\n#EngageorDie\nWhy is sociology and anthropology so important to understand for social media?\nI believe that at the top level, all of social media is driven by anthropology and sociology – More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/06/friday-roundup-social-media-is-a-total-waste-of-time/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFriday Roundup 11th June 2010\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut you only have to read the 22 I\u0026rsquo;ve selected for the Friday Roundup! :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme\u0026hellip; Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.smith/rolls-royce-corporate-comms-director-social-media-is-a-complete-waste-of-time\"\u003eSocial media is a waste of time\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;, but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - social media is a total waste of time"},{"content":"This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.\nAs I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:\nIf you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.\nAnd yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are:\nCan we begin to use the same terminology, please? What is it we should be measuring exactly? And can we close the gap between the PR profession’s and analytics vendor’s understanding of each other’s worlds? The Web Analytics Association worked very hard a decade ago to normalise the terms employed by the explosion of web analytics vendors so that one service could be compared with another. The same progress is required now of social analytics vendors, although some of the concepts are much harder to pin down this time.\nLet me give you an example, one that underlines the challenge when compared to, say, a common definition in web analytics of average time on site (ATOS), namely influence. Someone has been influenced when they think in a way they wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done. But not according to the social analytics vendors, who push influencer-centric over influence-centric definitions.\nBut influence isn’t some invented quantity that rolls up a number of indices and measures into a relatively arbitrary compound formula, making any appreciation of the underlying approach opaque to the end user (but in such a way that it can then be packaged and sold as ’unique’). We need to measure stuff because we should, not just because we can. Yet it’s easy to be susceptible to some of this faux holy grail stuff and we need to take a closer look at what’s on offer.\nIn fact, I believe PR professionals are better off just doing good work that aligns with the tenets of books such as The New Rules of Marketing and PR and Engage! , than waste time slaving to specious measures. Everyone should employ one and preferably more social analytics services. These should be incorporated into the workflow of your team (because this isn’t just about listening, it’s about conversation) and not relegated to the intern’s desk.\nThen you’ll be best placed to take advantage of its capabilities today, rising above its current flaws, and be ready to move up with the market as it matures this decade.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/06/making-sense-of-social-analytics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis is my article as it was published in \u003ca href=\"http://www.nma.co.uk/opinion/requirements-for-making-sense-of-social-analytics/3014286.article\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNew Media Age\u003c/a\u003e\n yesterday:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/nma-logo.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eChartered Institute of Public Relations\u003c/a\u003e\n Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs I commented in the \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Web Analytics eBook\u003c/a\u003e\n in 2008:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Making sense of social analytics"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a \u0026lsquo;first\u0026rsquo; going on at the CIPR\u0026hellip; yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.\nSo I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life\u0026rsquo;s hard.\nActually, I\u0026rsquo;d got to the CIPR for 3.30pm to have the first meeting of the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s Social Media measurement group, and we\u0026rsquo;ll be posting up the minutes to that next week. If you\u0026rsquo;d like to find out more about our plans, head on over to the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s brand spanking new website, here , where you\u0026rsquo;ll also have the opportunity to listen to an interview I conducted with the Queen of Measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine, this week. Or just click play here:\nInterview with Katie Delahaye Paine 20 June 2010 Next week\u0026rsquo;s session is on mobile. As always, it\u0026rsquo;s the CIPR HQ, 5pm-7pm, Thursday, and the conversation is kicked off by the lovely chaps at http://www.welovemobile.co.uk .\nHope to see you there. Once again, here\u0026rsquo;s our little wiki .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/06/social-analytics-katie-delahaye-paine-and-the-cipr-social-summer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a \u0026lsquo;first\u0026rsquo; going on at the CIPR\u0026hellip; yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series \u003ca href=\"http://ciprsm.wikispaces.com/Social\u0026#43;Summer\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003edesigned openly on a wiki\u003c/a\u003e\n by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/2010/06/social-analytics-katie-delahaye-paine-and-the-cipr-social-summer/cipr_2010_social_summer/\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"CIPR Social Summer\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/cipr_2010_social_summer.png\" title=\"CIPR Social Summer\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life\u0026rsquo;s hard.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer"},{"content":"Content management has come a long way since the turn of the century. Back then, web design and content management systems (CMS) typically set anyone back five to seven figures of whatever currency they had to hand. And then some bright sparks developed the idea of blogging.\nBlogging helped many non-technical web users start publishing for the first time by stripping CMS back to its bare bones, and I remember hosting a contingent from MIT in London in 2001 at the Work Foundation where we worked ourselves up into a frenzy about how big blogging was going to be!\nBlogging aside, I\u0026rsquo;ve just realised I\u0026rsquo;ve used four CMS this week alone. Drupal , in helping the CIPR bring their new website to life; Wordpress , with a premium theme from WooThemes , in assembling a more basic site for a new organisation called 6UK of which I\u0026rsquo;m a director; MarCom Professional\u0026rsquo;s mix of open and proprietary CMS; and I\u0026rsquo;ve even created a hand-coded site based on Matthew James Taylor \u0026rsquo;s superb liquid layouts (liquid means they flex to the browser window\u0026rsquo;s dimensions).\nBut the options for non-techies remain too limited. I detect an undercurrent of demand from individuals wishing to express their individuality without resort to the online equivalent of a crèche. So-called skinnable blog hosting services, and the likes of YouTube and Facebook are too constraining in my opinion.\nThe new website won\u0026rsquo;t be a website, but a \u0026ldquo;mysite\u0026rdquo; if you like. It won\u0026rsquo;t just host content, in fact that could be just a minor role, but my conversations and my social graph . It could be my hub for the collation and analysis of all the personal data that my household and I spin off. It could be my recommendation engine for anything and everything. It will be adaptable, tweakable, widgetable, without resort to anything more complicated than the instructions to my VCR\u0026hellip; oh, OK then, simpler.\nWatch out for innovations from the likes of Automattic and Diaspora . And Google.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nMarketers Crave Budget for Web Analytics Talent by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nMarketers everywhere seem to agree, it\u0026rsquo;s important to have the full picture when evaluating digital marketing investments. That said, market studies indicate that marketers still consider the click-through their main form of measurement \u0026ndash; despite its flaws.\neMarketer reports that a 2010 survey performed by Web analytics service Omniture showed that marketers were unable to measure marketing effectiveness across the typical purchase life-cycle.\nAsked which metrics would give them the most actionable insights, marketers said marketing cost, orders, average order size and conversion rate. More\u0026hellip; Web usability - lawyers beat cinemas by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nIn the Software as a Service world a lot of attention is paid to designing a web interface which gets people to qualify and \u0026ldquo;try before they buy\u0026rdquo; with the least friction.\nThe lawyers\nI was intrigued to read in the financial press today how a firm of litigation lawyers spend a lot of time and effort focusing on usability (UI) and performance before they launched a recent class action.\nThe class action, in Australia, is against the 5 banks of the local oligopoly and their penalty fees. More\u0026hellip; What PPC ad spending can tell you about the UK PR sector and other digital tales by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAs part of a recent SEO analysis of the websites of PR Week’s Top 150 agencies (*), we found that only 37pc of them contained the keyword term “PR” in their home page titles. And barely 15pc used the term “public relations” (a fairly bog standard SEO technique). We then realised that many firms referred to themselves as communications agencies and/or consultancies. So perhaps they were optimising on these terms? Nope. A mere six agencies had either of these terms in their page titles. More\u0026hellip; Social Media in Small Business is Anything But Small by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn celebration of National Small Business Week…\nFor entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, and consultants, one of the most exciting prospects of social media, lies in the ability to dramatically amplify your visibility and value proposition among existing and potential stakeholders. Social Media finally places small, local and emerging businesses in the spotlight in ways that up until this point, were largely unattainable.\nNew Media is rapidly shifting the landscape of how people find and share information and much of it isn’t just moving online, it’s connecting people in ways that weave a dedicated network of prospects and advocates within networks that invite your value-added participation. More\u0026hellip; CIPR Digital Impact Conference by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThe 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.\nI was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I\u0026rsquo;d focus in on the following assertion:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s my opinion that the things people think have change haven\u0026rsquo;t, but some things have changed that aren\u0026rsquo;t yet widely understood.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s my slidestack and I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your thoughts. More\u0026hellip; Online video rocks as a global marketing channel by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI’m frequently asked about reaching international audiences. With language differences and widely varying social networking sites (such as Hyves in the Netherlands), how do marketers reach a global audience?\nHuge brands should localize. But if you\u0026rsquo;re a smaller organization, video works great. You can imbed a video in most Web platforms and social networking sites around the world. Watch this short (1:16) video where I ask people in various countries if they watch video online. Show the video to your skeptical boss. More\u0026hellip; Will the iPad kill print? Will it hell by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nImage via Wikipedia I returned to the NEC, Birmingham today to participate in PIRA’s Great Print Debates for a session that pitched the iPad against print.\nThe iPad will no more spell the end of print than any previous generation of technology. Radios, TVs, PCs, CD-ROMs and the internet were all at one time set to hasten the demise of print.\nThe iPad is simply another device in the ongoing narrative of an industry reeling from the shift towards advertising online, the internet as a low cost real time distribution platform, and competition for consumer attention from screen based media. More\u0026hellip; Not all customers are equal in social media by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nImage via Wikipedia\nWe’re only beginning to see the use of Twitter for customer service. Yet the expectation of brands that use the channel is increasing all the time. Businesses may start prioritising engagement with customers on Twitter according to their influence. This was Brian Solis’ prediction speaking at Thinking Digital in Gateshead today.\nSolis said that measurement tools such as Klout enabled brands to determine the influence of a Twitter user and prioritise their response accordingly. More\u0026hellip; New Segmentation: a Source of IPTV Innovation by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nFive years ago, I recall when the incumbent Telcos in the U.S. were making plans to launch their IPTV services, and I remember being hopeful that this could be the beginning of an exciting new chapter in the pay-TV industry.\nThe market opportunities for innovative video entertainment offerings were unlimited \u0026ndash; due to the lack of meaningful differentiation among the legacy cable and satellite pay-TV service providers.\nUnfortunately, the results thus far have been disappointing to me \u0026ndash; since most IPTV offerings merely mimic the legacy channel-centric tiered approach to video delivery, with little inventive design that utilizes the inherent capabilities of IP-based platforms. More\u0026hellip; Current Themes in Social Marketing by Stephan Dahl of MIddlesex University\nSocial Marketing Quarterly, the main scholarly outlet in the social marketing field, has published “Current Themes in Social Marketing”, looking at the main themes emerging from text mining social marketing research over the past five years. The article is available here (via Informa World).\nDahl, Stephan (2010) ‘Current Themes in Social Marketing Research: Text-Mining the Past Five Years’, Social Marketing Quarterly, 16: 2, 128 — 136\nMore\u0026hellip; We Are The Champions by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAn important reminder that you are on the right path…\nSocial Media marketing is not new nor is it widely established or even understood. However in 2010, it will completely transform the way businesses attract customers and the way consumers find the businesses and services that matter to them. And like that, an overnight landmark, which really is over a decade in the making, will challenge business owners, more so than today, as they now compete for the future, right now.\nSocial Networks are no longer the playgrounds we once perceived. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/friday-roundup-discontent-content-management/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eContent management has come a long way since the turn of the century. Back then, web design and content management systems (CMS) typically set anyone back five to seven figures of whatever currency they had to hand. And then some bright sparks developed the idea of blogging.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlogging helped many non-technical web users start publishing for the first time by stripping CMS back to its bare bones, and I remember hosting a contingent from MIT in London in 2001 at the Work Foundation where we worked ourselves up into a frenzy about how big blogging was going to be!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - discontent content management"},{"content":"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.\nI was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I\u0026rsquo;d focus in on the following assertion:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s my opinion that the things people think have change haven\u0026rsquo;t, but some things have changed that aren\u0026rsquo;t yet widely understood.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s my slidestack and I\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo; Wide Web, I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to point people to your presentation\u0026hellip; loved it :-)\nHow digital changes everything and nothing View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\nP.S. If you like this, and you\u0026rsquo;re in London on Thursdays over the Summer, you might like this .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/cipr-digital-impact-conference/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u003c/a\u003e\n 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I\u0026rsquo;d focus in on the following assertion:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s my opinion that the things people think have change haven\u0026rsquo;t, but some things have changed that aren\u0026rsquo;t yet widely understood.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR Digital Impact Conference"},{"content":"\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel \u0026hellip; the Social Media Measurement Group.\nSome time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure \u0026lsquo;column inches\u0026rsquo;, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).\nMy disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.\nWithout a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone\u0026rsquo;s defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign\u0026rsquo;s success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X out of the press? \u0026ldquo;Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm\u0026hellip;.\u0026rdquo;.\nAnd then the Web arrived, and suddenly everyone was enamoured at the Web\u0026rsquo;s capacity to deal with numbers. Everything was a 1 or a 0. Either a page was \u0026lsquo;viewed\u0026rsquo; or it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Either an ad was served or clicked or it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Marketing nirvana had supposedly arrived for all marketing practitioners.\nBut interestingly, whilst online advertising has stolen a massive chunk of the budget previously the preserve of advertising in the \u0026lsquo;real world\u0026rsquo;, the new rules of marketing and PR have been engagement over interruption, conversation over brand bludgeoning. Or in other words, PR over advertising.\nAnd so the PR industry, perhaps not particularly famous for its scientific approach or adoption of information technology, is now faced with more data in a day than it had to work with throughout the entire decade of the 1990s. Probably. Surely there must be something in there? Surely, we can pull a few measures together, perhaps tweak with some weighting, add some stuff here and take some other stuff away there, and as sure as Facebook is an infringement of anyone\u0026rsquo;s personal privacy you\u0026rsquo;d have the ultimate measure of PR campaign effectiveness.\nNot quite.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s why I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be leading the CIPR Social Media Measurement Group, and I\u0026rsquo;m excited that we appear by all accounts to have assembled a rather useful bunch of PR measurement experts to update the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s guidance and policies in this regard.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;d like more information about this sort of stuff, then a great place to start is The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . But then I wrote it. Whilst it is obviously dated a while back, its content has stood the test of time. It has been downloaded over 90,000 times now, and the downloads in April 2010 exceeded those in April 2009 :-)\nAnd of course, you will find Katie Delahaye Paine \u0026rsquo;s and Marshall Sponder \u0026rsquo;s blogs fascinating too. Which why it\u0026rsquo;s fab that both of them have agreed to act as special advisers to our new group. And I\u0026rsquo;ve appended mini-biogs for the entire team below.\nWatch this space for updates as we begin our work, and in the meantime, if you liked this, you may like the following:\nInfluence - the bullship, best practice and promise Influence - it\u0026rsquo;s a numbers game ________\nMembers of the CIPR Social Measurement Group CIPR Social Measurement Group Twitter list CIPR Social Media Panel Twitter list Marcus Gault, Precise (@precisemarcus ) Marcus has 15 years’ experience in research and analysis gained in senior roles at Millward Brown, AC Nielsen and in-house at ASDA. He has advised a range of high profile clients including Google, Blackrock and Toyota, and has been instrumental in establishing Precise as the UK\u0026rsquo;s fastest growing analysis provider. He continues to lead the development of Precise\u0026rsquo;s unique and innovative methods of assessing and reporting on PR and communications effectiveness and is an active member of the analysis trade body AMEC.\nLuke Brynley-Jones, Our Social Times (@lbrynleyjones ) Luke founded and runs Our Social Times , the social media blog and consultancy that hosts Europe’s leading social media monitoring conference, Monitoring Social Media , and the Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp. Having developed over 40 online communities over the past 10 years, Luke is one of the UK’s most experienced social media experts. Luke also runs the Inbound Marketing Forum and teaches social media marketing for the University of Essex.\nAdam Paulisick, The Nielsen Company (BuzzMetrics) (@paulisick ) Adam is Senior Director, Commercial Operations for The Nielsen Company’s Online division (audience, advertising, video and social media market research) with responsibility for driving effective commercial strategy and operations within EMEA. Prior to Adam’s arrival in London he led global account planning and was originally one of the members of the BuzzMetrics team guiding early business development efforts.\nGiles Palmer, Brandwatch (@joodoo9 ) Giles is the founder and CEO of Brandwatch. He has taken the company from an initial project to build a local search engine for the UK government to a global Social Media Monitoring business. Work started on Brandwatch in November 2004, and really accelerated when the company raised external capital to develop the system in May 2006.\nMarshall Manson, Edelman (@marshallmanson ) Marshall is Director of Digital Strategy for Edelman UK. He is a pioneer in the field of online strategy, communications and reputation management. He moved to the UK in 2008, having previously worked in Edelman’s Washington DC office as Vice-President of Online Advocacy. Marshall advises a host of clients across all industries on online reputation management, crisis management, advocacy, engagement and viral marketing.\nPaul Armstrong, Kindred (@themediaisdying and @munkyfonkey ) Paul is working for Kindred (an integrated communications agency) as Digital Director after spending the last seven years in Los Angeles, the last two of which were at MySpace in the Corporate Communications department. Before this he worked for brands such as Sony, Activision, 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Yahoo! Philip Sheldrake, Influence Crowd (@sheldrake ) Philip authored \u0026ldquo;The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 \u0026rdquo; and gets hired by organisations looking to embed social analytics into the fabric of their organisation as effectively and cost effectively as possible. He also consults on the Internet of Things and the Semantic Web. Philip is a chartered engineer and founder and partner of Influence Crowd . He co-founded, built and sold Fuse PR to W2 Group in 2006.\nSpecial advisers: Katie Delahaye Paine, KD Paine \u0026amp; Partners (@kdpaine ) Katie is the CEO and founder of KDPaine \u0026amp; Partners LLC and author of \u0026ldquo;Measuring Public Relationships: The data-driven communicator\u0026rsquo;s guide to measuring success.\u0026rdquo; She also writes the first blog (Katie Paine\u0026rsquo;s Measurement Blog ) and publishes the first newsletter (The Measurement Standard ) dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability.\nMarshall Sponder, the \u0026lsquo;Web Metrics Guru\u0026rsquo; (@webmetricsguru ) Marshall is the founder of Webmetricsguru.com , an industry blog about Web analytics, social media and search marketing. He writes a monthly column for Entrepreneur.com on leveraging online marketing technologies that help businesses succeed in a challenging economy. Marshall is an Emeritus Director of Social Media at the Web Analytics Association and currently on the SEMPO Research Committee. He maintains his own analytics consultancy, Now-Seo, with current PR and search marketing projects at PR firm Porter Novelli and WordStream.com .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/best-practice-guidance-and-policy-for-social-media-measurement-from-the-cipr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/ciprsm_logo_wide_50h.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/cipr-social-media-group-and-the-semantic-web\"\u003enewly formed Social Media Panel\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026hellip; the Social Media Measurement Group.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure \u0026lsquo;column inches\u0026rsquo;, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWithout a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone\u0026rsquo;s defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign\u0026rsquo;s success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X \u003cem\u003eout of the press\u003c/em\u003e? \u0026ldquo;Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm\u0026hellip;.\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR"},{"content":"Fortunately, the last time I was asked \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a blog?\u0026rdquo; whilst presenting at a social media conference was 2008. Thank gawd for that. But too many social media conferences continue to labour the basics whilst the majority of practitioners have moved themselves way up the learning curve.\nSo I thought I\u0026rsquo;d invest this Friday Roundup in identifying three initiatives in London that should tickle your advanced social fancy.\nThe first is the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s Digital Impact conference . For an institute that didn\u0026rsquo;t lead in the social media world back when I was being asked \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a refback?\u0026rdquo;, the CIPR has jumped three gears and is heading straight into the thick of things in 2010. The content looks fab. The speakers are great and the venue, for those who haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been to the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s new home, is lovely.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going particularly for the First Direct and Vodafone sessions. (And don\u0026rsquo;t worry about the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website, yes it is awful, and yes they do know it, and yes a new one will debut in just a couple of weeks!)\nThe second is Social Media Marketing 2010 from the same guys that brought us the successful Monitoring Social Media 2009 and Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp 2010 conferences. And with Chris Brogan and Brian Solis making rare appearances in the UK, it\u0026rsquo;s shaping up to be another \u0026ldquo;I like\u0026rdquo; feather in the Luke Brynley-Jones\u0026rsquo; social hat.\nLastly, and another CIPR first, the CIPR Social Summer is the first event series organised by the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s newly formed Social Media panel, and a series that\u0026rsquo;s being developed openly on a wiki . Seriously, if you want to change it, you can.\nAdopting a more casual format, fireside chat if you like, the workshop owners have been free to tempt you with whatever they want to share. Check it out. Mark Adams, founder of Text 100 and Next Fifteen, is calling his session \u0026ldquo;The Social Stigma of Losing Your Hard-Won Mayorship\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; which I\u0026rsquo;m taking to be a session around location aware social networking rather than a personal branding expose; but you never know.\nAnd if that\u0026rsquo;s not all, the content here on MarCom Professional continues to teach us all a thing or two. Happy browsing.\nPhilip and the MarCom Professional team.\nHow social media might help put UK politics on the right track by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nElection 2010 was supposed to be the UK\u0026rsquo;s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.\nBut that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean same-interest groups aren\u0026rsquo;t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It\u0026rsquo;s just that the majority of the British public aren\u0026rsquo;t that engaged with social media just yet. And don\u0026rsquo;t start with that \u0026ldquo;but Obama did it in 2008\u0026rdquo; malarkey\u0026hellip; sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority \u0026ldquo;online\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; 7 Scientific Ways to Promote Sharing on Facebook by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nLeonardo Da Vinci once wrote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Kelly Johnson modernized that philosophy with an alternate twist, KISS, Keep it Simple and Stupid a.k.a. Keep it Short and Simple.\nIn a social economy where attention is a precious commodity, the ability to strip a social object down to its essence to capture attention has less to do with compacting character counts and more to do with the art and science of packaging and presenting content so that it is immediately compelling, simple to grasp and appreciate and in turn, share across social graphs. More\u0026hellip; CIPR Social Media panel Social Summer training sessions by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s a sign of the progress that the CIPR is making on the social media front.\nOne of the first outcomes from the Social Media panel is a series of training sessions led by industry practitioners. They’re set to take place at the CIPR’s HQ at Russell Square every Thursday night over the summer from 5pm to 7pm.\nThe programme is coming together on a wiki. Chip in if you’ve got a view or you’ve a topic that you’d like to see covered. I’m up on 5 August when I’ll talk about using social media to build your personal reputation and get hired. More\u0026hellip; Social media savvy Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s new competitive edge - partner enablement by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nIn a previous post (Part 1) I talked about the cultural change inherent in being a social media savvy company, and related it to Microsoft and the recent Netprospex Social 50 survey ranking US companies on their social media savviness.\nIn Part 1 I explained why I thought Microsoft deserved more credit for attaining the #1 position in the social savvy rankings, as it indicated a capacity for organisational change which has been frequently questioned in recent years.\nIn this part I want to explore what it means in terms of competitive advantage that Microsoft is #1. More\u0026hellip; The Businesses of B2B Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSocial Media is often misconstrued as a medium for business-to-consumer or B2C engagement and discounted as a viable communications network for those companies focused on business-to-business transactions. However, B2B, as in any other field impacted by online activity, is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time. More\u0026hellip; The Plane Truth: Brand journalism and the new Boeing site by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe Boeing Company recently launched a completely new approach to the Web. The dramatic shift in direction brings what was a dull technology and product focused site to one focused on brand journalism, with interesting stories about people.\nBrand journalism is the creation of videos, blog posts, photos, charts, graphs, essays, ebooks, and other information that deliver value to your marketplace. Brand Journalism is not a product pitch. It is not an advertorial. It is not an egotistical spewing of gobbledygook-laden, stock-photo enhanced corporate drivel. More\u0026hellip; What The Facebook? This is worrying. by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nThat’s the message I got when I didn’t want to join groups and fan pages for all of my stated interests to go with their new “Liking” policy. I simply wanted them to remain listed as words on the page, just as they had always been. But that was no longer an option. And that was when I decided it was time to seriously consider ditching my Facebook account. (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)\nUp until now, I have been a supporter of brands using Facebook to connect with people. More\u0026hellip; 3 principles for building social brands by Steve Sponder of Five by Five\nFor organisations to be successful in this new hyper-word-of-mouth world they will need to fully embrace the notion of a building a social brand. A social brand is one that is able to stay true to three core principles; it actively listens, it has appropriate social behaviour and it builds win/win relationships with its stakeholders.\nActive listening is required if the brand is to truly be part of the market conversations, being part of the conversation provides valuable insight and critical feedback. More\u0026hellip; Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel\u0026hellip; the Social Media Measurement Group.\nSome time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure \u0026lsquo;column inches\u0026rsquo;, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE). More\u0026hellip; Value of radio versus podcasts in audience engagement by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s some data that challenges the progress of social media.\nConsumer appetite for radio – like TV – is at an all time high. According to RAJAR data (PDF) for the first quarter of 2010 46.5m adults tune into radio each week in the UK.\nYou thought that social media was killing mainstream media? No chance.\nBut radio remains a crude instrument to communicate with an audience. People may be listening but are they engaged?\nDavid Cushman made this point on Twitter in response to a tweet I posted about the RAJAR data. More\u0026hellip; We’re the Tweets in America by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe fascination with Twitter has less to do with the number of users and everything to do with the ability to observe and study a notable online community of passionate short-form content creators and consumers. This is of course, not just any online community. Twitter is quickly becoming the lens into all that moves us as individuals and also as a global society.\nTwitter’s simplicity is part of its brilliance. The ability to interpret, analyze and in turn, predict behavior, currently sets it apart from most other social networks. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/friday-roundup-social-media-training-gets-more-useful/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFortunately, the last time I was asked \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a blog?\u0026rdquo; whilst presenting at a social media conference was 2008. Thank gawd for that. But too many social media conferences continue to labour the basics whilst the majority of practitioners have moved themselves way up the learning curve.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I thought I\u0026rsquo;d invest this Friday Roundup in identifying three initiatives in London that should tickle your advanced social fancy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first is the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cipr.co.uk/Digital%20Impact/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCIPR\u0026rsquo;s Digital Impact conference\u003c/a\u003e\n. For an institute that didn\u0026rsquo;t lead in the social media world back when I was being asked \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a refback?\u0026rdquo;, the CIPR has jumped three gears and is heading straight into the thick of things in 2010. The content looks fab. The speakers are great and the venue, for those who haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been to the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s new home, is lovely.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m going particularly for the First Direct and Vodafone sessions. (And don\u0026rsquo;t worry about the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s website, yes it is awful, and yes they do know it, and yes a new one will debut in just a couple of weeks!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe second is \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialmediamarketing.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Media Marketing 2010\u003c/a\u003e\n from the same guys that brought us the successful Monitoring Social Media 2009 and Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp 2010 conferences. And with Chris Brogan and Brian Solis making rare appearances in the UK, it\u0026rsquo;s shaping up to be another \u0026ldquo;I like\u0026rdquo; feather in the Luke Brynley-Jones\u0026rsquo; social hat.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLastly, and another CIPR first, the CIPR Social Summer is the first event series organised by the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s newly formed Social Media panel, and a series that\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://ciprsm.wikispaces.com/Social\u0026#43;Summer\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ebeing developed openly on a wiki\u003c/a\u003e\n. Seriously, if you want to change it, you can.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - social media training gets more useful"},{"content":"Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK\u0026rsquo;s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.\nBut that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean same-interest groups aren\u0026rsquo;t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It\u0026rsquo;s just that the majority of the British public aren\u0026rsquo;t that engaged with social media just yet. And don\u0026rsquo;t start with that \u0026ldquo;but Obama did it in 2008\u0026rdquo; malarkey\u0026hellip; sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority \u0026ldquo;online\u0026rdquo; effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone\u0026rsquo;s definition of social media.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election.\nIn Vince Cable We Trust! This group\u0026rsquo;s hub can be found at www.invincecable.org.uk , and its stated objective is:\nTo harness a groundswell of the UK electorate such that, in the event of a hung parliament, the Prime Minister has no choice but to invite Vince Cable to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.\nNow, I know quite a bit about the machinations of this group because I\u0026rsquo;m part of it. So I can tell you about what\u0026rsquo;s worked and what hasn\u0026rsquo;t. Let\u0026rsquo;s start with the hasn\u0026rsquo;t\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip;.\nA call to action #FAIL! Whilst our group recognised this potential weakness up front, we hadn\u0026rsquo;t quite appreciated how important it is\u0026hellip; a social media campaign, like any campaign of course, must have a definitive description of what you want those who agree with you, or who are persuaded to your point of view, to do.\nNot having a client in the traditional sense of the word, we thought we\u0026rsquo;d just kick up a stink and others would kick up too. But whilst this country did indeed get itself a hung parliament (one in which no party can proceed alone to form a government), none of us could actually vote for one. And there was never going to be a \u0026ldquo;Vote for Vince Cable\u0026rdquo; box on the election papers outside of his local constituency.\nWe had thought others could just do what we were doing, shout about why our man was by far the most suitable candidate for Chancellor of the Exchequer, but again, unless they could translate this into a call to action to their readers and followers, what exactly were they going to recommend?\nNow that we have got ourselves a hung parliament (which btw I consider to be a good thing for the country right now), we can ask people to shout again. And indeed, we have called today \u0026ldquo;Blog Vince Day\u0026rdquo;, but with negotiations going on behind closed doors between Conservatives and LibDems, and between Labour and LibDems, it\u0026rsquo;s unclear again what influence we can have on these discussions.\nIf you do agree with our campaign\u0026rsquo;s assertions however, do blog, comment and / or tweet about it, with the hashtags #invincecable and #ukelection. Now! Thanks!\nOur successes We\u0026rsquo;ve definitely succeeded in making our point to a wide range of social media participants. Saying that, I\u0026rsquo;m supposed to be an expert in social Web analytics, and campaign measurement \u0026amp; evaluation\u0026hellip;. And whilst the absence of a client was fantastic in giving us no constraints on what we could do, no client also means no budget and therefore no sophisticated attempt at measurement \u0026amp; evaluation :-(\n(And before you mention the free tools, you might be interested in my slidestack: Influence. The bullshit, best practice and promise .)\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a quick look at three of our highs:\nWe made Vince the Mayor of Number 11 Downing Street on FourSquare\u0026hellip; cheeky, easy, quick and effective\u0026hellip; well w.r.t. the FourSquare and Twitter community anyway Our Crowd Flutter had William Hill suspend bets and then shorten the odds on Vince becoming Chancellor. In fact, I believe the neologism \u0026ldquo;Crowd Flutter\u0026rdquo; was born of a member of our campaign team Our campaign and website were covered on BBC TV news\u0026hellip; it seems today that social media has to attract sufficient buzz to be covered by traditional media in order to take it to the next level of social media momentum\u0026hellip; and I wonder when that reliance will fade? Take Back Parliament The Take Back Parliament campaign has kicked off as the usual distortion of our electoral process has once again become a painful reminder of its inadequacies, or simply the butt of jokes.\nhttp://www.takebackparliament.com Interestingly, and in contrast to the InVinceCable campaign, Take Back Parliament benefits from it having emerged from a coalition of established bodies as listed at the bottom of their homepage. It has gone from nought to thirty five thousand supporters in three days\u0026hellip; several times larger than the InVinceCable community at a rough count.\nOne of their first calls-to-action was a demonstration in London, to which 100 supporters responded according to Twitter reports. My favourite Tweet referred to this being the first demonstration the reporter had witnessed where the placards portrayed pie charts!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve signed up. Being fascinated by the potential of social media, and interested in politics, this is by far the best way to learn what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nDemocracy Democracy defined as putting a cross in a box every four years isn\u0026rsquo;t quite fully democratic in my opinion, but then I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want a referenda based approach like Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s either.\nAs Sir Winston Churchill is quoted as saying: \u0026ldquo;It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.\u0026rdquo;\n:-)\nNOW DON\u0026rsquo;T FORGET\u0026hellip; IT\u0026rsquo;S \u0026ldquo;BLOG VINCE DAY\u0026rdquo;!\nMay the voice of the people be heard!!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/how-social-media-might-help-put-uk-politics-on-the-right-track/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eElection 2010 was supposed to be the UK\u0026rsquo;s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean same-interest groups aren\u0026rsquo;t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It\u0026rsquo;s just that the majority of the British public aren\u0026rsquo;t that engaged with social media just yet. And don\u0026rsquo;t start with that \u0026ldquo;but Obama did it in 2008\u0026rdquo; malarkey\u0026hellip; sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority \u0026ldquo;online\u0026rdquo; effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone\u0026rsquo;s definition of social media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How social media might help put UK politics on the right track"},{"content":"The BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, hosted the Mashup Event in London last night, an event focused on the Internet of Things. As chair I knew it was important to establish boundaries for the evening\u0026rsquo;s discussion, but the problem is\u0026hellip; there is simply no sector or discipline that is or will be left untouched by the Internet of Things.\nFortunately, I could lean on an expert panel to shoulder the burden of picking out the topics, although I was first to take a stab at defining the topic: a network of objects beyond the \u0026lsquo;usual\u0026rsquo; including:\nthe device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit) the electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution) non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture). David Orban opened the evening in ten minutes with a fast, furious, compelling and fascinating slide stack. He could have banged us over the head with ten minutes about WideTag , but preferred to situate his company\u0026rsquo;s endeavours in the bigger picture. Videos from tonight will go up on the Mashup Event website, but if you can\u0026rsquo;t wait, here\u0026rsquo;s a video of David in action at Momo Amsterdam a month ago.\nDavid Wood completed the scene setting (we like to open Mashup Event\u0026rsquo;s to the floor quickly). Having spent a decade with Psion and a decade with Symbian, David is well placed to discuss the factors that influence the success and failure of technology led innovations. His whistle stop tour of issues this evening covered technology, business model, ecosystem management, project development agility and design, and his recent blog post does more justice to his perspectives than I can do here.\nAs the conversation was opened up, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t too long before we hit disagreement. It seems panellist Phil Cole of Wireless Logic (the UK\u0026rsquo;s most successful independent M2M service provider) over-emphasised a vertically focused approach to the chagrin of Pachube \u0026rsquo;s Usman Haque who is more convinced of the horizontal opportunities. Fortunately, both Phil and Usman softened towards each other\u0026rsquo;s point of view, particularly as the remaining panellists, Everythng \u0026rsquo;s Niall Murphy and Arkessa \u0026rsquo;s Paul Green, mediated. Discussions of smart transport, healthcare and street lighting (that bored adolescent\u0026rsquo;s can turn on and off at will) helped ground the conversation before we took off again.\nHaving been closely involved with the evolution of the World Wide Web (and more specifically an Open Web , an openness we should never take for granted!), I wondered what the panellists thought about potential parallels between the evolution of the Internet and the evolution of the Internet of Things. In particular, does any idea of \u0026ldquo;optimal outcome\u0026rdquo; require the Internet of Things to have an equivalent body or initiative to the Internet Governance Forum ? And what is an \u0026ldquo;optimal outcome\u0026rdquo;?\nHaving directed the question to David Orban he was quick to point out that he had no patience in waiting thirty years this time, fair point, and it seemed that there was some concensus that a degree of intermediation would be required. It seems to me however that this should not be enforced too early, nor too late. Markets aren\u0026rsquo;t perfect, as recently demonstrated beyond argument, but then early intervention can kill the potential innovations born of a thriving and competitive marketplace. Mmmm. So we didn\u0026rsquo;t get to define what might be optimum; hey, we only had 90 minutes.\nI invited Telefonica O2 \u0026rsquo;s Mike Short to give us the telco\u0026rsquo;s take, and his response was straight forward: proprietary is the biggest barrier and regulators don\u0026rsquo;t yet understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on here; to which there were considerable nods of agreement around the room.\nResponding to a tweet in the #mashupevent tweetstream, the debate moved to points of privacy and the associated terms of service. Niall donned his entrepreneur\u0026rsquo;s hat and stated categorically that startup\u0026rsquo;s should steer clear of personalisation. It almost sounded like he was saying the associated regulatory regime means personal data should be considered toxic waste, a turn of phrase I recently heard a privacy counsel for one of the biggest search engines use. And happy to play contrarian again, Usman responded by saying that no-one should be afraid of personalisation, but rather simply allow users to do what they will and share what they want.\nI introduced my 7-position dial metaphor at this juncture. It goes like this. Just as the subtleties of asserting copyright have been articulated in a series of standard creative commons legal documents, one could envisage, say, seven standard legal documents describing an individual\u0026rsquo;s, or more probably a household\u0026rsquo;s, approach to their willingness to share their use data with the product or service supplier, or any third party come to that. Number 1 could be as \u0026ldquo;off grid\u0026rdquo; as you can be, perhaps excepting the needs of emergency services to triangulate your mobile phone\u0026rsquo;s position. Number 1 says \u0026ldquo;get out of my life\u0026rdquo;.\nNumber 7 could be just what the life streamer with a camcorder hanging off the side of his head would go for. They have no problem sharing everything. Or if the typical Western stereotype of the Chinese culture is correct, and my knowledge here is too flimsy to state one way or the other, Number 7 could be the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m Chinese and my dial doesn\u0026rsquo;t have options 1 to 6\u0026rdquo;.\nCultural extremes aside, the consumer / the citizen learns the privacy level they\u0026rsquo;re most comfortable with, accepting the trade-offs between additional services or warranties or other goodies in return for their data or otherwise, and can easily join their \u0026rsquo;things\u0026rsquo; to the Internet with confidence. David Wood also pointed out that my 7-position dial need not be physical, but represent the virtual interface to that \u0026rsquo;thing\u0026rsquo; when addressed from a \u0026rsquo;thing\u0026rsquo; with a screen.\nThree things stuck in my mind from the panellists\u0026rsquo; concluding statements. David Wood asserted with resolute confidence that healthcare is the first big opportunity for the Internet of Things. Niall believes that early applications will simply informationally augment the physical products already in our possession, and insisted we address the basics first; infrastructure and trust. And David Orban pointed out that the Internet of Things transforms all manufacturers into service providers\u0026hellip; a manufacturer of kettles today becomes a water boiling service provider tomorrow.\nAfter all that, it\u0026rsquo;s time for a cup of tea.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/05/chairing-the-internet-of-things-mashup/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, hosted the \u003ca href=\"http://www.mashupevent.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashup Event\u003c/a\u003e\n in London last night, an event focused on the Internet of Things. As chair I knew it was important to establish boundaries for the evening\u0026rsquo;s discussion, but the problem is\u0026hellip; there is simply no sector or discipline that is or will be left untouched by the Internet of Things.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFortunately, I could lean on an expert panel to shoulder the burden of picking out the topics, although I was first to take a stab at defining the topic: a network of objects beyond the \u0026lsquo;usual\u0026rsquo; including:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ethe device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ethe electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003enon-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eenvironmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.davidorban.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Orban\u003c/a\u003e\n opened the evening in ten minutes with a fast, furious, compelling and fascinating slide stack. He could have banged us over the head with ten minutes about \u003ca href=\"http://www.widetag.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWideTag\u003c/a\u003e\n, but preferred to situate his company\u0026rsquo;s endeavours in the bigger picture. Videos from tonight will go up on the Mashup Event website, but if you can\u0026rsquo;t wait, here\u0026rsquo;s a video of David in action at Momo Amsterdam a month ago.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Chairing the Internet of Things mashup"},{"content":"Last week\u0026rsquo;s Friday Roundup focused on the ramifications of the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, on the marketing and PR professions. So perhaps you\u0026rsquo;ll forgive me if I push my luck by talking tech two weeks running.\nThe Internet of Things changes many aspects of our lives, including the possibilities and practice of the influence professions; marketing and PR. What is it? Well, you can think of it as a network of objects beyond the usual computers and smartphones, for example:\nThe device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit) The electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution) Non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and Environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture). And just like the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things isn\u0026rsquo;t just some futurologist\u0026rsquo;s dreamscape. It is here, now.\nWalmart and Tesco adopted technology allowing them to track products (the non-electrical items in the bullet list above) as early as 2003. Fiat has enabled customers of some of their vehicles to upload data collected by their car and describing their driving style and history since 2008. Over a third of a million patients in the US have devices implanted that send information back to their healthcare specialist.\nIf you want to understand how your company should be approaching the Internet of Things from an influence perspective, there\u0026rsquo;s no better place to start than finding out more about the Internet of Things itself.\nSo if you\u0026rsquo;re in London Tuesday evening, come along to the Mashup Event . I\u0026rsquo;m in the chair and our panellists will be delighted to answer your questions.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nB2B Marketer Online Prospecting Preferences by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that business-to-business (B2B) sales cycles are longer than a year ago, but sales pipelines are growing, according to the results of a market study by OneSource.\nTraditional outbound prospecting still produces the most qualified leads for U.S. B2B sales representatives, but companies are relying more on their corporate Website to attract new customers. Social networking sites were rated toward the low end of the scale \u0026ndash; though they were as helpful in lead generation as direct mail. More\u0026hellip; The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 2 by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAs social media moves from the edge to the center of adoption and practice, the future of marketing hinges on the ability for brands to evolve from the broadcasting of one-to-many sales and marketing messages to an authentic media company that creates and publishes meaningful and timely content. In Part 1, we examined the idea that every company is a media company: EC=MC, the various forms of pervasive media in the social Web, the need for editorial calendars, and how through the creation and proliferation of social objects, businesses could earn awareness and presence. More\u0026hellip; CIPR’s social media panel sign of CIPR modernisation by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe first meeting of the CIPR’s social media panel took place last week. There’s an announcement about the panel, its make-up and its remit on the CIPR web site. I was pleased to accept an invitation to join the group. You can follow the work of the panel on Twitter via the hashtag #ciprsm – and @ciprsocialmediapanel is a Twitter account that is following the members of the panel and aggregating their Twitter feeds.\nI let my membership of the CIPR lapse five years ago after former director general Colin Farringdon dismissed the potential of blogs and social media. More\u0026hellip; The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 1 by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI recently called for businesses to broaden their perspective of Social Media from an experimental stage of acting and reacting, to one of learning and leading through intelligence, participation, and also publishing. Creating social profiles and broadcasting tweets and status updates is elementary, whereas creating a meaningful presence through the development and dissemination of remarkable content is judicious.\nWhat lies ahead is an inflection point in the maturation of social media, publishing, marketing and communications. More\u0026hellip; Smoking Skills Beatbox is a clever video to support an important cause by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI love this video.\nSmoking Skills is a hip and fresh approach to raise awareness for the dangers of smoking amongst urban teens.\nThe video is directed by Michael Krivicka from New York City and features legendary beatbox artist Kenny Muhammad.\nMichael sent me a link to this video ten minutes ago when it had just 13 views. As I blog it the video has 27 views. My guess is that it will have many many more views in the days and weeks to come. Great work Michael.\nDirect link to video. More\u0026hellip; Amazon poison pen reviews and why its no longer possible to remain anonymous online by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nProponents of social media have been quiet on the Orlando Figes case leaving mainstream media to pick up the story. The Times leader writer and columnist Oliver Kamm has penned an analysis for the story. The case of the Birkbeck College professor and celeb-historian that admitted posting anonymous and often hostile reviews on Amazon shows that it is increasingly impossible to be anonymous on the internet – even when you try as hard as Figes.\nHere’s why:\nSocial pressures – speculation and ego are a potent combination that tests the conscience of even the most devious anonymous commentator. More\u0026hellip; Are PR people the main readers of UK online IT news publications? Google thinks so. by Andrew Smith of escherman\nGoogle has just updated its Doubleclick Ad Planner tool with a useful new feature that shows a site’s top 10 audience interests, representing the aggregate interests of the site’s visitors. As Google says: “In these top 10 lists, each interest is assigned an affinity score, such as 3.9x, which means visitors to the site are that many more times likely to be interested in the topic than the average Internet population.\u0026quot;\nI tried it out on a couple of UK online IT news sites – More\u0026hellip; Big Ideas use lower budgets! by Sofia Bento of Blogal strategies of brands\nWhat can you do if you\u0026rsquo;re low on your publicity budget, but still want to access as many people as you can with your message?\nHarley Davidson made it quite simple:\nChatRoulette consists of randomly connecting you and someone somewhere in the world using a connected webcam and allowing you to talk to a stranger. You never know who you are going to be talking to. Some 500,000 people connect daily to ChatRoulette, so it\u0026rsquo;s quite popular.\nWe don\u0026rsquo;t need to have money to make big campaigns. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/friday-roundup-the-internet-of-thing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/all.aboard.web.3.0\"\u003eLast week\u0026rsquo;s Friday Roundup\u003c/a\u003e\n focused on the ramifications of the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, on the marketing and PR professions. So perhaps you\u0026rsquo;ll forgive me if I push my luck by talking tech two weeks running.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Internet of Things changes many aspects of our lives, including the possibilities and practice of the influence professions; marketing and PR. What is it? Well, you can think of it as a network of objects beyond the usual computers and smartphones, for example:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNon-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eEnvironmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd just like the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things isn\u0026rsquo;t just some futurologist\u0026rsquo;s dreamscape. It is here, now.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the Internet of Things"},{"content":"Do you recall the pre-Web days of PR and marketing? The time before The Cluetrain Manifesto signalled that everything had changed and that the social media train was about to leave the station whether you were on it or not.\nIf stretching out that train doesn\u0026rsquo;t stretch the metaphor too much, you could say that a very long train left the station from 1999 to 2009 with people jumping on board as and when they and/or their organisation felt ready. But undoubtedly, those who \u0026ldquo;got it\u0026rdquo; earlier than later have been best positioned to reap the benefits for their organisation and for their personal career.\nWell, marketing and PR is about to change. Again. It\u0026rsquo;s 2010.\nIf Web 2.0 could be summed up as content and community, then Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of that content and community. Web 3.0 is more accurately known as the Semantic Web, and as the name implies it gives us the opportunity to have software applications connect the dots and spot patterns and coalesce information and reach conclusions on our behalf.\nAs all the marketing and PR disciplines and specialisms converge, to create a role I like to refer to as the Influence Professional, with the corresponding leadership position of Chief Influence Officer, one characteristic that will set these professionals apart from what will then have become the \u0026ldquo;old-school\u0026rdquo; will be their ability to understand the complexity of influence and the adaptations required to prosper in a world with a meaningful Web.\nAnd this transition to Web 3.0 is happening. Now.\nI had the pleasure to present this future for our industry to a roomful of PR professionals, academics and analytics specialists this week, and our host, Speed Communication\u0026rsquo;s Stephen Waddington, has posted about the evening here . He has sourced a splendid video of Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, explaining the Semantic Web during a TED Talk, and he has also included my slidestack. I\u0026rsquo;m equally delighted that the slidestack shot straight to the slideshare.net homepage.\nSo, if the bouquet of high voltage electricity surging through the train engine evokes sweet memories for you (and I\u0026rsquo;m really not a train spotter, honestly), then you are more than welcome to join our open collaborative group. Details in the slidestack.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSell the Light, Not the Lightbulb by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI spent an absorbing hour this week with an international corporate communications guy from the US.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s always good to chat to someone who sits at the cutting edge of the profession and is in a position of seeing PR from different angles given their work takes them across territorial borders on a regular basis.\nSomething the PR guy said really resonated:\n\u0026ldquo;Sell the light, not the lightbulb.\u0026rdquo;\nWow! Love it! (I\u0026rsquo;m quite partial to the odd good analogy).\nIt certainly relates More\u0026hellip; The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part One by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe State and Future of Twitter was revealed to the world at the Chirp Conference. Developers, futurists, reporters, investors, stakeholders, and businesses convened at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, making the journey from all over the world to witness history in the making.\nMy experience at Chirp was in a word, profound. I sit here, right here, right now, attempting to distill all that I heard and learned and its true effect on the general public. The volume of ideas and insight is implausible to capture, analyze, and share in one post. More\u0026hellip; Big boxes of social media by Steve Sponder of Five by Five\nAfter watching the Web 2.0 hyper-juggernaut scream into town a few years back it has been interesting to see it delivering big boxes of social media filled with shiny new tactics including a bunch of social networks, a corporate blog, a few micro-blogging platforms, a suite of widgets and a packet of chicklets.\nIt’s unfortunate that there was no mention of which department to deliver it to and no instructions on how to use the tactics. As a result the box was mistakenly handed to the marketing department. More\u0026hellip; What engagement time tells you about the value or otherwise of online press coverage by Andrew Smith of escherman\nConsider the following: An average person can read around 200 words per minute on screen. The average UK Guardian website reader spends around 7 mins and 30 seconds per visit (according to Google) The Guardian has monthly page views of around 88 million in the UK and around 21 million unique visitors per month (according to Google) Based on the above, the average visitor will spend around 450/4.2 = 107 seconds per page. In other words, the average reader will read up to 350 words before moving on to another page or off the site completely. More\u0026hellip; Business Credibility Is Different From Social Trust \u0026amp; Friendship by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nIn my last post, I pointed out how professional networks online are not based on friendship and trust, but rather on the sharing of deep knowledge between participants, whether individuals or institutions. Respect and influence are good words to use to describe the outcomes of sharing knowledge within a professional social network. So is credibility.\nDavid Meerman Scott recently discussed this idea in rich detail during an interview he gave about his book: \u0026ldquo;The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; More\u0026hellip; Microsoft tops social media savvy companies - survey by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nI was surprised to see that a new survey has found that employees at Microsoft Corp are the most social media-savvy in the world. The NetProspex Social Index was determined after an analysis of more than 100,000 business executives from the Fortune 1000 companies in the first quarter of 2010.\nApple ranked 10th, while eBay, Amazon, Disney and Google rounded out the top 5. Some surprises? - Raytheon #8 ahead of Best Buy #9, EMC #16 ahead of Cisco #20, and Coca Cola #50.\nI was surprised because Microsoft, from an outsider\u0026rsquo;s industry perspective, has shown itself to be increasingly unable to adopt, adapt and make business and cultural changes necessary to maintain it\u0026rsquo;s competitive position. More\u0026hellip; The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part Two by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe influence and promise of Twitter is only now starting to materialize. Everything that occurred prior to Chirp has lead us to this moment and as such, is almost worthy of categorization as BC (Before Chirp). Everything that happens now, is almost symbolic of a new movement (AC, After Chirp) and as such, it essentially starts a new chapter in the evolution of Twitter.\nTo truly capture the State and Future of Twitter and all that was revealed during its first official conference, requires additional time and space. More\u0026hellip; Guest Post: How CRM Integrates Into Business Development Processes by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nAdeline Grosrenaud is a London blogger with a blog dedicated to CRM. It may seem an out of date concept now that the social web is going mainstream, but I asked her to write about how CRM and biz dev processes can be mutually supportive. She has a helpful check list of metrics that would be worth checking for your organisation. Here’s what she has to say\u0026hellip;\nWhile the term CRM is often just used to refer to CRM software, true customer relationship management is much more than that. A business ought to have a well thought out and written customer relationship management strategy and plan which has involved thorough research if they want to succeed in their given industry. More\u0026hellip; Facebook found a way to Kill Google by Andrew Swenson of wordpost\nimage by jaycameron\nOkay, so maybe Facebook won’t kill Google, but I’m predicting they will supplant them as the largest and most ubiquitous web app. In case you’ve been sleeping, yesterday at the f8 developer conference, Facebook announced Open Graph, a new killer app.\nWhat’s changed\nIf you aren’t up to speed, here are the three most important updates (and you can read the rest on Mashable):\nWith the new “Facebook for Web Sites” social plugins (the like button is featured at the top of this post), you don’t need to log in to a web page to engage with its content. More\u0026hellip; The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThe Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession\u0026hellip; all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.\nBut is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.\nGot your attention?!\nPR and Web 3.0View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.\nThanks to the following for their time and attention last night: More\u0026hellip; Reputation Online article on Nielsen’s report on social advertising within Facebook by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online about Nielsen’s report published at ad:tech this week on the effectiveness of social advertising versus PR within Facebook. The report says that earned media, the goal of any PR campaign, is a highly effective way for a brand to generate awareness in a social network such as Facebook – but cannot be guaranteed. Meanwhile, social ads (a form of network endorsement on ads) drive engagement and reach similar to traditional paid-for campaigns. More\u0026hellip; The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part Three by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn Part Two of The State and Future of Twitter, we reviewed Promoted Tweets and the new advertising platform and metric system that will test and hopefully strengthen the “interest graph” that connects individuals around relevant subject matter and eventually the ads that they might find relevant. In Part Three, we are going to review the news and ideas that erupted during the Chirp conference as well as the new features that position Twitter as “consumption media” and how it will earn new users and simultaneously increase the activity and contributions of everyone. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/friday-roundup-all-aboard-web/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eDo you recall the pre-Web days of PR and marketing? The time before \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cluetrain_Manifesto\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Cluetrain Manifesto\u003c/a\u003e\n signalled that everything had changed and that the social media train was about to leave the station whether you were on it or not.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf stretching out that train doesn\u0026rsquo;t stretch the metaphor too much, you could say that a very long train left the station from 1999 to 2009 with people jumping on board as and when they and/or their organisation felt ready. But undoubtedly, those who \u0026ldquo;got it\u0026rdquo; earlier than later have been best positioned to reap the benefits for their organisation and for their personal career.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell, marketing and PR is about to change. Again. It\u0026rsquo;s 2010.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf Web 2.0 could be summed up as content and community, then Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of that content and community. Web 3.0 is more accurately known as the Semantic Web, and as the name implies it gives us the opportunity to have software applications connect the dots and spot patterns and coalesce information and reach conclusions on our behalf.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - all aboard Web 3.0"},{"content":"The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession\u0026hellip; all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.\nBut is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.\nGot your attention?!\nView more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\nThanks to the following for their time and attention last night:\nStephen Waddington @wadds Rob Brown @robbrown Robin Grainger @mistergrainger Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce David Dewilde @dewilded Richard Bagnall @richardbagnall Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce David Phillips @DavidGHPhillips Giles Palmer @joodoo9 Chris Lee @cmrlee Brad Little @bradleyjlittle Ben Schneider @SchneiderBen Ged Carroll @r_c ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/the-most-exciting-development-in-pr-since-the-cluetrain/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession\u0026hellip; all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain"},{"content":"The CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I\u0026rsquo;ve appended here for your convenience. I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting.\nOne of the first things I\u0026rsquo;m going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0.\n(More info here in a previous post .)\nStephen Waddington has invited us to hold the meeting at Speed \u0026rsquo;s office in Leicester Square, so if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the Semantic Web and find yourself in central London 6.30pm this coming Wednesday, do get in touch !\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in following the tweets of this group, I\u0026rsquo;ve created a Twitter list here .\n___________\nCIPR launches social media panel The CIPR has gathered together some of the UK’s foremost social media thinkers and contributors to provide input into the Institute’s policy guidance, education and training. Led by CIPR board member Rob Brown, the panel will look at issues such as online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement.\nCIPR President Jay O’Connor said: “A core theme in our three-year strategic plan is social media and the impact on the public relations profession. Rob joined the CIPR board to lead our efforts in this area, feeding into our policy, research and training. As part of this, Rob has set up the Social Media Panel - a group of some of the UK\u0026rsquo;s foremost social media contributors, who will debate and input, ensuring our guidance reflects the very best thinking and practice.\n“Things are moving quickly. Reaching out to practitioners who can offer their insight so that we can guide our members and the profession appropriately is key.”\nThe panel is a diverse group comprising some of the best thinkers and practitioners, including:\nDaljit Bhurji ACIPR – Managing Director, Diffusion (@Daljit_Bhurji ) Mark Borkowski - Managing Director, Borkowski (@MarkBorkowski ) Rob Brown FCIPR – Managing Director, Staniforth (@robbrown ) Stuart Bruce MCIPR – Managing Director, Wolfstar (@stuartbruce ) Dominic Burch - Head of Corporate Communications, ASDA (@dom_asdaPR ) Simon Collister - Head of Non-Profit and Public Sector, We Are Social (@simoncollister ) Gemma Griffiths – Client Director, Racepoint (@GemGriff ) Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future (@katyhowell ) Marshall Manson - Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman (@marshallmanson) Beccy McMichael – Head of Corporate \u0026amp; Technology, Ruder Finn (@bmcmichael ) Danny Rogers – Editor, PR Week (@dannyrogers2001 ) Julio Romo MCIPR – PR and Communications Consultant, twofourseven (@twofourseven ) Philip Sheldrake – Partner, Influence Crowd LLP (@sheldrake ) Stephen Waddington MCIPR – Managing Director, Speed Communications (@wadds ) Robin Wilson – Director Digital PR \u0026amp; Social Media, McCann Erickson (@robin1966 ) ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/cipr-social-media-group-and-the-semantic-web/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I\u0026rsquo;ve appended here for your convenience. I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the first things I\u0026rsquo;m going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"CIPR social media group and the Semantic Web"},{"content":"In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the \u0026ldquo;Awesome Analytics Advantage\u0026rdquo;, making those organisations achieving this advantage \u0026ldquo;Triple A\u0026rdquo;!\nFundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases\u0026hellip;.\nretail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!\nWell, I\u0026rsquo;ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine , during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma ). My conclusion\u0026hellip;\nSAS has leapfrogged to the front of the Triple A pack. Now I should caveat this conclusion with the simple fact that I have yet to get my mits on the service, but given SAS\u0026rsquo; heritage products and services and the brief demonstration during the webcast of their SMA\u0026rsquo;s integration with Web analytics, it looks to me like the social Web analytics field changed today.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;s not all good news (but then you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t expect a new entrant to achieve nirvana at their first attempt). We learn for instance that \u0026ldquo;Reuters Business\u0026rdquo; has influence of 122,530. Yes indeed. Not 122,000 mind, or 123,000, but 122,530. But 122,530 what??\nIs it guilty of my definition of \u0026ldquo;what influence is not\u0026rdquo; in my presentation? Specifically slides 3 and 4, the latter reading\u0026hellip;\nInfluence is not some quantity invented by a PR firm, analytics provider, or measurement and evaluation company that rolls up a number of indices and measures into some relatively arbitrary compound formula that makes any appreciation of the underlying approach, variables and mathematics completely opaque to the end-user thereby radically attenuating any little use it may have been but in such a way that it can be branded nicely and sold as “unique”.\nBut there was some talk of clients being able to customise the \u0026ldquo;influence score\u0026rdquo; to their needs, so whilst I still believe in influence-centric PR campaigns over influencer-centric approaches, I won\u0026rsquo;t pigeonhole SAS alongside the culprits identifed in my presentation just yet.\nAnd lastly, for those semantic and pedantic amongst you (long may we thrive), here\u0026rsquo;s why I continue to refer to social Web analytics rather than simply social media analytics .\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with my presentation. I\u0026rsquo;m delighted it became SlideShare\u0026rsquo;s most tweeted document and most discussed on Facebook for the couple of days after it went up\u0026hellip;\nView more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/your-awesome-analytics-advantage-starts-today/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the \u0026ldquo;Awesome Analytics Advantage\u0026rdquo;, making those organisations achieving this advantage \u0026ldquo;Triple A\u0026rdquo;!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases\u0026hellip;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eretail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"SAS%20logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/SAS_TPTK_logo.gif\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell, I\u0026rsquo;ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, \u003ca href=\"http://kdpaine.blogs.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKatie Delahaye Paine\u003c/a\u003e\n, during which SAS presented \u003ca href=\"http://www.sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/social-media-analytics/index.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etheir new social media analytics service\u003c/a\u003e\n and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag \u003ca href=\"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sassma\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e#sassma\u003c/a\u003e\n). My conclusion\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Your \u0026quot;Awesome Analytics Advantage\u0026quot; starts today"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s just coming up to ten years since I participated in the first UK workshop on this new thing called blogging. During the ensuing decade I have formed a number of social media tenets that have so far stood the tests of time.\nOne of these is simply that social networks work best when they span the on- and off-line worlds; when face-to-face leads to \u0026rsquo;linking-in\u0026rsquo;, and when \u0026lsquo;friending\u0026rsquo; leads to meet and greet.\nOf course, another tenet was that at some juncture we\u0026rsquo;d stop differentiating between on- and off-line in the same way we don\u0026rsquo;t feel the need to qualify whether a conversation was held in person or over the phone, but what\u0026rsquo;s a contradiction between friends?\nAnd the combination of on- and off- has worked in my favour recently. I had the benefit of a highly receptive audience at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 who went on to view and tweet and my presentation about influence on slideshare.net, which then helped catapult it to slideshare\u0026rsquo;s homepage as their most discussed document of the day.\nSo how can you start making the combination of on- and off- work to your advantage?\nLots of great posts for you this week. Enjoy!\nPhilip and the MarCom Professional team.\nWhy the iPad won\u0026rsquo;t save Publishers (and what to do about it) by Andrew Swenson of wordpost\nPhoto Credit: Renato Mitra\nWith print sales falling faster than tween girls are falling for Justin Bieber, book publishers are getting a bit panicky. In not so modest desperation, they’re looking for a savior… Enter the iPad.\nAdvertisers are lining up for periodicals, and according to the Wall Street Journal, breaking out their checkbooks for iPad deals. This has caused some minor elation, even among more traditional book distributors.\nThis, I think, is foolish.\nFact: the iPad won’t save publishers\nThis is a given. More\u0026hellip; Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nHere is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.\nIt 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!\nUPDATE 2nd April 2010: I\u0026rsquo;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. More\u0026hellip; Many marketing and communications professors are criminals by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOne student literally cried on my shoulder. Sobs and snot. (Really). I had never met her before. She came up to me after a speaking gig to tell me her story.\nAnother student asked: \u0026ldquo;Why do my professors not know about social media?\u0026rdquo;\nAnother emailed: \u0026ldquo;Two years going through an MBA program and Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were never mentioned!\u0026rdquo;\nAnother: \u0026ldquo;Did I waste my money on a 1950s education here?\u0026rdquo;\nAnother: \u0026ldquo;Only one professor in 4 years understands today’s world.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Social Networks are Touchpoints for Customer Acquisition and Retention by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTouchpoints serve as the point of contact between a buyer and a seller. As the race to socialize commerce escalates, these touchpoints represent the nodes that define the human network, connecting people across the social Web and uniting them around common interests, themes, and movements.\nWhile the technology to connect buyers and sellers on the social Web is universal, the architecture for true engagement is antiquated. Customers are flocking to the social web to not only connect with friends, family, and peers, but also the brands that attract their attention. More\u0026hellip; E-mail Marketing is Making Social Connections by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that in 2009 e-mail marketers started to get social, but 2010 will be the year social media makes e-mail marketing more powerful. Social media is a complement to e-mail marketing, because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects.\n\u0026ldquo;Even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail,\u0026rdquo; said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst. \u0026ldquo;The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; E-Reader Buyer Attitudes and Usage Behaviors by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nThe media publishing industry needs an upside trend. Perhaps this is it. comScore released the results of a survey of 2,176 Internet users regarding their awareness, attitudes and opinions of the Apple iPad and other e-readers or tablet devices.\nResults were analyzed across age and gender profiles, as well as the iOwners (a comScore term) consumer segment \u0026ndash; defined as those owning either an iPhone or iPod Touch.\nConsumers were asked several questions regarding their awareness of various e-readers and tablet devices and their past purchase behavior or intent to purchase these devices. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Metrics by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nJim Sterne has written an outstanding book called Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which releases this week. This is the third book in my New Rules of Social Media book series (following Inbound Marketing and Get Seen).\nReaders of my blog and those who have seen my talks will know that I am very critical of the old \u0026ldquo;ROI\u0026rdquo; version of measuring marketing. You can hear my Epic ROI Rant where I go off on the topic for a few minutes (resisting the dropping of F-bombs the entire time). More\u0026hellip; Book review: Antony Mayfield\u0026rsquo;s Me and My Web Shadow by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nProponents of social media in the UK and US will almost certainly have come across Antony Mayfield’s work. He’s a senior vice president at iCrossing, a digital marketing firm, that works with brands including Coca-Cola, Toyota and Channel 4.\nWe’ve only ever met once very briefly but Mayfield feels like an old friend. I read his blog and follow his tweets. Therein lies one of the benefits of maintaining a strong web shadow.\nManaging your own web shadow is important says Mayfield as our lives increasingly move online. More\u0026hellip; iPad is a great business for Apple, but it won\u0026rsquo;t save print by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe iPad could prove to be a smart way for Apple to grab part of the publishing market as a content aggregator. But it won’t save print media by providing a new audience as Apple fanatics are predicting. In fact it could hasten its decline.\nAt best it’s another chapter in the unfolding story of the fragmentation of media. Publishers must make their content available on yet another platform and be prepared for Apple to act as gatekeeper.\nIf the iPad is successful the only winner will be Apple. More\u0026hellip; Enterprise Social Strategy Begins With Discovery by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nStarting a strategic social media plan can be overwhelming to a mid-to-large company. There are a few big questions that often cause organizational paralysis\u0026hellip;the most daunting of which is \u0026ldquo;where do we begin?\u0026rdquo; followed by \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s happening that we don\u0026rsquo;t know about?\u0026rdquo; But knowledge is a catalyst to action. And, as with the formation of most effective business strategies, you need to understand it in order to set a course of change.\nSo in order to begin to formulate a social media strategy within enterprise, the first place to start is to conduct a discovery audit: More\u0026hellip; Broadcast 2.0 v. Open Market by Andrew Swenson of wordpost\nBeyond all of the iPad hype, beyond the lovers and the haters and the blenders, there’s a really serious question lurking, and Doc Searls nailed it in his brain dump response: Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody?\nOn closed systems\nSearls, Cory Doctorow, Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Alex Payne (cf. this post also), Tim Bray, and Peter Kirn, take the side of the open marketplace. More\u0026hellip; A Prediction: Twitter to Predict the Future by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTrending topics reveal much more than the objects that captivate the hearts, minds, and keyboards of Twitter users around the world. Twitter’s trends is a cultural mirror that reflects the state of attention and intention. And as such, Tweets then offer an MRI that visualizes the minds of consumers and more importantly, serve as a crystal ball that reveals the future of products and services before and soon after they’re released.\nFor the most part, however, the vast amount of precious insight is widely untapped. More\u0026hellip; Mike Litman’s blog as model for the future of a media by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nIf you want a glimpse at what a media outlet might look like in the future take a look at how Dare’s Mike Litman has developed his blog. Using a similar model to Newser he’s curating content from around the social, marketing and PR web and presenting it in a highly visual format. And it’s working – he’s currently broken into the top 150 in the AdAge ranking of marketing blogs.\nIn Mike’s own words:\n“Traffic in raw terms dipped a little in the first month since I changed things around a bit but its normalising again (up 90% in the past month). More\u0026hellip; Durrant\u0026rsquo;s Jeremy Thompson on the Gorkana deal by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nDurrants has acquired Gorkana less than five-months after its acquisition of Metrica.\nDurrants is a business that under the leadership of managing director Jeremy Thompson has set its sights firmly on modernising the workflow of PR agencies and in-house teams. I caught up with Thompson this morning to ask him about the deal.\nThe Daily Telegraph is reporting that the deal is worth £20m. How did you arrive at a valuation and what’s the structure of the deal?\nWe are not sure where The Telegraph got its numbers from but we are not disclosing the consideration. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/04/friday-roundup-social-in-real-life-and-online/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s just coming up to ten years since I participated in the first UK workshop on this new thing called blogging. During the ensuing decade I have formed a number of social media tenets that have so far stood the tests of time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of these is simply that social networks work best when they span the on- and off-line worlds; when face-to-face leads to \u0026rsquo;linking-in\u0026rsquo;, and when \u0026lsquo;friending\u0026rsquo; leads to meet and greet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf course, another tenet was that at some juncture we\u0026rsquo;d stop differentiating between on- and off-line in the same way we don\u0026rsquo;t feel the need to qualify whether a conversation was held in person or over the phone, but what\u0026rsquo;s a contradiction between friends?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the combination of on- and off- has worked in my favour recently. I had the benefit of a highly receptive audience at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 who went on to view and tweet and my \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/influence-the-bullshit-best-practice-and-promise\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentation\u003c/a\u003e\n about influence on slideshare.net, which then helped catapult it to slideshare\u0026rsquo;s homepage as their most discussed document of the day.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo how can you start making the combination of on- and off- work to your advantage?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLots of great posts for you this week. Enjoy!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - social \u0026#039;in real life\u0026#039; and online"},{"content":"Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp .\nIt 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!\nUPDATE 2nd April 2010: I\u0026rsquo;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?\nView more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .\nJasonfas : \u0026ldquo;There are 6 levels of interaction when considering influence\u0026rdquo; @sheldrake . Consumer to consumer and consumer to supplier are vital. Nice ppt\n1 minute ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet simonmc : Interesting @sheldrake using NPS as good methodology (contra influence) when academic support for it is patchy #msmbc10 6 minutes ago from txt · Reply · View Tweet Jasonfas : Very interesting interactive presentation on \u0026ldquo;Influence\u0026rdquo; by @Sheldrake . I wish we had some1 from Klout here to offer a retort #msmbc10 10 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet marc_bone : Excellent talk by @sheldrake at #msmbc10 challenging Influencer-measurements w/ common sense\n16 minutes ago from Echofon · Reply · View Tweet peehsb : great interactive lively approach @sheldrake , felt good to be a part of it! Txs #msmbc10 17 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet chat_lotte : RT @farhan : @sheldrake are your influencer slides available online? #msmbc10 18 minutes ago from HootSuite · Reply · View Tweet chat_lotte : RT @treypennington : The New CIO? \u0026ldquo;Chief Influence Officer\u0026rdquo; via @sheldrake #msmbc10 20 minutes ago from HootSuite · Reply · View Tweet chat_lotte : RT @farhan : @sheldrake really changed up the format at #msmbc10 definitely an inspiring thinker worth following :)\n21 minutes ago from HootSuite · Reply · View Tweet richardbagnall : Interesting looking at the faces of some of the automated platform vendors as @sheldrake destroyed influence scores! #msmbc10 30 minutes ago from TweetGrid · Reply · View Tweet juanortiz : hey @sheldrake thanks for the chance of participating on the influence presentation! :) let me know when you need a panelist again #msmbc10 31 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet farhan : @sheldrake are you going to stick around for a bit?\n32 minutes ago from dabr · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation dj_justjay : RT @treypennington : \u0026ldquo;Not measuring for measurement\u0026rsquo;s sake…but to better achieve something else\u0026rdquo; @sheldrake #msmbc10 34 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet farhan : @sheldrake really changed up the format at #msmbc10 definitely an inspiring thinker worth following :)\n34 minutes ago from dabr · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation MiChmski : Great presentation @Sheldrake 35 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet domsh : @sheldrake says influence isn\u0026rsquo;t something the marketing team \u0026ldquo;does\u0026rdquo;. Everyone must contribute. #msmbc10 (via @DaveRReed )\n35 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet iSOFT_Shaun : RT @adycoles : RT @crossy : @sheldrake has influenced us, was he the only presenter so far to truly do so? #msmbc10 \u0026lt;== Certianly more than the others\n41 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet adycoles : RT @crossy : @sheldrake has influenced us, was he the only presenter so far to truly do so? #msmbc10 \u0026lt;== Certianly more than the others\n43 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet domsh : Interesting preso about \u0026lsquo;influence\u0026rsquo; by @sheldrake at #msmbc10 43 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet mikeander : Great Social Media friendly workshop from @sheldrake - giving the audience a voice! #msmbc10 44 minutes ago from UberTwitter · Reply · View Tweet MiChmski : @Sheldrake : \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t underestimate people\u0026rdquo; #msmbc10 True story\n44 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation Banyong : RT @pornprom : RT @treypennington : The New CIO? \u0026ldquo;Chief Influence Officer\u0026rdquo; via @sheldrake #msmbc10 #ittwt about 1 hour ago from im+ · Reply · View Tweet crossy : @sheldrake has influenced us, was he the only presenter so far to truly do so? #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from UberTwitter · Reply · View Tweet pornprom : RT @treypennington : The New CIO? \u0026ldquo;Chief Influence Officer\u0026rdquo; via @sheldrake #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from Echofon · Reply · View Tweet AdParker : RT @richardbagnall : @sheldrake marketing as we know it is over.Here come \u0026lsquo;chief influence officers\u0026rsquo; working across all disciplines #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet Tracey_at_CIPR : @jayoconnor @sheldrake Yes, he has! Bootcamp has been very valuable so far, Andrea and I will report back on it.\nabout 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation adycoles : RT @iSOFT_Shaun : methinks Mr @sheldrake would make a good TV quiz host! #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from web · Reply · View Tweet richardbagnall : @sheldrake suggests that marketing as we know it is over. Here come \u0026lsquo;chief influence officers\u0026rsquo; working across all disciplines #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from TweetGrid · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation treypennington : The New CIO? \u0026ldquo;Chief Influence Officer\u0026rdquo; via @sheldrake #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet treypennington : \u0026ldquo;Not measuring for measurement\u0026rsquo;s sake…but to better achieve something else\u0026rdquo; @sheldrake #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet farhan : @sheldrake are your influencer slides available online? #msmbc10 about 1 hour ago from dabr · Reply · View Tweet · Show Conversation ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/03/influence-the-bullshit-best-practice-and-promise/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHere is the presentation I just delivered to \u003ca href=\"http://www.monitoring-bootcamp.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMonitoring Social Media Bootcamp\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt 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!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUPDATE 2nd April 2010: I\u0026rsquo;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?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentations\u003c/a\u003e\n from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePhilip Sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise"},{"content":"What\u0026rsquo;s influence? How is it achieved? Who\u0026rsquo;s got it?\nRegular readers of my posts will know that I have a penchant for labelling all the combined disciplines of marketing and PR as simply \u0026ldquo;Influence\u0026rdquo;. (Hey, the word even appears in the name of my consultancy.) And the combination or convergence of these skills under one unifying term helps erode the noun orientation of our profession and assists in constructing a verb oriented approach. What are we really trying to do?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been pulling my thoughts together for a presentation about influence for this coming week\u0026rsquo;s Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London (about half a dozen tickets remaining I believe), and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting my presentation to my blog on the day. But perhaps I can leave you with something to think about until then, particularly as I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that this will spark violent disagreement all the better for getting the matter resolved as soon as possible.\nHere it is. Influence scoring services like Klout and Social Mention are utterly useless. At best such services are harmless fun, and at worst they are a costly and wasteful distraction from doing the right thing the right way for yourselves or your client.\nUntil Wednesday ;-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nIs your Twitter Home Page your biggest SEO asset? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nDo you know the Page Rank of your Twitter Home Page? You may be surprised to find it is a lot higher than you think it is – and you probably achieved it without even thinking about it. For example, the Page Rank for my blog home page is 5 – and that’s taken a little while to get to, not withstanding the blood, sweat and tears of creating and maintaining content. In the course of some client work recently, I happened to plug in some Twitter Home Pages to check Page Rank – given they were created relatively recently, I was surprised by how high the Page Rank values were. More\u0026hellip; Why are we so quick to criticise? (Nestle Facebook page may be fake) by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe Twitter mob jumped on Nestle yesterday after it was allegedly heavy handed in a comment stream on a Facebook fan page. Week in week out the social media mob passes judgement on brands that cock-up online. The speaker circuit is littered with case studies of #failed companies such as Eurostar, Paperchase, Habitat and Vodafone.\nHere’s the issue: the instantaneous nature of communication in a network means that we no longer stop and think and everyone has an audience. Speculation is shared and the mob quickly turns it into fact. More\u0026hellip; Twitter Turns Four - How\u0026rsquo;s It Been For You? by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nOn the eve of Twitter\u0026rsquo;s fourth birthday, I thought it apt to reflect a little on the micro-blogging platform and how it\u0026rsquo;s affected me personally, the PR/media/marketing industry specifically, as well as broader populace generally.\nIn true Twitter form, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept my snippets to 140 characters. A hard call, I know, but my sweat is your gain! (Inspired by @AdamVincenzini)\nBut firstly, how\u0026rsquo;s Twitter been for you?\nI would love to hear from you - in 140 character bursts if possible More\u0026hellip; Behaviorgraphics Humanize the Social Web by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn 2007 Charlene Li, then at Forrester Research, now running the Altimeter Group, along with Forrester ’s Josh Bernoff, Remy Fiorentino, and Sarah Glass released a report that introduced us to Social Technographics. Forrester’s research segmented participation behavior on the social web into six categories, visualized through a ladder metaphor with the rungs at the high end of the ladder indicating a greater level of participation.\nSocial Technographics were designed to help businesses engage in social media with a more human approach, catering to individuals where, when, and how they are participating and contributing to the social Web. More\u0026hellip; Learn SEO with this Crash Course by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nTitle tags, canonicalization, ALT text, long-tail keywords. Search engine optimization may seem confusing and overly technical for the average marketer. The fact is, it can be quite technical, requiring specific knowledge and training. However, there are also many aspects to SEO that are not difficult to understand, nor difficult to do.\nThere are numerous resources available to learn SEO techniques. One of the best ones I’ve seen is this video presentation by Lee Odden with Top Rank Online Marketing. More\u0026hellip; A case for rethinking product and brand by Andrew Swenson of wordpost\nimage credit: jhritz\nRethinking Product and Brand\nProduct has historically been branded as a combination of physical properties, supporting service, and symbolic value: the Lexus has leather seats, is covered by a substantial warranty, and perhaps above all else, is a symbol of status.\nThe commerce that’s followed has been built on quid pro quo transaction—a product made up of attributes, service, and symbol in exchange for capital. But in social business structures, it’s my prediction that this type of mechanistic exchange will no longer be the primary goal of business operation, but instead one intersection of shared time and meaning. More\u0026hellip; The Role Of Social Engineering In Social Media by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks\nWhat does Disney World and social media have in common? The answer to the question is social engineering. I recently gave a talk at LexisNexis about this topic and it was initially met with resistance\u0026hellip; community and social media is all about collaboration and sharing, right? Right. But there are methods to achieving, designing, the experience for users to get what they need out of the engagement. Social engineering, though it sounds evil, can really serve your members well by providing them with the assistance to make the most out of their experience on your site. More\u0026hellip; Calvin Klein Runs First Augmented Reality Underwear Campaign In GQ Magazine by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nvia seda.posterous.com The print ads will run in the May issue in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, and in the April issue of the Condé Nast men’s title in the US, China, Korea, Australia, Mexico, Taiwan and India. Consumers with webcams can view the campaign on the brand’s dedicated microsite at xmarkyourspot.com, by holding up either the ad from the magazine, or a print-out of the AR code in front of their webcam. A 3D box then appears that allows visitors to select from four short films created for the augmented reality initiative. More\u0026hellip; Football mobile marketing comes of age by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage by coda via Flickr The Football World Cup will be the first big test of mass mobile marketing for brands. Going mobile is a hot topic of conversation within marketing circles. But it takes a big event for a lot of large brands to start using the medium and to inspire others to jump in and try it out.\nLast month, a conference about mobile marketing for Football – including the World Cup – was hosted by Camerjam.\nThey have kindly published the keynote speaker, Tomi Ahonen’s speech and slide deck online as well as several other presentations. More\u0026hellip; Q\u0026amp;A: Culture Shock, How Social Media is Changing the Culture of Business by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nGood friend JD Lasica asked me to share answers to some fantastic questions for a blog post he published in celebration of the new book, Engage. I poured so much of myself into the responses, that I felt it was worth sharing here with you as well.\n#Engage\nYour new book Engage may turn out to be the definitive work on how social media is transforming business. Looking at the big picture, how is it changing the balance of power between customers and companies?\nI invested an incredible amount of passion and also vision into this book as I believe that the time is now to lead a media revolution based on insight, intelligence and experience. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/03/friday-roundup-influence-influence-influence/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s influence? How is it achieved? Who\u0026rsquo;s got it?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRegular readers of my posts will know that I have a penchant for labelling all the combined disciplines of marketing and PR as simply \u0026ldquo;Influence\u0026rdquo;. (Hey, the word even appears in the name of my consultancy.) And the combination or convergence of these skills under one unifying term helps erode the noun orientation of our profession and assists in constructing a verb oriented approach. What are we really trying \u003cem\u003eto do\u003c/em\u003e?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been pulling my thoughts together for a presentation about influence for this coming week\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.monitoring-bootcamp.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMonitoring Social Media Bootcamp\u003c/a\u003e\n in London (about half a dozen tickets remaining I believe), and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting my presentation to my blog on the day. But perhaps I can leave you with something to think about until then, particularly as I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that this will spark violent disagreement all the better for getting the matter resolved as soon as possible.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere it is. Influence scoring services like \u003ca href=\"http://klout.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKlout\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://socialmention.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Mention\u003c/a\u003e\n are utterly useless. At best such services are harmless fun, and at worst they are a costly and wasteful distraction from doing the right thing the right way for yourselves or your client.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Influence Influence Influence"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had the pleasure in the last two weeks of working with a dozen of the finest Brits in PR, branding, digital / Web, public affairs and news distribution. We\u0026rsquo;ve joined up to work voluntarily on an apolitical campaign in the run up to the UK general election (invincecable.org.uk if you\u0026rsquo;re interested).\nI\u0026rsquo;m telling you this because, having blogged about the convergence of marketing disciplines over the years (as distinct from \u0026ldquo;integrated\u0026rdquo;), this campaign of ours has revealed just how far the best practitioners\u0026rsquo; expertise is now \u0026ldquo;converged\u0026rdquo;. Sure, there\u0026rsquo;s still the need to pause to explain the occasional aspect or define a particular piece of jargon or inevitable acronym, but generally the group just understands what we\u0026rsquo;re trying to achieve and how we can all work together to make it happen.\nThere is no bewilderment, misconception or diffidence.\nAnd this is despite the fact that we haven\u0026rsquo;t actually all met each other. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t stop us. We\u0026rsquo;re Skype\u0026rsquo;ing, IM\u0026rsquo;ing, emailing, wiki\u0026rsquo;ing, posterous\u0026rsquo;ing, tweeting, and quickly assembling the resources, ideas and timetable for a cracking campaign. And all in the open . And all whilst earning a living. Awesome.\nThis segues nicely into a couple of posts this week that take this idea further by exploring how marketing, or as I tend to say, influence, is now the responsibility of everybody in your organisation rather than just those people \u0026lsquo;in marketing\u0026rsquo;. Both posts are well worth your time.\nBrian Solis picks up the thread in \u0026ldquo;The Brand Dashboard \u0026rdquo; and David Meerman Scott in \u0026ldquo;Social business beyond just the marketing department \u0026rdquo;.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nWhat new skills are required for social media aware marketers? by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nAs promised in a previous post “Why are clients still scratching their heads about Social Media?” I wanted to look at the additional skills that marketing leaders will need to possess from now on to understand the new world of social media and drive real benefit from it. This post has been prompted by some research by recruitment firm Major Players covered by Revolution Magazine that claims online marketing growth “may be stunted by a sheer lack of social media knowledge in the talent pool.” More\u0026hellip; Optimizing Brands for Social Search by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFaceboook recently overtook Yahoo as the second most visited site in the United States. And in doing so, Facebook along with other social networks set the stage for a confluence of social and search that fundamentally changes who we, as a society, discover and share information, and in turn, where our attention is directed and driven. Source: Mashable\nMake no mistake, attention is shifting away from traditional destination sites and instead, it is fixated on personalized attention dashboards that funnel social feeds, the activity and focus of social graphs into one clickable view. More\u0026hellip; Growing SMB Social Media Marketing Usage by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs) are adopting social media marketing in greater numbers, according to a market study by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland.\nSocial media usage increased to 24 percent, from 12 percent the year before.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s interesting to note that the most common usage of social media among small business was a company page on a social networking site, followed by posting status updates.\nSMB expectations of social media are in line with their experiences, although they are not quite as successful as they had hoped. More\u0026hellip; Redundant service launched for unemployed by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nDeciding on a technical strategy for a mobile campaign or service can be really tricky. We like to think we offer our clients a good level of insight, and we are often amused by some of the mobile technology choices made by companies and organisations. However, I think it is fair to say that I was shocked and a little outraged by the choice that the UK Jobcentre made when they decided to launch a job finding service as an iPhone and Android app.\nFor the uninitiated, one of the major challenges in mobile is the fact that different mobile phones have quite different technical capabilities and that consumers (even if they own the same phone) can exhibit quite different behaviours. More\u0026hellip; Why Layar is the coolest iPhone app in the world by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nObsessed.\nI have become obsessed by an iPhone application called Layar.\nI first learned about Layar a few weeks ago when I spoke at the Marketing Pioneers event in Amsterdam.\nLayar is a free application that uses your GPS location to show what is nearby by displaying real time information on top of the image on your mobile\u0026rsquo;s camera (it works on other platforms besides the iPhone).\nThe founders of Layar call it \u0026ldquo;augmented reality.\u0026rdquo; I call it \u0026ldquo;cool.\u0026rdquo;\nWatch this short video to see Layar in action. More\u0026hellip; Social business beyond just the marketing department by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about how organizations extend the use of social networking beyond the marketing department. You\u0026rsquo;ve probably thought about this too or are even implementing it at your company.\nIt seems there are three phases of development as an organization matures its social business:\nFear and distrust of social networking and a culture of saying “no” to tools like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I’d say this is where 25% of companies are right now.\nPutting a few people in the marketing department “in charge of that social stuff.” More\u0026hellip; University of Cardiff digital communication masterclass: media trends and PR skills by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPR is the management of reputation. That used to exclusively mean using media relations to build trust between an organisation and its audiences. But traditional media is in turmoil: ad revenue is at an all time low thanks to the recession and the internet has reduced the cost of publication and distribution to almost zero.\nThe rise of social networks has led consumers to fundamentally change their media consumption habits. Consumers are becoming contributors.\nThe impact on the PR profession has been dramatic. More\u0026hellip; GAP: Turning shopping on its head by Michael Litman of Dare Digital\nIsn’t this brilliant? I thought so. It’s from a few months back now but no they aren’t a client, lets get that out of the way first.\nTo announce and promote their customer loyalty programme Sprize, the GAP store in Vancouver, BC completely flipped everything upside down and adhering to their tagline rather nicely of turning shopping on its head. This I like. So all of the mannequins, displays and signs were flipped, as well as some cars and a hot dog stand outside of the store. More\u0026hellip; The Brand Dashboard: A Window to Relevance by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nPerhaps the most difficult aspects of Social Media to embrace are the changes in our behavior and overall philosophy it necessitates in order to earn relevance and ultimately prominence in consumer hearts, minds, and markets.\nSimply put, Social Media makes us vulnerable and officially ends an era of perceived control threaded by the illusion of invincibility.\nEverything we thought we knew and valued is now in dire need of reassessment. We are entering into a time when we are affected by voiced sentiment in the public spotlight and backchannels of the social Web. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/03/friday-roundup-marketing-convergence-and-social-all-over/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve had the pleasure in the last two weeks of working with a dozen of the finest Brits in PR, branding, digital / Web, public affairs and news distribution. We\u0026rsquo;ve joined up to work voluntarily on an apolitical campaign in the run up to the UK general election (\u003ca href=\"http://www.invincecable.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003einvincecable.org.uk\u003c/a\u003e\n if you\u0026rsquo;re interested).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m telling you this because, having blogged about the convergence of marketing disciplines over the years (as distinct from \u0026ldquo;integrated\u0026rdquo;), this campaign of ours has revealed just how far the best practitioners\u0026rsquo; expertise is now \u0026ldquo;converged\u0026rdquo;. Sure, there\u0026rsquo;s still the need to pause to explain the occasional aspect or define a particular piece of jargon or inevitable acronym, but generally the group just understands what we\u0026rsquo;re trying to achieve and how we can all work together to make it happen.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no bewilderment, misconception or diffidence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd this is despite the fact that we haven\u0026rsquo;t actually all met each other. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t stop us. We\u0026rsquo;re Skype\u0026rsquo;ing, IM\u0026rsquo;ing, emailing, wiki\u0026rsquo;ing, posterous\u0026rsquo;ing, tweeting, and quickly assembling the resources, ideas and timetable for a cracking campaign. And all \u003ca href=\"http://invincecable.wikispaces.com/the\u0026#43;landing\u0026#43;page\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ein the open\u003c/a\u003e\n. And all whilst earning a living. Awesome.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - marketing convergence and social all over"},{"content":"We have a super mix of posts for you this week. In fact the reason we send this weekly roundup on a Friday is because we think more people make some time to read about their industry towards the end of the week.\nAnd in a converging profession, that awareness can prove critical in securing that new business opportunity, and in maintaining the business you have.\nPR consultants should have a good grasp of search engine optimisation. SEOs should get the heads round mobile apps. Mobile digital pros may well do better stuff with training in advertising. And advertisers should be looking to learn PR skills.\nWell, you get the idea.\nAt the end of the day we\u0026rsquo;re all trying to influence others to prefer our goods and services over others\u0026rsquo;, and to align their thinking more closely with ours, and to act as evangelists for us. And we should all be trying harder to be influenced by our publics too, so we increase our chances of our developing empathy successfully, and therefore products and services and thinking and acting that more closely align with our publics\u0026rsquo; expectations and needs.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nMeasuring digital PR by Kate Hartley of Carrot Communications\nThe PRCA invited me to give a short presentation for one of its series of ‘Expert Briefings’ yesterday, this time on measuring digital, hosted by Ketchum Pleon. Up in the firing line with me were Fernando Rizo, head of digital at Ketchum Pleon, and Kristin Wadge, a director at Metrica. Although the three of us have quite varied clients, we all pretty much said the same core things:\nMetrics have to have real meaning to the business: they must be things we can learn from, and feed back into the development / strategy process. More\u0026hellip; What Brands Can Learn From AC-DC by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nAustralia’s greatest musical export AC-DC recently returned to home soil for a major sell-out tour.\nThese guys are simply amazing. Still rocking after all these years, packing in the crowds year after year after year. Who would have thought the band would still be one of the biggest rock acts in the world some 35 years after their formation in Australia in 1974?\nPOP QUIZ: What was the first gig AC-DC played? (check the answer at the bottom of the post!).\nLet’s face it, any brand would kill for AC-DC’s longevity, their cross-generational appeal and the fanatical fan base that continues to buy their product year in, year out. More\u0026hellip; Less Advertising for Social Media Companies by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nIn the few short years that social media marketing has been prevalent, it has already had an enormous effect on the way companies do business online and off-line.\nIn the coming years there will be even more changes, as social media marketing extends from the marketing department to nearly every aspect of a company\u0026rsquo;s business operations.\neMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson outlines several trends to watch in the coming years. \u0026ldquo;Advertising \u0026ndash; which some might say has already failed as a business model \u0026ndash; will not be the primary revenue driver for social media companies,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is the entire version of my recent post on Mashable, “The Maturation of Social Media ROI“\nOver the years, Social Media experts attempted to redefine ROI for a new era of influence. While some introduced alternative philosophies for measuring the nuances tied to social media, others wondered aloud whether ROI simply wasn’t necessary as the tools and methodologies for analyzing yields didn’t yet exist. And furthermore, by focusing on justification and metrics, we were distracted from the primary objective of building relationships and cultivating dialogue. More\u0026hellip; Reputation Online: ‘Blogging is broken’ by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s an article that I’ve written for Reputation Online based on the content from the corporate blogging workshop that I ran last week at the CIPR Reputation Management conference. More\u0026hellip; The smut is back on the table by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nSo, Apple are allowing naughtiness back on their App Store, hey?\nWhat a turn up for the books. At We Love Mobile Towers we are delighted with this fine move.\nBecause we are part of the dirty mac brigade? Well, not publicly.\nThe issue here is that, when Apple made that epoch defining move into the mobile world, they provided something that we mobilists had been screaming out for.\nStability.\nA platform that has fixed rules, that has standards, that has an entire ecosystem all set up and ready to go. More\u0026hellip; Time Spent on Social Networks up 82% Around the World by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nNielsen recently released a new report that officially documents what many of us already know, just never substantiated through data. According to a study published at the end of January 2010, Nielsen observed the online social activity of consumers around the world and discovered an 82% increase in time spent on social networking sites in December 2009. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours on popular networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In December 2008, users clocked just over three hours on social networking sites. More\u0026hellip; Scribe puts an SEO expert in your WordPress site by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nWhen it comes to optimizing web content for search engines, there’s a lot to know, a lot to remember, and it’s always changing it seems. Wouldn’t it be great to have an SEO expert review your web content and tell you what keywords it is optimized for? And how to improve the search engine optimization of that copy? And then tell you if the improvements you made actually did improve the content’s SEO?\nThe folks at Scribe have built a tool that does all this and more — More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/02/friday-roundup-the-converging-professions/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe have a super mix of posts for you this week. In fact the reason we send this weekly roundup on a Friday is because we think more people make some time to read about their industry towards the end of the week.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd in a converging profession, that awareness can prove critical in securing that new business opportunity, and in maintaining the business you have.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePR consultants should have a good grasp of search engine optimisation. SEOs should get the heads round mobile apps. Mobile digital pros may well do better stuff with training in advertising. And advertisers should be looking to learn PR skills.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the converging profession"},{"content":"\nFour things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade\u0026hellip;\n1. Web 2.0 participation I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the \u0026ldquo;write\u0026rdquo; part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don\u0026rsquo;t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.\nPerhaps this split isn\u0026rsquo;t so accurate these days given the ease with which Facebook and Twitter can be updated, but it is representative of a shape of participation.\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to see greater involvement; I think it would have warm benefits at both the societal and individual levels. I began to call this the 1:9:90 objective, but then I still felt upset about the 1! :-)\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s difficult to read meaning into Web 2.0 contributions The second thing that struck me flowed from my work in social Web analytics and the conversations I\u0026rsquo;ve had with many of the vendors since my 2008 ebook about the difficulty of interpretting sentiment. Indeed, you could say that highly accurate, low cost, widely applicable sentiment analysis is a decade or more away, and sentiment is only part of \u0026ldquo;meaning\u0026rdquo;.\nMany services make no attempt to automate sentiment / tone analysis. But I much prefer that to those that puport to do so but do a crap job, sometimes to the point where their attempts are simply opaque and potentially misleading.\nThe most expensive and avant garde services today peak at around 65% accuracy for a narrow range of languages, which dismays any researcher clutching her normal distributions and statistical confidence formulae.\n3. Web 3.0 has already made its first foray into social media Web 3.0 is the name most often used to describe the Semantic Web . Web 2.0 is about community and content, and Web 3.0 is about the meaning of those community contributions and content. Literally, how can we augment the stuff so that the Web \u0026ldquo;understands it\u0026rdquo;.\nSo far, XHTML Friends Network (XFN - a microformat ) and Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF - a Resource Description Framework ) are the most obvious manifestations. For example, when you maintain a blogroll on some blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, you are asked to express the nature of your relationship with the subject of the link, not just provide the link alone. You give the link some meaning.\n4. The need for consistent social media measures The last of the four things that have struck me has become increasingly apparent to anyone involved in measurement and evaluation, and crystallised for me at the Influence Scorecard workshop I hosted in New York in December. The diagrammatic representation of the Influence Scorecard methodology highlighted the aching need for consistent social media measures to be plugged into business performance management approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard. To \u0026ldquo;close the loop.\u0026rdquo;\nI was delighted to hear that Radian6 \u0026rsquo;s David Alston circulated my post on the topic to his colleagues.\nThe Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things So I have started to wonder how social media participants could be equipped to meet the social Web analysts half way to the advantage of \u0026lsquo;both sides\u0026rsquo;, and whether the same \u0026rsquo;equipment\u0026rsquo; might not facilitate more people to tell others what they think, potentially without have to write posts or record videos because, well, it\u0026rsquo;s not their nature.\nThe Influence Scorecard group is now combining expertise therefore to develop the first \u0026ldquo;Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things\u0026rdquo;. So far this has consisted of me posting the first couple of pages to a wiki, the first here that includes a link to the second.\nThe ontology is non-proprietary (subject to Creative Commons attribution-share alike 3.0 ) and developed collaboratively. Indeed, whilst a proprietary ontology isn\u0026rsquo;t quite a contradiction in terms, even the ontologies being developed by and for the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, sectors renowned for patenting and copyrighting everything and anything that moves, are open.\nBy the way, the UK\u0026rsquo;s biggest retailer, Tesco, responsible I believe for taking £1 in £5 of high street spending, has just started to mark-up the content on its websites to give it meaning when viewed / queried / indexed by other software and services.\nSo we are by no means leading such ontological developments, but this is the first stab at developing an ontology related to the public relations profession to our knowledge.\nWhat happens when we have an ontology? For the WWW\u0026rsquo;s social media participants to be part of Web 3.0 as well as 2.0, they need a set of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use extensions / add-ons / plugins / apps to augment their current applications and services. The ontology informs the design and user experience of such apps and services, and we\u0026rsquo;re developing the software openly under the most liberal licensing available, GPLv3 .\nAnd so what? This means social media participants can make their contributions resonate more loudly around the water coolers and in the boardrooms of the organisations whose business and brands and related issues they are discussing. Many of these organisations have to rely on software and services, social Web analytics, to keep track of all the mentions, questions and verdicts out there, and such services will now find more meaning to work with than before. This is the C2B benefit.\nThere is also C2C (or person-to-person) benefit. Imagine that every time you make a social media contribution that you have the opportunity to quickly and easily reflect the meaning of your written / recorded content in the metadata. Today, when you write a blog post for example, the search bots can index it and pick up on key words and phrases, but they can\u0026rsquo;t understand what you feel about the topics. What do you mean?\nBy adding metadata that communicates this meaning to other services, your post can be married and juxtaposed to other contributions of like and dislike attitude. A new social graph emerges, not one based on X knows Y knows Z, but one based on A feels like B feels like C, and A does not feel the same as D or E.\nI feel that this initiative has real moral purpose. We\u0026rsquo;re helping everyone to improve how they can express their feelings, and helping everyone better understand everyone else\u0026rsquo;s feelings.\nHow can I / my company get involved? This is a game of two halves:\nThe ontology By their very nature an ontology is never complete, or perfect, or finished. But we need to have developed something sufficiently meaty to get going. The work has just started, but the more public relations experts, both practitioners and academics, lending their insights the better. Come on over and register at the wiki or contact me .\nThe software I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that the WooThemes team is onboard; in fact their Adriaan Pienaar (aka Adii Rockstar ) is heading up this side of things. If you don\u0026rsquo;t know these guys, you might see that they come second only to wordpress.org in Google\u0026rsquo;s search results for \u0026ldquo;Wordpress themes\u0026rdquo;.\nThey are simply a very talented bunch!\nWe\u0026rsquo;d love more code-heads to get involved. So if you are a crack developer, or your consultancy has digital expertise and some awesome developers, I\u0026rsquo;d be delighted to discuss our programme with you. Again, please register at the wiki or contact me , particularly if you think your company might be interested in sponsoring this endeavour.\nWe are about to change the practice of public relations, again Since the Cluetrain Manifesto first pointed the way in 1999, Web 2.0 has changed how we go about PR. Web 3.0 is a majorly significant part of why PR is about to change again, and just as radically.\nI hope you\u0026rsquo;ll come on board this train as we\u0026rsquo;re about to pull out of the station!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/02/pr-and-web-3-0-a-call-to-action/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"PR%20and%20Web%203.0%2C%20and%20the%20ontology%20for%20feelings%20about%20things\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/PR_Web3_375.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFour things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"1-web-20-participation\"\u003e1. Web 2.0 participation\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the \u0026ldquo;write\u0026rdquo; part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don\u0026rsquo;t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"PR and Web 3.0... a call to action"},{"content":"So-called \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0\u0026rdquo; dominated the last decade. This decade be prepared for \u0026ldquo;Web 3.0\u0026rdquo;. Why the quotes?\u0026hellip; well these terms are loosely defined at best, but remain useful as signposts of major change.\nMost pundits associate 3.0 with something called the Semantic Web. Effectively, if Web 2.0 was about community and content, then Web 3.0 / the Semantic Web is about understanding the meaning of those social contributions and content.\nImportantly, Web 3.0 is going to have as big an impact on what it means to practice marketing and public relations as Web 2.0. The implications are widespread and interlinked, which is not surprising when something called LinkedData is a sub-set of the Semantic Web.\nAfter a decade\u0026rsquo;s gestation, the Semantic Web is not far from emerging into the mainstream, so expect to feel the first birth pangs any time soon. The first thing I expect we\u0026rsquo;ll notice is the dropping of job titles or self-promotion monikers like \u0026ldquo;social media expert\u0026rdquo;, which are now waaaaay too common anyway, in deference to \u0026ldquo;Semantic marketing pro\u0026rdquo; or somesuch [note to self!].\nIf you are amongst the marketing and PR geekerati, then you might want to help a group of us define the world\u0026rsquo;s first Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things. This ontology will help convey the meaning of the social Web\u0026rsquo;s contributions so that your heartfelt fanboy exclamations and miserable #fail sentencings don\u0026rsquo;t just reside in obscurity but contribute to a wider resonance. Interested ?\nLastly, I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with a link to my favourite post of the week, and outrageously it\u0026rsquo;s not on MarCom Professional. It\u0026rsquo;s a post by Marshall Sponder, the Web Metrics Guru , and explores the meaning of \u0026ldquo;influencer\u0026rdquo; and how you might use various social Web analytics services to find them. Nice work Marshall and see you at the Monitoring Social Media bootcamp next month.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nDigital Marketing Practitioners Walk the Walk by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nMarketers continue to shift their budgets from traditional to digital media, but simply including online ad campaigns and social media efforts is not enough for an effective marketing mix, reports eMarketer.\nAccording to Alterian\u0026rsquo;s assessment, the maturity of digital and social media requires integration of marketing strategies. Marketers must move from a focus on isolated campaigns to an emphasis on listening to and communicating across channels.\nIn this study, more than one-half of marketers worldwide reported directing their efforts toward integrating their communication strategies to emphasize multichannel engagement. More\u0026hellip; What\u0026rsquo;s it like applying to work for your company? by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nB2B recruitment is an area where it is easy to forget the importance of branding and corporate communication. Nowadays you can find out loads about what it’s like working for a company online – and mostly through non-official sites. I was really pleased to read this post from Jeffrey L. Cohen in which he interviews Laurie Ruettimann, an HR Consultant and blogger, about how she would advise an organisation to use social media for recruitment.\nIf you don’t have time to hear the full 8 minute interview, here are the notes I took from it. More\u0026hellip; How to crowdsource videos for your company by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWouldn’t it be cool if people created videos for you? Perhaps like HP, you could hold a contest to get students to put forward their best efforts.\nThe contest was simple. \u0026ldquo;Present an idea which promotes HP Workstations ability to bring to life anything the creative mind can conceive.\u0026rdquo; This video filmed, edited and directed by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth for the contest is just terrific.\nPlease take just 80 seconds to watch this amazing video.\nDirect link to HP Invent video by Matt and Tom here. More\u0026hellip; The Internationalization of Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIf you were to look at Social Media the United States and many other parts of the world, you would believe that the world of Social Media was flat, dominated by social continents including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, and Flickr. As we zoom in, we visualize other established and emerging social services that depict provinces and outlying settlements of our social atlas.\nUpon publishing the original Conversation Prism, which was the culmination of a year’s work documenting and organizing the social web by usage and conversational patterns, the world responded by creating Conversation Prisms specific to each country. More\u0026hellip; Social Media and How it is Impacting on Public Relations (Part Two) by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nThis is PART TWO of a guest post by strategic public relations professional and blogger, Craig Pearce (below). His views and news on PR can be found at Public relations and managing reputation: better business and society.\nIn the second post of this three-part series (READ PART ONE HERE), issues discussed will include the participation required to utilise social media to its full effect, the dialectic between reputation and engagement for organisational stakeholders and social media as an issues management activity. More\u0026hellip; Ten things you need to know about Google Buzz by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nGoogle Buzz started to roll out to Gmail users this evening in a move said to challenge Facebook and Twitter.\nIt’s available immediately to all Gmail users; unlike Google Wave it isn’t restricted to beta users. According to Google it will appear in your inbox in the next day or so Google Buzz is a realtime social network like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. You can use it to share links, photos, videos, and status updates with your network Updates from people in your network will automatically be posted your Gmail inbox The network will prioritise messages from people in your network that the Google Buzz algorithms determine are most relevant to you Google Buzz incorporates a function similar to Twitter’s retweet. More\u0026hellip; The Information Divide: The Socialization of News by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn the era of the real-time Web, information travels at a greater velocity than the infrastructure of mainstream media can support as it exists today. As events materialize, the access to social publishing and syndication platforms propels information across attentive and connected nodes that link social graphs all over the world. Current events are now at the epicenter of global attention as social media makes the world a much smaller place.\nIt’s a timely subject as Clay Shirky will discuss how Social Media can make history at this year’s TED conference. More\u0026hellip; Paperchase social media storm versus journalistic integrity; and implications for crisis communications by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPaperchase has published a statement on the contact section of its web site about the alleged copyright theft of work by independent artist Hidden Eloise. The stationery firm said that it purchased the image in good faith from a small London based design company called Gather No Moss. “[…] In this case, we would like to confirm that Paperchase bought the artwork in question, in good faith, in October 2008, from a well-known central London Design Studio along with a number of other designs. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/02/friday-roundup-the-semantic-we/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo-called \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0\u0026rdquo; dominated the last decade. This decade be prepared for \u0026ldquo;Web 3.0\u0026rdquo;. Why the quotes?\u0026hellip; well these terms are loosely defined at best, but remain useful as signposts of major change.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost pundits associate 3.0 with something called the Semantic Web. Effectively, if Web 2.0 was about community and content, then Web 3.0 / the Semantic Web is about understanding the meaning of those social contributions and content.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImportantly, Web 3.0 is going to have as big an impact on what it means to practice marketing and public relations as Web 2.0. The implications are widespread and interlinked, which is not surprising when something called LinkedData is a sub-set of the Semantic Web.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the Semantic Web"},{"content":"I learn something every day as I help moderate MarCom Professional.\nThis week I was most intrigued by the idea that Google could add adverts to Google Streetview \u0026hellip; both static and moving images in what constitutes a sort of augmented-virtual-reality I guess. AVR? Thanks to Michael Litman for flagging this.\nAs always, Brian Solis has a couple of cracking posts this week, one on the socialization of email marketing , and another on the stages of social media integration in business , which shares some of the outlook of aspects of the Influence Scorecard initiative.\nI\u0026rsquo;d obviously recommend MarCom Professional for keeping up to speed on how marketing and PR have been and are being transformed. And if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for a comprehensive resource that\u0026rsquo;s insightful and digestible, I whole heartedly recommend The New Rules of Marketing and PR by MarCom Professional member David Meerman Scott.\nDavid\u0026rsquo;s post this week announces the publication of the second edition: updated, revised and ready to continue the title\u0026rsquo;s domination as the No. 1 marketing best seller. It\u0026rsquo;s the perfect book to make sure you\u0026rsquo;ve grasped the full gamut of this digital revolution, and the ideal primer for all your colleagues who don\u0026rsquo;t seem to have \u0026ldquo;got it\u0026rdquo; just yet. Gawd bless\u0026rsquo;em.\nRegards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nNLA vs Meltwater: “come and have a go [\u0026hellip;] but make sure you have the requisite authority to make your point in court” by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nSteve has posted an update on the NLA vs Meltwater tribunal after the NLA issued a statement yesterday and he caught up with its commercial director Andrew Hughes. “The NLA says Meltwater’s approach to the digital licence issue is unfair. Meltwater is saying bollocks, we’ll challenge the legality and appropriateness of this. The NLA is now saying come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, but please make sure you have the requisite authority to make your point in court.” More\u0026hellip; Marketers Plan to Develop New Mobile Apps by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\neMarketer reports that mobile application (app) investment should grow significantly in 2010, according to the latest market study by DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless.\nIn contrast, spending on social media apps will stagnate \u0026ndash; even though more marketers have already developed those applications. Among those marketers who already had an social media app in 2009, however, Facebook was the leading platform.\nFewer than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009, but most plan to invest in a mobile app this year. More\u0026hellip; The Very Real Investments in Virtual Goods by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nAccording to the latest market study by Engage Digital Media, an amazing $1.38 billion was invested in 87 virtual goods-related companies.\nThe amount invested in 2009 represents more than three times the investment in the virtual goods space in 2008 \u0026ndash; when $408 million was invested. The total number of companies receiving investment money also increased year-over-year \u0026ndash; 87 in 2009 compared with 34 in 2008, an increase of more than 100 percent.\nOf the $1.38 billion invested for the year, $398.3 million is acquisition related. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Roundup #23 by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog\nWelcome to the second installment of eModeration\u0026rsquo;s weekly social media round-up. Here you will find a note of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).\nIn this update: Dunbar\u0026rsquo;s Number; Seesmic jumpstarts Twitter\u0026rsquo;s stats; and how the Nexus One Nixes Bad Words.\nON FACEBOOK \u0026hellip; / ON TWITTER \u0026hellip; / ON GOOGLE \u0026hellip; / BRANDS GET SOCIAL \u0026hellip; / UNDER THE GAVEL \u0026hellip; / SOCIAL STATS \u0026hellip; / ON MOBILE \u0026hellip;\nON FACEBOOK \u0026hellip;\nHoorah! Those of you who feel mildly ashamed that your tally of Facebook Friends isn\u0026rsquo;t quite what it should be can hold your heads high once more. More\u0026hellip; Speed backs Inconvenient PR Truth campaign as Realwire reveals 1.7 billion irrelevant press releases sent each year by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nSpeed is backing an industry initiative launched this morning to address the issue of PR spam. It’s the brainchild of Realwire’s CEO Adam Parker. We’re all aware of the issue; there isn’t anyone in the PR industry that hasn’t been guilty of spamming bloggers or journalists at some point in their career.\nResearch by Realwire claims that 1.7 billion irrelevant press release emails estimated to be received in total each year by UK and US Journalists alone\nMark Borkowski and Stephen Davies are also onboard from the PR industry alongside media distribution services and journalists. More\u0026hellip; New Rules, new ideas, and a few secrets: Second Edition of my bestseller by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe SECOND EDITION of The New Rules of Marketing and PR is in bookstores now!\nThe book has gone through a complete re-write. See below for what\u0026rsquo;s new.\nIf you haven\u0026rsquo;t read the book at all, now is the time! If you read the first edition thank you!! (If you\u0026rsquo;re considering re-reading the book, you\u0026rsquo;ll want to get the new edition). If you\u0026rsquo;re a fan of the ideas in The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR, I hope you will help me spread the word by tweeting, blogging, doing a video, or talking it up somehow. More\u0026hellip; The Socialization of Email Marketing by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFollow me on Twitter! Become a fan on Facebook!\nIt seems that everywhere you turn, businesses, media properties, and brands are asking us to connect with them in the social Web. Whether it’s on TV, in press materials, advertising, or email, brands are vying for our “friendship.”\nIn July 2009, Bill McCloskey in partnership with StrongMail, analyzed the email marketing campaigns of top brands and how they integrated social profiles into the marketing presentation. McCloskey observed that top brands were reviving email campaigns with the inclusion of links to social profiles, specifically Facebook, Twitter, and also MySpace. More\u0026hellip; The 10 Stages of Social Media Integration in Business by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is the unabridged version of my post on Mashable, “The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration.“\nAn overnight success ten plus years in the making, Social Media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. With every day that passes, we are presented with increasing reports that showcase the impact of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs within small and large businesses alike. As a result, we can now visualize the state of adoption, understanding, and implementation in different business ecosystems. More\u0026hellip; SEO still doesn\\\u0026rsquo;t get Social by Mindy Gofton of I-COM\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been looking at the Twitter feed of a fairly comprehensive list of UK SEOs this morning and I noticed something.\nOf the most recent 140 tweets in the feed at the time I was looking (about 11:45am):\n13 people plugged their own content 27 people plugged random sites such as newspapers, YouTube videos, funny pictures and other amusing \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo; content 25 recommended or retweeted content on the most popular SEO/Tech sites (e.g. SEO Moz, Techcrunch, Mashable, Sphinn, etc.) only 4 tweets recommended articles on their direct compeitors\u0026rsquo; More\u0026hellip; Video Ads in Google Street View by Michael Litman of Consolidated PR\nLast week Gizmodo spotted that Google has filed a patent entitled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising,” which in short allows them to paste media (adverts) onto the images.\nIts interesting how the mouse in Street View follows the 3D space, we assume to allow any data to be tagged to buildings etc.\nWith data of course comes the ability to provide click throughs and advertising. We dont think it will limited to simple images however as video can also be embedded into panoramas as one of our previous examples shows. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/01/friday-roundup-the-new-rule/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI learn something every day as I help moderate MarCom Professional.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis week I was most intrigued by the idea that Google could \u003ca href=\"/posts/michael.litman.2/video-ads-in-google-street-view\"\u003eadd adverts to Google Streetview\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026hellip; both static and moving images in what constitutes a sort of augmented-virtual-reality I guess. AVR? Thanks to Michael Litman for flagging this.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs always, Brian Solis has a couple of cracking posts this week, one on the \u003ca href=\"/posts/brian.solis/the-socialization-of-email-marketing\"\u003esocialization of email marketing\u003c/a\u003e\n, and another on \u003ca href=\"/posts/brian.solis/the-10-stages-of-social-media-integration-in-business\"\u003ethe stages of social media integration in business\u003c/a\u003e\n, which shares some of the outlook of aspects of the \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/how-the-influence-scorecard-radically-transforms-marketing-and-pr\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n initiative.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d obviously recommend MarCom Professional for keeping up to speed on how marketing and PR have been and are being transformed. And if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for a comprehensive resource that\u0026rsquo;s insightful and digestible, I whole heartedly recommend \u003ca href=\"/posts/david.meerman.scott/new-rules-new-ideas-and-a-few-secrets-second-edition-of-my-bestseller\"\u003eThe New Rules of Marketing and PR\u003c/a\u003e\n by MarCom Professional member David Meerman Scott.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the New Rules"},{"content":"If the end of the last decade was all about the massive growth in the social Web, the beginning of this one will witness considerable emphasis on social Web analytics \u0026hellip; 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.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a busy market , but with Visible Technologies pinning down $22m in C series funding this week, things are starting to get serious.\nBrian Solis discusses the social network advertising and marketing outlook for 2010 this week, and Michael Litman has been good enough to share a presentation by Charlene Li with us about the future of social networks. Unfortunately, Charlene\u0026rsquo;s presentation stops short of discussing the need for consumer facing (high mention volume) brands to adopt analytics, although it does reference the associated redesign of organisational workflow that\u0026rsquo;s demanded.\nBut let\u0026rsquo;s stop for half a sec. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s time to take stock before we plough headlong into what\u0026rsquo;s possible, and invest a little time thinking about what\u0026rsquo;s preferable. Fortunately, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to start in the board room but with your own behaviour to your own benefit. And collectively, we can then move the zeitgeist towards enshrining aspects of personal privacy, counter to the ambitions of Facebook .\nLet\u0026rsquo;s talk about the Forget Web .\nLet\u0026rsquo;s develop the social Web this decade to better reflect the way we\u0026rsquo;d like to cohere as families, communities and societies. And whilst Charlene\u0026rsquo;s presentation appears to envisage a future entirely dominated by centralised (albeit distributed) privately owned networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the whole social Web can be as heterogenous and decentralised as blogging is today. Watch out for developments on this front from Wordpress developers Automattic amongst many others\u0026hellip; in fact, this is very much the territory of Google\u0026rsquo;s open Wave protocol .\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to know what you think about the ideas encompassed by the Forget Web .\nBest regards, Philip.\nCommunicating the Essence of Your Brand by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nBlogging guru Denise Wakeman loves the \u0026lsquo;how to\u0026rsquo; part of author Gary Vaynerchuk\u0026rsquo;s book CRUSH IT!In her post \u0026lsquo;Are You Crushing It With a Blog?\u0026rsquo;, Denise focuses on Vaynerchuk\u0026rsquo;s reasoning for \u0026ldquo;why a blog\u0026rdquo;.\nBut why do you need a blog? Why not a website?\nAs Vaynerchuk says:\n\u0026ldquo;Think of it this way: your website is for communicating logistics and facilitating sales; your blog is for communicating the essence of your brand\u0026rdquo;.\nLike Denise, I dig the notion that a blog is for \u0026ldquo;communicating the essence of your brand\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; Surely time for the PR v. advertising battle to end..? by Mark Pinsent of Mark Pinsent\nReading Jackie Cooper\u0026rsquo;s latest essay I agree with a huge amount of what she says. Almost everything in fact. And why not? Having worked for Edelman in both freelance and permanent roles, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a bit of contact with Jackie and have enormous respect for her. As you\u0026rsquo;d expect, as founder of Jackie Cooper PR she\u0026rsquo;s a true doyenne of the consumer PR world. But the headline (and also the first line in fact) really jars: \u0026ldquo;Why It\u0026rsquo;s Time for Ad Agencies to Admit Defeat\u0026rdquo;. The PR industry has a real complex about the advertising industry – More\u0026hellip; 2010: Social Network Advertising and Marketing Outlook by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn July 2009, experts predicted that advertising on Facebook would surpass MySpace by 2011. What represents a tectonic shift in social media spend is now anticipated in twenty-ten (2010).\nA new report published by eMarketer, “Social Network Ad Spending: 2010 Outlook” documents the major shifts in social network advertising spending that emerged in 2009 and will ultimately unfold in 2010.\neMarketer observes that Facebook is becoming the premier destination for marketers in the U.S. as well as many worldwide markets. More\u0026hellip; Engagement – PR’s lost metric by Andrew Smith of escherman\nI was intrigued by a recent blog post from Tom Foremski where he “raised the possibility of PR agencies developing the ability to drive lots of traffic to specific news stories” and suggesting that this would constitute a PR firm’s “killer pitch”. I immediately thought of a superb piece by Ashley Friedlein at E-Consultancy (New metrics and business models for digital publishing – selling outcomes not inputs). He may have written it nearly a year ago, but it still makes good sense. More\u0026hellip; The Socialization of Small Business by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSocial Media impacts every business, every brand, and in doing so, connects a network of distributed communities of influence, making the world a much smaller place in the process. Small businesses are in fact at an advantage in Social Media Marketing as they can focus on hyper-local activity that can offer immediate rewards or at the very least, the real-time feedback or lack thereof says everything about next steps.\nA recent survey conducted by Citibank offers a contrary point of view, citing small business executives who believe social networks offer no benefit or promise to expanding their business. More\u0026hellip; The Future Of Social Networks by Charlene Li from Altimeter by Michael Litman of Consolidated PR\nvia michaelbatistich.com More\u0026hellip; Why is Lack of Control Suddenly a Big Deal? by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nA large part of what the public relations profession has done in the past - and continues to do today - is the generation of media publicity - editorial coverage in newspapers and magazines and on radio, television and the internet.\nGood old column inches and airtime! Probably not as important or as effective as, say, five to 10 years ago, but certainly a critical part of the PR mix for many companies and organisations.\nDespite what so-called \u0026lsquo;spin doctors\u0026rsquo; like to think, PR people (and by extension, the brands they represent) generally have little control over what the media says. More\u0026hellip; The Economist positive on PR industry future by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThere’s an article in this week’s The Economist (disclosure: Speed client) written out of New York that paints a rosy future for the PR industry. Growth is being driven by clients prioritising communication, particularly during the recession, and budgets being diverted from other marketing activities.\nEdelman chief Richard Edelman is quoted as saying that PR is the “organising principle” behind many business decisions.\nClients, The Economist says, are putting their budgets behind larger, more established firms. Media fragmentation and social media are also cited as a shot-in-the-arm for the industry. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2010/01/friday-roundup-the-forget-we/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf the end of the last decade was all about the massive growth in the social Web, the beginning of this one will witness considerable emphasis on \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial Web analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026hellip; 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s a \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-increasingly-crowded-market-of-social-web-analytics\"\u003ebusy market\u003c/a\u003e\n, but with \u003ca href=\"http://www.visibletechnologies.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eVisible Technologies\u003c/a\u003e\n pinning down \u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.grill/visible-technologies-secures-22-million-in-funding\"\u003e$22m in C series funding\u003c/a\u003e\n this week, things are starting to get serious.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/posts/brian.solis/2010-social-network-advertising-and-marketing-outlook\"\u003eBrian Solis discusses the social network advertising and marketing outlook for 2010\u003c/a\u003e\n this week, and Michael Litman has been good enough to share \u003ca href=\"/posts/michael.litman.2/the-future-of-social-networks-by-charlene-li-from-altimeter\"\u003ea presentation by Charlene Li\u003c/a\u003e\n with us about the future of social networks. Unfortunately, Charlene\u0026rsquo;s presentation stops short of discussing the need for consumer facing (high mention volume) brands to adopt analytics, although it does reference the associated redesign of organisational workflow that\u0026rsquo;s demanded.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the Forget Web"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s the time of year when everyone is tempted to look backward and forward. The Newspaper Licensing Agency appears to be the exception to the rule, by looking forward and thinking backward.\nFor those who haven\u0026rsquo;t followed the debate, here\u0026rsquo;s a summary\u0026hellip; the NLA, gawd bless\u0026rsquo;em and the past Century they still live in, has adapted its terms to charge parties for clicking on hyperlinks to content on their members\u0026rsquo; websites.\nThat might not have sunk in on a cursory read. You might think I have mistyped or something. But yes, you did read it right\u0026hellip; I know, it\u0026rsquo;s incredible isn\u0026rsquo;t it. If you are sent a hyperlink to coverage on a newspaper website, you have to pay the NLA a license fee to click on it! More exclamation marks warranted!!!\nI think this is simply appalling, so I was delighted to read a post from Stephen Waddington this week describing Meltwater\u0026rsquo;s announcement that they are to take the NLA to copyright tribunal over the matter . I\u0026rsquo;m not shy in my criticism of the NLA (\u0026quot;NLA, Agency or Anachronism \u0026quot;) and I will support this effort anyway I can, and I do hope you can offer or show your support too.\nOn a considerably more enlightening note, David Meerman Scott has posted about a great ebook compiled by Seth Godin called \u0026ldquo;What happens now?\u0026rdquo; comprising 1-page contributions from many thought leaders, including David of course. Check it out. An fascinating source of inspiration as 2010 ticks closer.\nAnd with that, we\u0026rsquo;ll say goodbye for 2009. We wish you a Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nPR to Face the Best and Worst of Times in 2010 and Beyond by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI WROTE THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE FOR MARKETING MAGAZINE\u0026rsquo;S JUST-RELEASED \u0026lsquo;2010 MEDIA SURVIVAL GUIDE\u0026rsquo;.\nThe annual guide is a bumper read, and provides a range of insights and commentary from experts across public relations, events and experiential, print media, TV/radio, mobile, web and social media.\nFeatured writers in the section on social media include Laurel Papworth, Gavin Heaton and Stephen Collins.\nOkay, on with the article\u0026hellip;\nIn his classic novel The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote: More\u0026hellip; What Matters Now by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nAs we wind down 2009, it’s time to think about what matters for 2010.\nMy friend Seth Godin has pulled together a remarkable group of more than 70 people who each contributed a one-page essay with a one-word title to create a free ebook called What Matters Now.\nWhat Matters Now will inspire you to make some changes in 2010, and to keep doing work that matters.\nDownload What Matters Now. (Note: 3 MB file size.) Please share!\nRead Seth\u0026rsquo;s blog post about the ebook here.\nRemember, big thoughts and small actions make a difference. More\u0026hellip; The death of TV was called early: social web drives TV audiences by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nAlmost all of my TV viewing is via time shift via the internet or Sky+. But I’m in a minority in the UK. The web is failing to make a significant dent on traditional TV viewing habits. At least that’s what the latest numbers from BARB and Nielsen tell us. According to TV number crunchers writing in the latest bulletin from BARB (PDF), time-shift viewing accounts for less than 6 per cent of total view in July 2009 up from 1.2 per cent in July 2005.\nBARB doesn’t monitor internet TV viewing habits but a recent Ipos Mori survey commissioned on its behalf calculated that 10 per cent of adults had watched TV via the internet in the last week for approximately an hour and three-quarters. More\u0026hellip; Last carnival of the mobilists for the decade #cotm by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nI have the pleasure of rounding out 2009 with the final Carnival of the Mobilists for the year – and for the decade! When I think back to where I was and what I was doing 10 years ago in 1999, and where I am the world is now – it has been an amazing journey.\n10 years ago I was single and living in Sydney – working for Telstra Corporation in the Telstra.com area. New Years Eve 1999 I will remember forever – we were at the Overseas Passenger Terminal on Sydney Harbour – More\u0026hellip; The Future of Interactive Marketing by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: ShutterstockForrester recently released a new report tracking the future of US interactive marketing through 2014. Authored by Shar VanBoskirk, with Christine Spivey Overby, Niki Scevak, and Angie Polanco, Forrester predicts that interactive marketing is poised to grow at a 16% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).\nEven though interactive marketing will approach $55 billion by 2014, the report also observes that not all industries will keep pace with this growth. Retail and financial services are expected to dominate the greatest share of all interactive marketing. More\u0026hellip; Only 9% of Inc 500 do not use social media in 2009 by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nReporting on other surveys of social media trends I said that \u0026ldquo;The only thing certain about surveys of the business use of social media is that the trend is UP.\u0026rdquo;\nThis was confirmed again by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth which has followed up on its 2007 and 2008 studies of social media usage by the Inc. 500 with the release of its 2009 survey.\nAdoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing themselves as “very familiar” More\u0026hellip; Meltwater to challenge NLA web licensing via UK Copyright Tribunal by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nMeltwater customers received an email this morning in which Meltwater says that it is challenging the NLA web licensing scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal. This is likely to take as long as 12 months during which Meltwater says that it will continue to serve links to its business-to-business customers. The full text of the email follows below: Dear Meltwater Customer, You may or may not be aware that the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) recently decided to extend its hardcopy licensing regime to cover links to newspaper website content. More\u0026hellip; Cool Job Alert: Video interview with Allan Schoenberg CMEGroup by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI spent yesterday morning with Allan Schoenberg, who is Director of Corporate Communications for the CME Group, the world\u0026rsquo;s largest derivatives marketplace (futures exchange).\nWe spent most of our time on the historic trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, the first organized futures exchange, founded in 1848.\nAllan has a really cool job. Imagine working in corporate communications in what I think of as \u0026ldquo;the center of the news universe.\u0026rdquo;\nPlease take about 7 minutes to watch this fascinating video interview. More\u0026hellip; Facebook Brings Fans into Focus by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: ShutterstockAs brands and personalities race to establish online communities and host meaningful conversations in Social Media, Facebook continues to pave the roads that connect them.\nIf your customers, prospects, and the peers who influence them are active in Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages are then not a question of if, but when and how they’re implemented and cultivated.\nMany brands and personalities underestimate the value and reach of social networking, instead opting to drive traffic and activity back to the primary dot com (brand home page). More\u0026hellip; Government \u0026lsquo;Spin\u0026rsquo; Story Leaves PR Warrior With a Heavy Heart by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI read with interest a feature article in The Sunday Age this week titled \u0026lsquo;Calling The Tune\u0026rsquo; in which the author Tom Hyland examines how \u0026ldquo;governments and their PR machines are so intertwined it\u0026rsquo;s hard for journalists to tell where the spins stars and ends\u0026rdquo;.\nWhen I say I read the article with interest, I should also add I did so with a heavy heart.\nWhy so morose PR Warrior?\nFirstly, there is this obsession by the media that PR is all about them. In many journalists\u0026rsquo; More\u0026hellip; Twitter study proves your website needs to be entertaining by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nEntertainers top the charts on a study of Twitter influence. According to the phone manufacturer, INQ, the most influential people on Twitter are mostly entertainers and celebrity sports people. Fourteen of the Top 20 influencers are entertainers and well-known sporting legends. There are only two business people in the list - Pete Cashmore and Biz Stone. Pete is the founder of the social media site, Mashable, and Biz is the co-founder of Twitter.\nRemarkably, they sit amongst a list of celebrities and entertainers who not only have large numbers of followers, but also get re-tweeted a great deal, who make large numbers of posts themselves and who are referred to many times over by other Twitter users. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/12/friday-roundup-the-newspaper-licensing-agency/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s the time of year when everyone is tempted to look backward and forward. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.nla.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNewspaper Licensing Agency\u003c/a\u003e\n appears to be the exception to the rule, by looking forward and \u003cem\u003ethinking\u003c/em\u003e backward.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor those who haven\u0026rsquo;t followed the debate, here\u0026rsquo;s a summary\u0026hellip; the NLA, gawd bless\u0026rsquo;em and the past Century they still live in, has adapted its terms to charge parties for clicking on hyperlinks to content on their members\u0026rsquo; websites.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat might not have sunk in on a cursory read. You might think I have mistyped or something. But yes, you did read it right\u0026hellip; I know, it\u0026rsquo;s incredible isn\u0026rsquo;t it. If you are sent a hyperlink to coverage on a newspaper website, you have to pay the NLA a license fee to click on it! More exclamation marks warranted!!!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the Newspaper Licensing Agency"},{"content":"OK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that we ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we\u0026rsquo;ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com .\nThis is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.\n[See my ebook for more about social Web analytics , and here for the difference between the social Web and social media .]\nOf course, the vendors really don\u0026rsquo;t have a choice. Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into social media monitoring next year will eat the lunch of the plain vanilla \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve got some servers and some crawlers and some pretty graphs\u0026rdquo; brigade. Only those vendors that have lifted their game up along the lines identified by the Influence Scorecard approach will survive. Moreover, they will have set themselves up to offer a level of service that will never, imho, be of interest to Google.\nThe Influence Scorecard vision and methodology encompasses many changes to the way in which marketing and PR is conducted. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the differences we should expect between the state of the profession in ten years\u0026rsquo; time versus today will be greater than the changes over the last ten. If I was partial to hyperbole, I\u0026rsquo;d say we haven\u0026rsquo;t yet scratched the surface, but I\u0026rsquo;m not and we have been doing a lot of scratching. But here\u0026rsquo;s a selection of some of the changes in brief.\nA place at the board table for the Chief Influence Officer The Chief Influence Officer is a different beast to the CMO. The most adaptable CMOs will morph into Chief Influence Officers, and let\u0026rsquo;s face it the title may not actually change but the role most certainly will.\nThe advent of the Chief Influence Officer marks the death of John Wanamaker\u0026rsquo;s adage \u0026ldquo;I know that half of my advertising doesn\u0026rsquo;t work\u0026hellip; the problem is, I don\u0026rsquo;t know which half\u0026rdquo;. The encumbent knows precisely the state of all six influence flows at any point in time. She is sensitised to her organisation\u0026rsquo;s environment in a way that makes most CMOs today look like they work in little bubbles where they had no choice but to \u0026ldquo;make stuff up \u0026rdquo;.\nThe Chief Influence Officer is as much a scientist and engineer as the CMO was an artist. The marketer of the tens (or whatever the next decade is called) is in information technology , with a slant towards the \u0026ldquo;information\u0026rdquo; over \u0026ldquo;technology\u0026rdquo;.\nBusiness Intelligence and Business Performance Management BI (Business Intelligence) is her bread and butter, and her BI extends beyond the four walls of her organisation and its supply chain, the domain of today\u0026rsquo;s BI, courtesy of the integration of social Web analytics.\nSocial Web analytics, via BI, is integrated into Enterprise Resource Planning ; what I call (given the current mode to \u0026lsquo;verbize\u0026rsquo; nouns!) the ERP\u0026rsquo;ing of social Web analytics.\nSimilarly, the system is integrated into Business Performance Management for the transformation of information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom and action.\nVisualisation I have found that I have sometimes confused people when I talk to them about influence (marketing and PR) becoming more of an engineering discipline or science than an art. So let me correct a too common misperception by stating with the authority of a Chartered Engineer that engineers and scientists need inspiration and creativity as much as the artist or free-think-stylee marketer. There\u0026rsquo;s as much rigor and discipline as inspiration and genius at such highly regarded companies as Crispin Porter + Bogusky .\nUnfortunately, Hollywood likes to portray deep IT or science expertise by having reams of numbers flying up or down a screen. I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen such a screen in real life. Engineers, scientists, and soon marketers, need IT to help them visualise their environment, to comprehend it, to wield it. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to write about data visualisation further here as I\u0026rsquo;ve posted enough about that in the past, and here\u0026rsquo;s a couple of those posts:\nCan you see it? Making influence visible , Aug 2008 Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation , Mar 2009 Buyer marketing From the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008:\nThe ramifications for organisations of this Social Web reality were first considered and presented by the authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999.\nThe Cluetrain Manifesto asserts that the Internet allows markets to revert back to the days when a market was defined by people gathering and talking amongst themselves about buyer reputation, seller reputation, product quality and prices. This was lost for a while as the scale of organisations and markets outstripped the facility for consumers to coalesce. The consumers’ conversation is now reignited.\nIn other words, the balance of power shifted somewhat from the massive dominance of large organisations at the end of the 20th Century back towards the individual. This rebalancing will continue during the next decade. It will give rise to something I call buyer marketing; similar to what Doc Searl\u0026rsquo;s VRM initiative refers to as \u0026ldquo;personal RFP \u0026rdquo; and most recently what Scott Adams has labelled \u0026ldquo;broadcast shopping \u0026rdquo;.\nThis marks the point at which individuals can market their needs or desires to organisations interested in meeting that need or desire, either directly or anonymously via an intermediary or broker. Whilst many of us have developed the remarkable ability to block the majority of adverts today from our conciousness, this ability will be taken up a notch once each of us feels happy to have the ability to pull marketing to us on demand. Anyone who tries to push stuff at us can quite simply be ignored, totally, end of.\nWhy the slightly different turns of phrase? Well, I\u0026rsquo;m happier that a buyer marketing his or her need leaves it a little more open ended as to the speed or indeed inevitability of a purchase; where perhaps “procurement” (in RFP) conveys a pre-determined course of action and timeline.\nSecond, “broadcast” doesn’t quite sit well with my protocol obsessed perspective. Buyer marketing is more of a Web service (a pubsub for the geeks out there).\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m not that hung up on the semantics, it\u0026rsquo;s the possibility and inevitability that matters.\nLastly, you might be interested in knowing that whilst the idea of “buyer marketing” reverses the normal marketing mechanism, one thing does not necessarily get flipped… identity. The prospect can elect to remain completely anonymous to you\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s then your job as a marketer (influencer) to persuade them through the provision of some great post-sales benefits to declare their identify to you upon purchase.\nOther posts about the Influence Scorecard workshop http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/12/notes-from-the-influencer-scorecard-summit-a-long-but-worthwhile-post-to-read http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/issues/11-1-09/painemappingfuture11-1-09.asp http://blog.us.cision.com/2009/12/bringing-clarity-to-new-media-jargon ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/12/how-the-influence-scorecard-radically-transforms-marketing-and-pr/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-first-meeting-on-the-influence-scorecard\"\u003ewe ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop\u003c/a\u003e\n in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we\u0026rsquo;ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at \u003ca href=\"http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"influence scorecard architecture draft\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influence-scorecard-architecture-v1-01.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influence_flows.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat\u0026rsquo;s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"How the Influence Scorecard radically transforms marketing and PR"},{"content":"I had the pleasure of being interviewed by David Meerman Scott recently for his next book. (Do you know that \u0026ldquo;The New Rules of Marketing and PR\u0026rdquo; has been translated into 24 languages?!)\nDavid had just been speaking at Dow Jones\u0026rsquo; launch of their new Media Relations Manager , and like all accomplished speakers he conveyed some serious points of view interspersed with the more light-hearted observations (the one about \u0026ldquo;Who are hell are these people?! \u0026rdquo; got people laughing).\nWe spent most of our time talking about the Influence Scorecard (see my post this week ) and the expansion of \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo;. By this I mean that the social Web is bigger than social media, even though the terms are often treated as synonyms. The social Web encompasses social (non-traditional / non-industrial) media, but also applications such as Tweetdeck and iPhone apps, services such as social assisted search and location-based services, and the network itself\u0026hellip; which is becoming the Internet of Things.\nThe Internet of Things refers to a network of objects not historically connected. We can consider four kinds of objects: the device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (washing machine, car, aircon unit); the electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (ceiling lighting, electric heater, power distribution); non-electrical objects (food and drink packages, clothes); and environmental sensors (measuring temperature, heat and moisture for example).\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a future with some serious issues for social Web marketers. Or given the social Web\u0026rsquo;s pervasiveness by then, I should drop the \u0026ldquo;social Web\u0026rdquo; bit and just say \u0026ldquo;marketers\u0026rdquo;.\nHave a good weekend. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nIKEA word-of-mouth photo tagging campaign by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nIKEA uses phototagging to promote the opening of a new store by word-of-mouth on Facebook. More\u0026hellip; On PR, Social Media and the Evolution of the Web with Robert Scoble by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI recently visited good friend Robert Scoble, his lovely wife Maryam and their family in Half Moon Bay. It was an overdue trip, one without an agenda. It was a fleeting opportunity to catch up, talk a bit about the latest book, and also an excuse to have a fireside chat, literally, on the grounds of the Ritz Carlton (overlooking the overlooking the 18th green and the Pacific Ocean.)\nBefore we could walk over to the Ritz however, Scoble sat me down, fired up his Canon 5d Mark II and sparked a discussion that would ultimately unfold as an invigorating dialogue covering the evolution and future of PR, Social Media, technology and the people and companies driving the social economy. More\u0026hellip; Conflicting business social media reports open opportunities by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nThe only thing certain about surveys of the business use of social media is that the trend is UP.\nWhile Citibank recently found (\u0026ldquo;Citibank Survey Reveals Small Businesses Not Joining Social Media Conversation\u0026rdquo;) the opposite was true in Asia according to report in the Singapore Straits Times.\nAccording to the Citibank survey of 500 small business executives across the United States:\n76% have not found social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year; More\u0026hellip; The Proliferation of Online Video by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: ShutterstockOnline video continues to capture the attention of producers and viewers, with the market as well as industry leaders, leading us into a more pervasive form of video entertainment, communication and education.\nWith YouTube quickly transforming from a user-generated video network into an invaluable repository for content, the associated behavior for creating, uploading, discovering, and watching online videos is evolving. What many have yet to realize are the effects YouTube has aroused. More\u0026hellip; CEO blogger reaches a global audience including the media and employees by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLast week I sat down with Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) to learn about how he uses his blog.\nI\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by CEOs who blog and who are active on Twitter @PaulFlevy, especially those from large organizations like BIDMC (7,000 people work there).\nSee below for a ten minute video discussion I had with Paul.\nPaul has been blogging since August 2006. His Running a Hospital blog is popular with healthcare professionals around the world, with BIDMC employees, and with people who work at competing hospitals in the Boston area. More\u0026hellip; Direct-connect Internet-enabled TV Bombshell by David Deans of Digital Lifescapes\nAccording to eMarketer, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) now forecasts a slight growth uptick (0.6 percent) in 2010 to $166 billion in overall industry revenues. What has changed?\nInternet-Enabled Televisions, which connect directly to the Internet via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, are one of the hot new products that Americans will be buying \u0026ndash; along with continued adoption of various online video streaming and DVR services.\nAmericans are watching more TV than ever, and also more online video, according to Nielsen. More\u0026hellip; Q\u0026amp;A: President Kevin Taylor on the CIPR\u0026rsquo;s trading position and its future by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has hit the headlines in recent weeks after it reported that it expects to make a loss of £700,000 this year.\nI caught up with President Kevin Taylor this morning to talk about its trading position, the future of professional membership organisations as communities assemble online, the move to Russell Square and the three-year plan to put the Institute on a firmer footing.\nQ: On what financial basis does the CIPR continue to operate (based on £336,000 net assets at the end of 2008 less £700,000 reported losses)?\nWhat you have to understand is that the loss we are likely to report is not all in cash terms. More\u0026hellip; Is Facebook Losing its Coveted Demographic? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\ncomScore recently released a report that triggered nothing short of a “sky is falling” media panic. Led by Adweek asking if Facebook is getting uncool for the 18-24 year olds, the media is speculating as to whether or not a mass exodus is underway with much of the blame focusing on parents “ruining the party” for younger demographics.\nHere’s what we do know…\ncomScore is reporting that time spent on Facebook by 18-24 year olds is waning. In July 2009, minutes spent on Facebook dropped by 3%. More\u0026hellip; Marketing products with very long sales cycles by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMy daughter is a junior (third year) in high school so we are still a year away from the college application season here in the U.S.\nBut get this - my family has been in college shopping mode for three years!\nIt started when my daughter entered high school. Nearly three years ago, she started to get interested in the process of choosing and applying to schools and soon after started her research on specific colleges and universities. She spent time checking out college Web sites and we’ve visited around a dozen campuses so far. More\u0026hellip; NLA web clipping licence to go ahead in the New Year by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI have followed the NLA’s plan to licence the use of paid-for business-to-business web content from newspaper web sites since the NLA announced its plans in June (search my blog for content tagged NLA for more information). Since then publishers have started to raise pay walls and take on Google in a bid to monitise content. Six months is a long time on the Internet and especially so for newspaper publishers running loss making web operations.\nThe NLA said today that the web licensing scheme will go ahead from 1 January 2010. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Round-up #15 by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog\nWelcome to eModeration\u0026rsquo;s weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).\nThis week: \u0026lsquo;cyberdisinhibition\u0026rsquo;; the Digital Economy Bill; and REO Speedwagon.\nCheck back on Monday, when we\u0026rsquo;ll be casting a beady eye over the goings-on at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and beyond - see you then.\nTHE HEADLINES \u0026hellip; / THE LOWDOWN \u0026hellip; / IN OTHER NEWS \u0026hellip;\nTHE HEADLINES \u0026hellip;\nSmell the distinctive aroma of burning rubber? Catch the sound of screeching tyres? Yes, it’s Google making a rather sharp U-turn, as it announces that it will, after all, allow publishers to restrict how many stories a reader can access per day. More\u0026hellip; The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nI was delighted to host the first meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative in New York this week with a fine group of people:\nKate Delahaye Paine, the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (twitter, linkedin)\nMarshall Sponder, the Web Metrics Guru (twitter, linkedin) Ted Shelton, Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group (twitter, linkedin) Jay Krall, Global Product Management, Cision (twitter, linkedin) Aubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (twitter, linkedin) Harish Rao, network science at The Rao Group Diane Meier, Founder and CEO, Meier Brand Connie Bensen, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, Alterian (twitter, linkedin) The task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/12/friday-roundup-social-web-bigger-than-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI had the pleasure of being interviewed by \u003ca href=\"http://www.davidmeermanscott.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Meerman Scott\u003c/a\u003e\n recently for his next book. (Do you know that \u0026ldquo;The New Rules of Marketing and PR\u0026rdquo; has been translated into 24 languages?!)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid had just been speaking at Dow Jones\u0026rsquo; launch of their new \u003ca href=\"http://www.dowjones.com/product-mrm.asp\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMedia Relations Manager\u003c/a\u003e\n, and like all accomplished speakers he conveyed some serious points of view interspersed with the more light-hearted observations (the one about \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/david.meerman.scott/who-the-hell-are-these-people\"\u003eWho are hell are these people?!\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; got people laughing).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe spent most of our time talking about the Influence Scorecard (see \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-first-meeting-on-the-influence-scorecard\"\u003emy post this week\u003c/a\u003e\n) and the expansion of \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo;. By this I mean that the social Web is bigger than social media, even though the terms are often treated as synonyms. The social Web encompasses social (non-traditional / non-industrial) media, but also \u003cstrong\u003eapplications\u003c/strong\u003e such as \u003ca href=\"http://www.tweetdeck.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTweetdeck\u003c/a\u003e\n and iPhone apps, \u003cstrong\u003eservices\u003c/strong\u003e such as social assisted search and location-based services, and the \u003cstrong\u003enetwork\u003c/strong\u003e itself\u0026hellip; which is becoming the Internet of Things.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the social Web bigger than social media"},{"content":"I was delighted to host the first meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative in New York this week with a fine group of people :\nKate Delahaye Paine , the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (twitter , linkedin ) Marshall Sponder , the Web Metrics Guru (twitter , linkedin ) Ted Shelton , Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group (twitter , linkedin ) Jay Krall, Global Product Management, Cision (twitter , linkedin ) Aubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (twitter , linkedin ) Harish Rao, network science at The Rao Group Diane Meier , Founder and CEO, Meier Brand Connie Bensen , Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, Alterian (twitter , linkedin ) The task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. For those of you unaware of the Influence Scorecard project, you may want to flick through the presentation at the end of this post, or perhaps read my last post on the matter .\nOne of our first tasks was to get some definitions agreed. For example:\nInfluence: the power or ability to affect someone\u0026rsquo;s beliefs or actions Engagement: some action (anything but nothing) Advocacy: engagement driven by an agenda Sentiment: expression of opinion Transparency: the default to disclose and the disclosure of any reasons not to do so Authentic: not false, genuine, real Trust: competence, integrity, reliability and authenticity For the more academically minded of you, we then resorted to Grunig \u0026amp; Hunt models and Grunig\u0026rsquo;s Relationship index to pin down an expanded definition of influence and engagement to guide the construction of measures for relative or absolute assessment.\nHere goes\u0026hellip;\nInfluence Influence can be represented as the reach (a quantity) for a specific relevance (topic, demographic, value, etc) with a level of credibility (measured historically / retrospectively).\nA score / ranking / measure of POTENTIAL influence is composed of:\nReach: number of people that a person can reach; also the amplification that comes from the network connections of those people Relevance: the domain in which those people that can be reached are influenced (defined by topic, values, demographics) Credibility: the trustworthiness of the source. Engagement Engagement is a measure of activity (a quantity and varied by type of activity) at a level of intensity (subjective level of passion).\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a measure of the degree of involvement that a person has with an issue, brand, person, etc., composed of:\nVolume of actions / interactions The qualitative judgement of the level of passion (emotion?) expressed in those interactions. Engagement may require differently defined measures depending upon each of Forresters five categories of engagement: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectator.\nMeasurement heuristics The team also agreed some useful common sense rules governing our approach to measurement:\nJust because you can measure something doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you should / that it\u0026rsquo;s useful As people behave as they are measured, the measure or more likely group of measures should frustrate any individual\u0026rsquo;s tempation for \u0026ldquo;gaming it\u0026rdquo; (ie, their focusing on getting good scores rather than on the activity to get good scores) Beware compound measures; algorithms must be transparent. On that last point, check out Don Bartholomew\u0026rsquo;s (MetricsMan) excellent post debunking much of the Twitter measurement crap .\nOther stuff and next steps We covered a whole lot more, but nowhere near as much as there is stuff to do. This is a journey rather than a destination per se. We\u0026rsquo;ve each taken actions, and mine is to diagrammatically represent the entire objectives and machinations of the Influence Scorecard to portray where we\u0026rsquo;re heading and to mark off progress.\n(For a lengthier description of the workshop, head over to Marshall\u0026rsquo;s post .)\nIf you\u0026rsquo;d like to join in, please get in touch (@sheldrake ). We\u0026rsquo;re meeting again early 2010, and looking for participants to get stuck in on both academic and practical fronts. As an example of the latter, we have already identified some blue chip CMOs willing to try our stuff for real next year, perhaps you are another?\nThe slideshare overview Influence Scorecard June 2009 ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/12/the-first-meeting-on-the-influence-scorecard/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI was delighted to host the \u003ca href=\"http://thisisbeta.influencescorecard.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003efirst meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative\u003c/a\u003e\n in New York this week with \u003ca href=\"http://thisisbeta.influencescorecard.com/participants/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea fine group of people\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://kdpaine.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKate Delahaye Paine\u003c/a\u003e\n, the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/kdpaine\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/kdpaine\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.webmetricsguru.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarshall Sponder\u003c/a\u003e\n, the Web Metrics Guru (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/WebMetricsGuru\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/marshallsponder\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.theconversationgroup.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTed Shelton\u003c/a\u003e\n, Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group  (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/tshelton\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/tshelton\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJay Krall, Global Product Management, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cision.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCision\u003c/a\u003e\n (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/jaykrall\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jay-krall/4/b94/306\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/podolsky\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://ca.linkedin.com/in/aubreypodolsky\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHarish Rao, network science at The Rao Group\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.meierbrand.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDiane Meier\u003c/a\u003e\n, Founder and CEO, Meier Brand\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://conniebensen.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eConnie Bensen\u003c/a\u003e\n, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, \u003ca href=\"http://www.alterian.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAlterian\u003c/a\u003e\n (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/cbensen\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/bensenc\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003elinkedin\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. For those of you unaware of the Influence Scorecard project, you may want to flick through the presentation at the end of this post, or perhaps \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-first-influence-scorecard-meeting\"\u003eread my last post on the matter\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of our first tasks was to get some definitions agreed. For example:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard"},{"content":"The Monitoring Social Media 09 event this week was a \u0026lsquo;standing-room-only\u0026rsquo; event. And I particularly enjoyed the presentations from Marshall Sponder , Giles Palmer , Brad Little and Katy Howell .\nHere is a couple of points I made in my participation of the panel debating the future of social media monitoring.\nFirstly, this sector will broaden its focus. I define social media as being a subset of the social Web, so the social Web = social media (blogs, facebook, twitter) + apps (tweetdeck, skype) + services (geo-location, social search) + the network (including the Internet of Things ). Then things get really interesting!\nSecondly, there are more than 70 vendors in this space, and commoditisation has effectively made data, indexing, simple analysis and pretty charts FREE. The conclusive step in this process will be Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into social media monitoring, which I think might happen the first quarter of next year.\nSo what should you pay for? In short, great data visualisation , interpretation and insight, and the ease with which you can integrate this insight into your business processes and intelligence to improve your organisation\u0026rsquo;s ability to hold the conversation and adapt and respond to market opportunities. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to refer to this as the ERP ing of the social Web, and will mark the point at which this sector matures and becomes a competitive differentiator. The have\u0026rsquo;s and have-not\u0026rsquo;s will be plain to see.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working with organisations to affect this change, and procuring the right service in the right way is just the start. The transition often demands organisational restructuring to converge the traditionally siloed marketing disciplines and agencies, and a review of the associated optimisation of budget allocation.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with this week\u0026rsquo;s choice cuts. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nHey B2B marketers: It\u0026rsquo;s okay to have fun! by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhy is so much business-to-business marketing dreadfully boring?\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s because the marketers involved think \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; as in \u0026ldquo;I am marketing to a business\u0026rdquo; and this results in an overly serious tone. After all, if you are marketing to, say, technology companies that’s different than consumer marketing, right?\nWrong.\nB2B marketers seem to forget that what all marketers need to do is communicate to people. People want to do business with people and the companies that understand that in the B2B world develop a following. More\u0026hellip; Don’t sync updates: different networks, different audiences (lessons from a 13-year old) by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI got an ear bashing from my 13 year old goddaughter this weekend. Why, she asked, do you keep posting nonsense on your Facebook news feed. It’s because I’ve synced my Twitter feed with my Facebook feed I explained. “Twitter?” she said. My Twitter network is made up of a different group of people from my Twitter network. Facebook is family, friends, mates from school, university and stalkers. Twitter is mainly people from my professional life.\nDon’t get me wrong, there’s some crossover between the different networks. More\u0026hellip; How (and Why) I Squeeze Posterous Into My Day! by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI\u0026rsquo;m declaring my love right here, right now, for Posterous. Just sayin\u0026rsquo;.While I\u0026rsquo;m not generally prone to making sweeping statements about \u0026rsquo;the next big thing\u0026rsquo; when it comes to new media, I reckon Posterous has a pretty bright future.\nI\u0026rsquo;m reasonably active on Posterous (interestingly, I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have as slow a start with it as I did with Twitter).\nGiven I blog regularly here (obviously!), here and here, I tweet quite often and regularly update my LinkedIn page (and to a much lesser extent Facebook) - do I need Posterous in my life right now?\nI guess I don\u0026rsquo;t. More\u0026hellip; Mini-Blog Experiment: IBM, MS, LSI and SGI by Jon Carlson of LSI\nThis week, four big tech brands (IBM, Microsoft, LSI and Silicon Graphics) are experimenting w/a “mini-blog” while attending the Supercomputing Conference in Portland. Essentially, technology experts from each company agreed to blog “live” for four days only – a unique opportunity for the IT and data storage communities to join a dialogue w/business-critical technology providers. The target audience was narrow, the High Performance Compute (Supercomputing) a subset of the IT and data storage, data center segment. More\u0026hellip; Stephen Fry: celebs no longer need the press by Mark Pinsent of Mark Pinsent\nI\u0026rsquo;m not at the #140conf taking place in London today, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t hear this firsthand, but it\u0026rsquo;s been tweeted enough by people that are there that I think we can take it as fact.\nUK Twitter poster child, Stephen Fry, just said something like: \u0026ldquo;Celebrities can cut out the press from their PR. We no longer need them. Why speak to a publication with a circulation of hundreds of thousands when I can speak to millions through my keyboard?\u0026rdquo;\nI imagine it\u0026rsquo;s a quote that\u0026rsquo;ll get replayed a fair bit. More\u0026hellip; Twitter and Facebook could significantly change human health by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the biggest breakthrough in human health in the last couple of hundred years do you reckon? Is it antibiotics? Or, perhaps, anaesthetics? Or what about scanner technology? In spite of these significant developments in human medicine, they are not as revolutionary in health terms as the installation of sanitation. Clean water supplies do more to change human health than anything else; much of the problems in \u0026ldquo;third world\u0026rdquo; nations can be put down to poor sanitation.\nWhen seniors use onlince social networks they could well be improving their health More\u0026hellip; eModeration\u0026rsquo;s Social Round-up #13 by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog\nWelcome to eModeration\u0026rsquo;s twice-weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate). This week: News Corp and Google; Twitter\u0026rsquo;s wailing grumps; Britney\u0026rsquo;s encounter with the Dark Side; and why Stephen Fry is like a giant St Bernard.\nCheck back soon!\nTHE HEADLINES / THE LOWDOWN / IN OTHER NEWS / ON FACEBOOK / ON TWITTER / ON GOOGLE / BRANDS GET SOCIAL / UNDER THE GAVEL / SOCIAL STATS / ON MOBILE / VIRTUAL AND GAMES / THINKING\nTHE HEADLINES \u0026hellip; More\u0026hellip; The Golden Triangle by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: ShutterstockPrior to keynoting the PACA conference in Miami, Maria Kessler, president of the PACA Association, asked me if I had read a recent post by Fred Wilson entitled “The Golden Triangle.” We were deep in conversation as I was seeking an alternate title for my next book that identifies the divide between brands, information, and consumers and how we can, as social architects and engineers, build the bridges between people, contextual relationships, and technology. While “The Golden Triangle” More\u0026hellip; Facebook is right on the button for safety by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nChildren who get bullied online should rightly be protected; so too should adults who get \u0026ldquo;cyberbullied\u0026rdquo; as it is called. Today, though, a major row has erupted between the police and Facebook over a seemingly innocuous little \u0026ldquo;button\u0026rdquo; that helps people cope with online abuse. Jim Gamble, the CEO of the UK\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre\u0026rdquo; (CEOP), has been on radio and TV all day doing a good impression of \u0026ldquo;Mr Angry\u0026rdquo;; he has been very outspoken in his criticisms of Facebook in particular. More\u0026hellip; Making stuff up by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nHow do you market your company, products, and services?\nAre you sitting around your comfortable offices with your colleagues just making stuff up? Or do you really understand your buyer personas and what problems they have that you can solve?\nI share my thoughts on making \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; up in this short video.\nThanks to Stacy Melillo Spognardi at Cisco for asking the question that prompted this answer. I sat down with Stacy in my office (yes that\u0026rsquo;s my crap you see in the background of the video). More\u0026hellip; On Twitter and Social Networks, Brands Benefit from Conversations by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: ShutterstockA recent study revealed 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. Now we learn that Twitter users are actively paying attention to brands on the popular information network.\nAccording to research conducted by Performics and ROI Research, about half of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information.\nThe companies studied the activity of 3,000 users of social networks in the U.S. More\u0026hellip; Are You Actively Promoting Your Email Copywriting Expertise? This is Why You Should… by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nIt might be Facebook and Twitter getting all the attention these days. But there’s one old warhorse of internet marketing that continues to deliver real results – and that’s email. It might not be as sexy as its social media cousins. But email continues to be a reliable, trusty marketing tool for building relationships, delivering special offers and attracting website visitors.\nAnd it’s popularity is set to grow.\nAccording to a recent survey by Campaigner (an email marketing service provider) of 259 small firms: More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/11/friday-roundup-monitoring-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.monitoring-social-media.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMonitoring Social Media 09\u003c/a\u003e\n event this week was a \u0026lsquo;standing-room-only\u0026rsquo; event. And I particularly enjoyed the \u003ca href=\"http://oursocialtimes.com/index.php/2009/11/monitoring-social-media-09-photos-presentations/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentations\u003c/a\u003e\n from \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/webmetricsguru\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarshall Sponder\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/joodoo9\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGiles Palmer\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/bradleyjlittle\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBrad Little\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/katyhowell\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKaty Howell\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere is a couple of points I made in my participation of the panel debating the future of social media monitoring.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirstly, this sector will broaden its focus. I define social media as being a subset of the social Web, so the social Web = social media (blogs, facebook, twitter) + apps (tweetdeck, skype) + services (geo-location, social search) + the network (including the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternet of Things\u003c/a\u003e\n). Then things get really interesting!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSecondly, there are \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-increasingly-crowded-market-of-social-web-analytics\"\u003emore than 70 vendors\u003c/a\u003e\n in this space, and commoditisation has effectively made data, indexing, simple analysis and pretty charts FREE. The conclusive step in this process will be Google\u0026rsquo;s entry into social media monitoring, which I think might happen the first quarter of next year.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Monitoring Social Media 09"},{"content":"As the UK\u0026rsquo;s first appointment to the new role of storytelling laureate said self-deprecatingly this week on the Today programme, listening is more important than speaking, else we\u0026rsquo;d have two tongues and just one ear of course.\nWith that in mind, and having read all of this week\u0026rsquo;s top contributions to MarCom Professional, I\u0026rsquo;m going to shut up and leave you to browse amongst them.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nTwitter is dead - long live Twitter by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nTwitter users love the system and are very passionate about the benefits it brings them. But increasingly, Twitter is looking like it is on its deathbed. High profile celebrities, such as Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana) have left Twitter and Stephen Fry threatened to leave but returned. Facebook continues to rise, while Twitter remains stagnant Now, new data from the web intelligence company, Hitwise, suggests that Facebook is simply overpowering Twitter. Indeed, Twitter\u0026rsquo;s initial growth appears to be falling. More\u0026hellip; Qwest has their social media launch lived up to the hype? by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nIn a recent article Forbes talks with Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, about the future of social networking technologies in the enterprise.\nBesides being interested in his comment that \u0026ldquo;voice is now an application\u0026rdquo; the article didn\u0026rsquo;t give too much insight into social media. \u0026ldquo;We still are at the tip of the iceberg, if you will, in terms of what the potential for social networking will be for businesses.\u0026rdquo;\nHe stated what we often find when talking to large companies about social media especially if the technology people are involved - \u0026ldquo;When a business starts to think about social networking, they, first of all, are concerned about control and security types of issues\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; \u0026lsquo;Column Inches\u0026rsquo; Argument Gives Weight to Another Dilemma: the True Role of PR by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI read a good blog post this week by Sarah Emerson from Millward Brown entitled \u0026lsquo;Stop Pretending PR is Worth the Same as Advertising Space\u0026rsquo; (the comments thread is also definitely worth a look).This blog post is not meant to be derogatory to Sarah\u0026rsquo;s article. Hers is a good piece and well worth reading. Please do so :)\nNo, my post rant has its origins in the fact Sarah felt the need to write such a post.\nSurely - now we are coming up to a decade on from the turn of the century - the whole notion of measuring editorial exposure by comparing it to equivalent advertising spend (aka AVE) is more than a little outdated? (Again Sarah, this is not having a shot at you). More\u0026hellip; The Competition for Your Social Graph by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThis is the abbreviated version of my current contribution to TechCrunch, “In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC?“ Source\nFacebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée to the future of the social Web as each strive to host, what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others, refer to as our personal social operating system (OS). More\u0026hellip; Grateful Dead at the forefront of marketing technology by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThis week I had a chance to hang out with Jay Blakesberg, long-time Grateful Dead tour photographer, in his San Francisco studio.\nWe discussed how the band (now called The Dead) is at the forefront of using technology for marketing. This video is about 9 minutes and includes highlights from the discussions. Please take the time to hear Jay describe what a true marketing powerhouse of a band is doing more than 45 years after they originally formed.\nI suggest letting the video load before watching. More\u0026hellip; Twitter Releases New Widget for Lists by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTwitter recently expanded its new Lists service to users network-wide and in doing so, injected a sense of excitement, confusion, and also utility. Lists represent a significant milestone for Twitter as it transcends asynchronous conversations and and broadcast messages into a form of intelligence gathering, education, entertainment, and news.\nTwitter Lists are also stirring controversy as many believe that it sets the foundation for a new level of establishing a metric for influence. Whereas prominence was measured by the number of followers as well as the friends-to-follower ratio, now the amount of Lists that include any given entity factors into an equation for establishing authority. More\u0026hellip; The Evolving PR Crisis: The Future of the Embargo by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCreditIn media and blogger relations, PR typically wields two powerful tools to help boost the effectiveness of pitching and potential placement of news: the embargo and the exclusive.\nIn the case of an exclusive, a story is usually packaged prior to official release for one particular writer, fully understanding their style, nuances, and audience. If the story is accepted, it is not pitched to any other media outlets until after the story runs. The benefit for PR is that it can bank on the publishing of a guaranteed, high profile story. More\u0026hellip; Q\u0026amp;A with Durrants’ Jeremy Thompson on the Metrica deal, evaluation, aggregators and the NLA by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI caught up with Jeremy Thompson this morning, managing director of Durrants, to talk about media monitoring market, PR evaluation, aggregators and the NLA.\nDurrants has been on the acquistion trail. It acquired Metrica last week and the UK print monitoring business of Cision UK in July.\nThe media monitoring sector is oft regarded as the commodity end of the PR industry and is almost certainly under reported - if Durrants was listed in the annual PR Week League tables it would make a top ten slot. More\u0026hellip; Grappling w/the Social Media Back-Channel Conversation by Jon Carlson of LSI\nMost B2B marketers and support providers have become adept at carrying on multiple IM conversations during conference calls, one ear listening while producing a running commentary on the merits of the discussion, or even expanding the back-channel conversation well beyond the topic at hand. During meetings (digital etiquette aside), text messaging now consumes much more attention than the running dialogue. Conference call and net-meeting participants now expect the sidebar comments from guests attending. More\u0026hellip; Are you socially isolated? by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nImagine teenagers in their bedrooms right now, hunched over their laptop, tapping away on their keyboard and checking out their favourite tracks on iTunes or MySpace. It\u0026rsquo;s an image that many \u0026ldquo;do-gooders\u0026rdquo; would have us believe is all too common and which is really bad for youngsters.\nWill using the internet isolate you from the rest of the \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo;? You can almost hear the Daily Mail headline screaming \u0026ldquo;Ban kids from the Internet\u0026rdquo; or some such diatribe. More\u0026hellip; Bloggers and journalists needed for annual Glide survey by Andrew Smith of escherman\nFor the last few years, Glide Technologies (purveyors of the well known Online Press Centre product) have conducted an annual journalist survey to delve into the nitty gritty of what kind of information journalists want and how they want to receive it. The Glide surveys have tended to stand out from other similar, run of the mill research efforts in this area – they actually do seem to come up with some valuable insights. The 2009 survey is now getting underway – the key difference this year is that Glide is looking for input from both journalists and bloggers (sorry, no PR folk required). More\u0026hellip; Graduate Career fair for marketers by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nI was a speaker at the Cambridge University Careers Advertising and Marketing Communications event last week. It was a nice format of three talks with a concurrent exhibition by agencies with graduate recruitment schemes.\nI was asked to speak about the ‘family tree’ of the sector and what the job titles really mean. Thanks to all of you who contributed to my research panic post. I got more than enough material!\nWhile hanging around the exhibition it was interesting to see who was present and how they were projecting their brand identities onto prospective graduate hirees. More\u0026hellip; It’s free, but what’s the price? by Hamish Thompson of Twelve Thirty Eight Ltd\nOver the last several months I’ve been involved in plenty of pitches for new business. A decent share have been successful but there have been occasions – probably half a dozen – in which the potential client has opted to go for a bit of DIY PR instead while times are tight.\nIn all these instances I’ve taken an active interest in the outcome, largely because they were almost all cases where I felt that there was a great opportunity and I could see the story working in the nationals or on TV. More\u0026hellip; eModeration\u0026rsquo;s Social Round-up #11 by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog\nWelcome to eModeration\u0026rsquo;s twice-weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate). Check back soon!\nTHE HEADLINES \u0026hellip;\nHM Customs and Revenue is clearly in a state of some denial about the extent to which their pet subject is a byword for catatonic boredom: they have allowed the Boss Of All The Taxmen to have a go at delivering their new YouTube ad, instead of getting a professional in. If you are currently experiencing the agonies of insomnia, I advise you save this treat till bedtime. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Influencers are not Traditional Influencers by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSourceGuest post by Damien Basille, follow him on Twitter | Read his blog\nAs more and more brands are moving all of their ad spend online, defining how influence affects their return on investment is necessary and must be done as soon as possible. While some are making inroads to define these calculations many are overlooking the fact that influence affects everything. Without factoring in the real issue of different types of influence you run into a number of problems, for instance focusing on one group of influencers over another or getting broad sweeping numbers instead of knowing exactly how effective your time and money has been spent on the proper target. More\u0026hellip; Shout! With Martin Brooks, MD of Work Club by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nI founded an agency called Agency Republic in 2001 for Omnicom during digital boom times when clients were spending a lot on digital. We were smarter than the average – we had both really good digital and really good creative strategists so we could talk business.\nI left in 2007 with Andy Sandoz and Paddy Griffin to set up Work Club. The drivers were the lure of self employment and “doing it for myself” – I asked myself, if not now then when?\nWhat were the key decisions when founding the agency?\nHaving some money to back yourself rather than borrowing and having the right business partners is crucially important. More\u0026hellip; Rumors of the Death of Blogs are Greatly Exaggerated by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: feministingEach year at Blogworld Expo, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra presents The State of the Blogosphere as one of the event’s prestigious keynotes. For those who are unfamiliar with Technorati, it serves as a directory and search engine for the blogosphere as well as a benchmark for the ranking of blogs worldwide.\nWhile there has been much discussion about the relevance and even demise of blogs as the statusphere and micro updates gained traction in addition to earning prominence in the mainstream spotlight, the reality is that blogs are a vital ingredient to the media ecosystem. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/11/friday-roundup-6th-november-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs the UK\u0026rsquo;s first appointment to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/02/taffy-thomas-storytellling-laureate\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003enew role of storytelling laureate\u003c/a\u003e\n said self-deprecatingly this week on the Today programme, listening is more important than speaking, else we\u0026rsquo;d have two tongues and just one ear of course.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith that in mind, and having read all of this week\u0026rsquo;s top contributions to MarCom Professional, I\u0026rsquo;m going to shut up and leave you to browse amongst them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 6th November 2009"},{"content":"Nick Griffin, leader of the (racist, facist) British National Party, appeared on a prime time BBC news programme last night, Question Time .\nIt is hard to say which of the decision to do so or the content of the programme itself was most controversial. The event has most definitely generated serious heat, before, during and after, with Google News reporting in excess of 3000 stories on the matter.\nThe BNP is democratically elected, with two Members of the European Parliament, and that gives their leader a mandate to appear on a national TV funded by the electorate to convey his views and his policies.\nAnd I raise this matter here because marketing communicators know the value of dialogue. The days of Mr. Monologue Marketer are numbered, if not expired, and it\u0026rsquo;s through dialogue and freedom of speech and freedom of expression that we can best understand each other and respond accordingly.\nThose who cried for Mr. Griffin to be banned from appearing were wrong, yet hopefully many of them will now be satisfied. For through the most powerful media (yes, that\u0026rsquo;s still the TV, not Twitter!) the British public most definitely has come to better understand the BNP better than ever.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nMind the Social Media Gap by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nThis article first appeared in the PointZero magazine, issue 2 October 2009.\nIt is often said that marketing helps consumers decide which product they should buy, and the customer service and operations department of any company is where this work can come undone in a flash.\nAs rightly identified by Dave Evans in a recent post titled “Social Business: the New Black”\nMarketing sets the expectation, marketing creates demand, marketing helps a consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. More\u0026hellip; When marketing in the Netherlands you need to get Hyves by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhile in the Netherlands conducting a full-day seminar and presenting at several other events last week, I had an opportunity to learn a bit about Hyves.\nThe reach of Hyves is amazing.\nRadio Netherlands says one in three Dutch are on the social networking site. It is the second most visited site in the Netherlands after Google, but in terms of time spent, it is certainly tops. And Hyves has more users in the Netherlands than the other major social networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter combined. More\u0026hellip; Website eye tracking studies are fooling internet business owners by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nWeb designers are keen to explain the predominance of the \u0026ldquo;letter-f\u0026rdquo; approach to the internet. This comes from eye-tracking studies which show the way we look at web pages follows, broadly, an f-shape. We start in the top left hand corner, scan across and down with a quick glance across the middle.\nThe perceived wisdom is that we are checking for things like navigation, headlines and signs of trustworthiness. All of that is true, but the concentration on getting your website into an F-shape for usability purposes could be working against you. More\u0026hellip; How easy is it to get in touch? by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nI review a lot of websites when doing biz dev for CAS and also for clients. And too frequently I find that it is really hard to get in touch with some organisations. I’m not talking about using a general email address like admin@ or contact@ .\nTake a look at Bulletproof Design\nirritating music no contact form no cut/paste of contact information as it’s a flash site hard to find menu – had to hover over headline to get menus to appear. Freaking irritating – try another one…. More\u0026hellip; Blog that made the media star by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s further proof if any further were needed of the PR benefits of business blogging. After writing about the Daily Mail Stephen Gately controversy on Friday Will Sturgeon was invited onto Sky News alongside Matthew Todd, editor of Attitude. And today Sturgeon appeared on More4 News to discuss Twitter activism.\nSturgeon has form of course as the former editor of Silicon. But there’s no doubt that mainstream media researchers are using the blogosphere as a means to find commentators. More\u0026hellip; Press #FAIL = Social Media #FTW by Mindy Gofton of I-COM\nIn a week where we\u0026rsquo;ve seen outcry on social media sites force a major multi-national and a powerful law firm to back down in the face of public protests in favour of freedom of the press and in which users of social media sites have also forced an apology after a Daily Mail journalist wrote a column that many felt was openly homophobic, the media has been busy analysing the new role of social media in forming mass opinion within society.\nIn an article published on journalism.co.uk John Mair writes of protests via Twitter and Facebook, \u0026ldquo;It gives the illusion of democracy and belonging to a movement whereas in reality is it membership of a mob, albeit a virtual one? Is this healthy for democracy and media accountability or not?\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Radical thinking required to save magazine industry by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M\nThe closing down of Conde Nast\u0026rsquo;s Gourmet and Modern Bride magazines prompted Catherine Sherwood\u0026rsquo;s call for radical innovation to save the quality magazine industry which was full of insight.\nAs Catherine said, it paints \u0026ldquo;a pretty grim picture of the future of print publications, even with a fairly robust internet or social media strategy\u0026rdquo;.\nGourmet had the following: Website with both daily content and archives of recipes, restaurants, etc. Online forums Facebook page YouTube channel with lots of recipe demonstrations Podcasts on iTunes Three Twitter accounts (the magazine’s editor, the travel section’s editor and the magazine itself). More\u0026hellip; Terrific Inbound Marketing book shows you how to get found by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nToday Inbound Marketing is released and I am so excited.\nThis terrific book is written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah co-founders of HubSpot. Learn more about Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs here.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re living a revolution!\nWe\u0026rsquo;re living a revolution in the way people communicate.\nHow did a relatively unknown, young, single-term black senator with funny ears and a funnier name get elected President of the United States? Simple: He and his team understood the revolution and harnessed the power of the Web to communicate effectively with the masses. More\u0026hellip; 10 Great Branded iPhone Apps (and Pepsi\u0026rsquo;s) by David Knowles of\nWith marketing so fragmented these days, even the biggest brands risk slipping up trying something new. And it’s been Pepsi left blushing after its iPhone app, ‘Amp Up Before You Score’, attracted the wrong sort of headlines for pigeonholing women (around half its customers). It’s certainly one experiment they won’t be in a rush to repeat.\nWhilst most don’t backfire so spectacularly, there’s no shortage of poorly conceived iPhone apps created by brands. More\u0026hellip; Holy Social SEO Batman! by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nLast month, I shared with you Bing’s plan to launch its Bing and Ping beta feature (Search Results to Go Social with bing), which allows for social sharing of select search results in bing, like movie times. The feature has since been released to beta users, extending at least some search results into the social networks. Today, Microsoft announced it has signed an agreement with Facebook and Twitter to integrate status updates from these two social powerhouses’ users into its search results. More\u0026hellip; The Second Life of Second Life by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSourceRecently, I wrote about a study written by virtual worlds consultancy kzero.co.uk, which reported that membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million. Today, I received an update from the company and it appears that Second Life is experiencing a second life of its own.\nThis story begins with an impressive milestone: Second Life Residents have transacted the equivalent of more than $1 billion with each other while spending more than one billion hours in Second Life. More\u0026hellip; The Science of Retweets on Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource: Young Go GetterOver the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with “Viral Marketing Scientist” Dan Zarrella on special projects related to Twitter. His focus on social science and psychology as it relates to new media and online interaction and behavior is in line with my philosophy and approach to understanding and documenting socialized media.\nZarrella recently debuted TweetPsych, a sophisticated system that uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/10/friday-roundup-the-bnp-on-question-time/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNick Griffin, leader of the (racist, facist) British National Party, appeared on a prime time BBC news programme last night, \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/questiontime\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQuestion Time\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is hard to say which of the decision to do so or the content of the programme itself was most controversial. The event has most definitely generated serious heat, before, during and after, with Google News reporting in excess of 3000 stories on the matter.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe BNP is democratically elected, with two Members of the European Parliament, and that gives their leader a mandate to appear on a national TV funded by the electorate to convey his views and his policies.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the BNP on Question Time"},{"content":"I thought I\u0026rsquo;d highlight some great contributions on the subject of mobile in today\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional Friday Roundup, and then point you to an event covering a topic close to my heart, social Web analytics (my ebook on the topic is here ).\nSo, first up, the ever vigilant Andrew Grill always points his readers to useful stuff. This time it\u0026rsquo;s the latest publication from Bena Roberts at GoMo News , a collection of insightful essays on all things mobile.\nAnd David Knowles aims to inject a dose of realism into the iPhone app craze. If you\u0026rsquo;re intent on getting an app out there, here\u0026rsquo;s what you should know about what\u0026rsquo;s working and what isn\u0026rsquo;t .\nMonitoring Social Media 09 is bringing together social media monitoring experts and suppliers with PR and marketing professionals for a one-day conference in London on 17th November 2009. Speakers from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Market Sentinel, Brandwatch, Edelman, The Conversation Group, and the UK\u0026rsquo;s #1 PR blogger, Neville Hobson, will be discussing issues such as ROI, sentiment analysis, reputation management, infuence detection and data quality. (There\u0026rsquo;s an early bird ticket until 17th Oct.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you there.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSurprise \u0026amp; Delight: Powderfinger\u0026rsquo;s Twitter Campaign Builds Buzz for New Album by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nOne of Australia\u0026rsquo;s biggest-selling rock bands Powderfinger yesterday turned guerrilla marketing into an art form, performing three free concerts in the hearts of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne\u0026hellip;all on the one day!The cool thing Twitter was the only promotional channel the band used to get the word out. Fans did the rest in hyping the performances and the crowds followed.\nThe band started seeding the idea of the triple date tour earlier in the week, but held off giving too much away. Then, half an hour before each gig, they revealed where they would be playing, thus sending Twitter into a flutter. More\u0026hellip; When social media meets mobile – a perfect match? by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nThis post looks at taking social media mobile and how the growth in social networks will drive mobile internet usage.\nYou can’t help noticing how fast social networks are growing around the world, and with the two that get the most press lately – Facebook and Twitter, the real question is what does the explosion of social networks mean for mobile?\nWith twitter it used to be “What are you doing?” but with the explosion of mobile services, it has rapidly become “What are you doing and where are you doing it?” More\u0026hellip; Interaction in Advertising – New White Paper from eModeration by Tia Fisher of eModeration Blog\nWe’ve just published our latest white paper, Interaction in Advertising, which is summarised below. The paper examines how advertising is evolving from a one-way communicative process (the advertiser telling the consumer what they should be thinking), to a more collaborative, engaging format where brand and consumer communicate with an open dialogue.\nThe paper discusses examples of campaigns that are putting interaction in advertising into practice and highlights the risks and benefits of the developing trend. More\u0026hellip; Social media consultants: A call to action by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nGuest post by Jennifer Leggio, Read her blog | Follow her on Twitter Source: Shutterstock\nIf you’re dubbed a social media expert these days it’s almost like getting marked for professional death. It’s become even more popular to deny social media expertise as it has to claim faux expertise. Which means that the snake oiliest of the social media expert types have tried to give themselves a bit more oomph: they use the term consultant.\nSocial media expertise in general has become a joke, sadly, as there really are people out there who understand social media and how it relates to business. More\u0026hellip; GoMo News magazine showcases mobile thought leadership by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nBena Roberts and the team at GoMo news asked thought leaders in the mobile space to share a mix of insight, due diligence and perception with us. What they got was a number of razor sharp articles piercing the heart of the mobile marketing, mobile advertising, barcode and mobile search space. The resulting essays in mobile hope to make a difference, and can be read and enjoyed, studied, torn apart and used by vendors, workers, students and competitors to benchmark ideas or innovation. More\u0026hellip; David Letterman gets in front of the news by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nAmerican television personality David Letterman used his Late Show on October 1 to confess to an extortion attempt from someone threatening to expose affairs that Letterman had with staffers. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave commentary about the tawdry aspects of this to the thousands of other people who are weighing in with opinions on the sex angle. However, I do want to comment on the way that Letterman has chosen to handle the disclosure.\nGetting in front of a media crisis\nThe public heard about the affairs and the blackmail attempt from David Letterman himself first. More\u0026hellip; London says welcome to Foursquare! by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nMass excitment in the 33 Digital office today as it was announced that Foursquare had launched in London. As CNet reported:\n“Through a tweet, Foursquare announced that it will be bringing the service to London this week. This is Foursquare’s second European city. Amsterdam was first, but London is a whole different animal. London is the top Twitter-using city in the world, so people may be open to a new social service like Foursquare.”\nWe’ve written about Foursquare before on the 33 Digital blog and Drew Benvie covered it in the run up to launch way back at the beginning of August, but if you’re not sure what all the fuss is about, here’s an explanation from Foursqaure itself: More\u0026hellip; WPP’s Sorrell shares industry financial outlook at PRCA conference by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nImage via Wikipedia Sir Martin Sorrell was first to take the platform today and share his experience of the current climate for marketing services at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference at Mill Bank Tower, London.\n“I don’t see a recovery. I’ll declare victory when year-to-year revenues are better, not less worse. Confidence needs to transfer into cheque signing,” said Sorrell.\n“PR will be down like-for-like in 2009,” he said.\nPRCA chairman and Ketchum boss David Gallagher was more upbeat. More\u0026hellip; How the Obama campaign worked with bloggers by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOn Election Day 2008, an amazing 25 percent of Barack Obama voters were already directly linked to him through social media, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites according to The Nation. Putting aside politics and just considering the election from a marketing standpoint, I am absolutely convinced that Obama won the U.S. presidential election because he was the candidate who most strongly embraced new marketing. Way back before he even declared himself a candidate, Obama and his staff and volunteers jumped into the online world. More\u0026hellip; What Brands Need to Know About Marketing with Mobile Apps by David Knowles of\nNearly two years after its release, it seems as though iPhones are becoming overloaded with gimmicky apps that get deleted after only two days. And this is particularly true when the app has been created as part of a marketing campaign. Last year I commented on why iPhone apps were at the top of many brands’ Christmas wish list. Ever since Stanley Works released their virtual spirit level, brands have been pumping out mobile apps on an industrial scale. To be fair, it’s easy to understand why. More\u0026hellip; Introducing The Social Compass by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAn excerpt from my next book…\nA compass is a device for discovering orientation and serves as a true indicator of physical direction.\nInspired by a moral compass, The Social Compass serves as our value system when defining our program activities. It points a brand in a physical and experiential direction to genuinely and effectively connect with customers, peers, and influencers, where they interact and seek guidance online.\nThe Compass features the artistic talents of Jesse Thomas and JESS3 the team that helped me bring The Conversation Prism to life. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/10/friday-roundup-monitoring-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI thought I\u0026rsquo;d highlight some great contributions on the subject of mobile in today\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional Friday Roundup, and then point you to an event covering a topic close to my heart, social Web analytics (\u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003emy ebook on the topic is here\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, first up, the ever vigilant Andrew Grill always points his readers to useful stuff. This time it\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.grill/gomo-news-magazine-showcases-mobile-thought-leadership\"\u003ethe latest publication from Bena Roberts at GoMo News\u003c/a\u003e\n, a collection of insightful essays on all things mobile.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd David Knowles aims to inject a dose of realism into the iPhone app craze. If you\u0026rsquo;re intent on getting an app out there, \u003ca href=\"/posts/david.knowles/what-brands-need-to-know-about-marketing-with-mobile-apps\"\u003ehere\u0026rsquo;s what you should know about what\u0026rsquo;s working and what isn\u0026rsquo;t\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.monitoring-social-media.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMonitoring Social Media 09\u003c/a\u003e\n is bringing together social media monitoring experts and suppliers with PR and marketing professionals for a one-day conference in London on 17th November 2009. Speakers from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Market Sentinel, Brandwatch, Edelman, The Conversation Group, and the UK\u0026rsquo;s #1 PR blogger, Neville Hobson, will be discussing issues such as ROI, sentiment analysis, reputation management, infuence detection and data quality. (There\u0026rsquo;s an early bird ticket until 17th Oct.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ll see you there.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Monitoring Social Media 09"},{"content":"I need your clicks.\nYou see, I\u0026rsquo;ve been offline for ten weeks and handed the mantle of the Friday Roundups to Andrew Smith , as you will have noted. Thanks Andrew. But he appears to have grown the open and click rates in that short time faster than we were doing before he sprinkled his magic copywriter dust. Which is pleasingly irritating ;-)\n(If you need someone who \u0026lsquo;gets\u0026rsquo; the social Web, understands online communities and every Google Web tool under the cloud, he\u0026rsquo;s your man. Damn fine social media trainer too by all accounts.)\nBut I digress. I have to acquit myself now that Andrew and I will be alternating on the Roundups. So perhaps I can tempt you with the following morsels as you scroll down towards the long list\u0026hellip;\nDavid Meerman Scott interviews GM staff about their social Web engagement (here\u0026rsquo;s the one with the big boss ), and Mark Pinsent critiques the doing-all-the-work-for-nothing-we\u0026rsquo;ve-only-got-ourselves-to-blame new business pitch process, and provides his constructive alternative approach .\nSo watch these clicks and weep Andrew! Lastly, I\u0026rsquo;d also like to thank Gemma Griffiths and Simon Hilliard for their help moderating MarCom Professional. Much appreciated.\nHave a super weekend one and all, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nESPN takes Social Media Guidelines Just a Bit Too Far or How to Stunt Your Employee’s Growth by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nToday’s guest Op-ed contributor is Serena Ehrlich, Co-Founder, StartUp Army; Past President, NIRI Los Angeles Chapter, Dallas/Fort Worth Chapter Credit\nRecently ESPN established new social media guidelines banning their employees from discussing anything related to ESPN or sports on any social network. Some see this as a clever move for ESPN to save their intellectual property. I see this decision as detrimental both to ESPN as well as their employees. This sweeping decision has two tragic consequences. More\u0026hellip; Stop the PR pitch madness by Mark Pinsent of Mark Pinsent\nLast week, when Confused.com decided to pay some of the losing agencies in its pitch process for the ideas that they came up with, the company was roundly applauded by the PR industry. \u0026ldquo;At last,\u0026rdquo; people cried, \u0026ldquo;a recognition that creative ideas are valuable.\u0026rdquo; Fair enough. Clive at Bite wants to know how you put a price on a great idea, rightly pointing out that the value of a brilliant piece of creative will likely outstrip the two minutes in the shower it took to come up with it. More\u0026hellip; First ever Mobile Application Stores Conference at CTIA by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nNews comes from London Calling friend Ajit Jaokar about the first ever Mobile Application Stores Conference at CTIA. From a quick scan of the release, it has a great lineup of speakers. More information is presented below: The Mobile Application Stores, Strategy and Deployment conference http://www.mobileappevent.com/ is proud to announce its all-star speaker lineup for this unique event. Mobile Application Stores is a partner seminar of International CTIA WIRELESS I.T. and Entertainment October 8th in San Diego. More\u0026hellip; Command and control communication planning gives way to authentic campaigning, says Alastair Campbell by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nAccording to Alastair Campbell it is no longer possible to control a media agenda and the style of communication planning that characterised his tenure in Downing Street no longer works.\nCampbell is best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy.\n“We are no longer in control. The challenge of communications in a modern organisation is a scary prospect,” he said.\nCampbell addressed an invited group of communication professionals at a dinner at The Capital Restaurant in London hosted by Durrants on Thursday evening. More\u0026hellip; Never Alter Your Company Brand Unless… by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nBranding 101 says to establish your company brand and then be consistent. Place your brand everywhere and under no circumstances should you change that brand. Use specific PMS colors to print on slick stock and different PMS shades on uncoated stock. The RGB values and hex codes are specified. Maintain a clearance distance of x space around the logo. Never change the size relationship between the mark and the text. And never, ever, under any circumstances, or risk your own personal safety, alter the logo. More\u0026hellip; some lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learnt from an online crisis by Karalee Evans of headspace\nI have been thinking a lot lately about crisis communications and issues management for Public Relations professionals.\nOne reason I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it is recent events in my day job (which I won\u0026rsquo;t go into here). But further to this, another catalyst was the Social media and online marketing masterclass with David Meerman Scott.\nNow, the Masterclass with David was extremely interesting and to be frank, a little overwhelming in that there were so many insights and snippets of information I want to share. More\u0026hellip; Community building means making members feel special | Community Building by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nMembers of your community do a lot. You rely on them to make the community a success. You can influence the direction of your community, you can influence its content and you even have an influence over the type of members you want in the community. However, when it comes down to whether your community is going to be successful, your members are all that matter. You need to not only attract members that will help your community grow and continue to develop, but you need to keep them. You can do this by making sure they feel special. More\u0026hellip; Stop Talking About Social Media and Go Do It Already by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nGuest post by Louis Gray, @louisgray Credit: ShutterStock\nSocial media can be an incredible tool, both for producing and consuming incredible amounts of information. Over the last few years, there is no question that an unprecedented change has taken place, putting tools for publication and discovery in the hands of everyone – from simple text to photos and video. Social media tools are changing businesses in terms of how they can connect with customers, partners, peers and even the competition. More\u0026hellip; First look at new Vodafone 360 initiative \u0026amp; new apps by Andrew Grill of London Calling\nToday Vodafone announces their new Vodafone 360 initiative to raise the stakes in the mobile social networking and app store battle between operators. Designed as a major refresh of their Vodafone Live! initiative, Vodafone 360 aims to go beyond a simple web portal and instead link Vodafone customers with their favourite mobile applications and social networks. See a short intro video on the VF 360 site which explains how they will connect the web and mobile social media services together.\nThe new initiative will be launched later today, and demonstrations in London will feature new applications including: More\u0026hellip; GM CEO Fritz Henderson discusses new marketing by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nYesterday I spent the day at General Motors world headquarters in Detroit at the invitation of the GM social media communications team. I met a bunch of interesting people, drove some cool cars, and learned a great deal. I’ve got so much to share that I\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging exclusively about GM for the rest of the week. First up is my video interview with Fritz Henderson, President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors.\nWe discuss what helps to sell cars, including \u0026ldquo;new marketing\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Growing divide between politicians and web users by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPoliticians are consistently demonstrating they are growing ever further out of touch with the rest of us. A new study from the George Washington University in the USA shows that young people are interested in politics and they would love to get involved - if only politicians would talk to them and give them more, relevant information.\nVote for me! No thank you; you\u0026rsquo;re not my style Meanwhile an earlier piece of research showed that young people under the age of 24 are increasingly politically active online, yet the older, established political elite are failing to connect with them in any meaningful way. More\u0026hellip; What Brands Can Learn from Internet Dating by David Knowles of\nAccording to a recent study many of the top brands struggle when it comes to being loved. In fact, none of them scored above 30% at the ‘love score’ amongst customers, based on criteria such as whether the brand ‘makes time to reward me’, ‘relates to me best’ or ‘cares about me more than just money’.\nSo what’s gone wrong with the top brands’ love lives? Why aren’t they creating the emotional connections that are supposed to come from millions spent on marketing? Well, the low levels of affection for brands have been blamed on a lack of personalised engagement. More\u0026hellip; Christopher Barger on social media communications at GM by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSeveral people who have been following my video interviews with Fritz Henderson, CEO of General Motors and Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman have asked me how I was able to score such high profile discussions. Here\u0026rsquo;s how: I wrote a critical blog post in June Attention GM: Here are the top 5 marketing ideas for your reinvention. The post received hundreds of tweets and more than 50 comments. Very quickly (within hours actually) I was engaged with the social media team at GM. They turned me around. I went from a critic to a supporter. More\u0026hellip; How two customer magazine agencies stood out from the crown by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nReading the marketing magazine supplement on Customer Publishing and I\u0026rsquo;m struck by the longevity of a \u0026rsquo;new\u0026rsquo; marketing discipline that hit the scene a mere 15 years ago. One of my former colleagues made a fortune in an early customer publishing agency and failed to capitalise with subsequent genius… but I digress.\nI receive a couple of magazines produced by brands and organisations as a means of driving loyalty and brand engagement. Reading them, as a marketer, I am usually struck by how little of the content I really engage with. More\u0026hellip; Stop the PR pitch madness, part II…the nine point plan by Mark Pinsent of Mark Pinsent\nSo the post on Tuesday stirred up a neat little discussion. I was thinking that while it\u0026rsquo;s obviously easy to sit back and say what might be broken with a process, it\u0026rsquo;s also important to propose an alternative. So I thought I\u0026rsquo;d play client for half an hour, and try and work out how I\u0026rsquo;d go about selecting an agency in my perfect little theoretical world (though – and despite my flippant remark – you could do worse than read Gabbi\u0026rsquo;s summary of the Winning Without Pitching Manifesto in the comments). More\u0026hellip; One in Five Tweets are Related to Products by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAccording to a recent study, 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives.\nJim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro interaction as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. More\u0026hellip; Mary Henige of GM on storytelling and humanizing the company by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe final video in my series of four from my day at General Motors is with Mary Henige who is in charge of both social media communications and broadcast communications. I ask her about her dual role and we talk about storytelling (especially online) and its role in humanizing the company. If you have not seen the other videos, the links are:\nGM CEO Fritz Henderson discusses new marketing\nTop GM marketing exec Bob Lutz on effective communication\nChristopher Barger on social media communications at GM\nThis video is 7 minutes. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/09/friday-roundup-25th-september-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI need your clicks.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou see, I\u0026rsquo;ve been offline for ten weeks and handed the mantle of the Friday Roundups to \u003ca href=\"/people/andrew.smith\"\u003eAndrew Smith\u003c/a\u003e\n, as you will have noted. Thanks Andrew. But he appears to have grown the open and click rates in that short time faster than we were doing before he sprinkled his magic copywriter dust. Which is pleasingly irritating ;-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(If you need someone who \u0026lsquo;gets\u0026rsquo; the social Web, understands online communities and every Google Web tool under the cloud, he\u0026rsquo;s your man. Damn fine social media trainer too by all accounts.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut I digress. I have to acquit myself now that Andrew and I will be alternating on the Roundups. So perhaps I can tempt you with the following morsels as you scroll down towards the long list\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 25th September 2009"},{"content":"I have always admired the UK\u0026rsquo;s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century\u0026rsquo;s rules to this one.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a repeat of the opening sentence to a blog post of mine from 2007. And in the last couple of weeks the NLA appears to just get sillier and sillier and less and less in tune with how the world works today. They have announced their imminent intention to begin charging agencies and clients for sending URLs to each other.\nYes, you did read that right. I can assure you, that is the case, and no laughing please from those of you outside of the UK!\nNow I get copyright. As I had the opportunity to discuss with Lord Carter in relation to the Digital Britain report recently, the availability of too little copyright protection hinders innovation and competitiveness, as does too much. But whilst I appreciate that the newspaper available from my local shop is subject to copyright, I really don\u0026rsquo;t expect to be charged for directing a house guest to the shop.\nStephen Waddington picks up the cause in a post this week, and PRCA Director General Francis Ingham is not mincing his words either .\nI\u0026rsquo;m taking a break from the Friday Roundup for the next couple of months, but I leave in you good hands.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nIBM serves up an ace @Wimbledon by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nOn Saturday 4th July, I visited the Wimbledon Championships as a guest of IBM, in relation to a book I am writing on the business use of twitter (more on this in an upcoming post). IBM, in conjunction with their advertising Agency Ogilvy has served up three brilliant applications for the 2009 Wimbledon Championships. You can read more about the “Say Hello to a smarter Wimbledon” campaign, and my summary of each of them is below.\niPhone Wimbledon application\nThis is a must have application (just search for Wimbledon in the app store) for anyone following Wimbledon this year. More\u0026hellip; Imperial Sugar Company Newsroom: Brand journalism creates an authoritative voice by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhen an explosion at the Imperial Sugar Company (ISC) sugar refinery at Port Wentworth, near Savannah, GA, occurred in February 2008, fires burned for nearly two weeks. It was mainstream media\u0026rsquo;s dream story: Death and fire affecting a big corporation. Unfortunately for ISC, when journalists turned to the search engines for information about the company as they were writing their stories, many outdated reports and information appeared on the first pages of Google and the other search engines.\nWhen the crisis subsided, executives at ISC hired David E. More\u0026hellip; Why do we search for “marketing” 135,000 times per day in the UK? And where have all the click throughs gone? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nMarketing: searched for 135,000 times per day in the UK\nAccording to Google, we Brits enter the term marketing into our favourite search engine 134,466 times every day. That translates to around 4.1 million times per month (curiously, by contrast, the term selling is searched for only 32,877 times per day – or just over 1 million times per month).\nThe accepted wisdom is that the number one organically ranked page on Google can expect to gain – on average – a potential 42pc of the total number of searches performed for a term. More\u0026hellip; Use a blog to keep your customers happy by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nA happy customer is usually a loyal customer and is also someone who ends up referring business to you as well. In other words, look after your customers and they will look after you. That, of course, is a rather well-known business adage, which is why it is so suprising that so few companies use blogging tools as part of their customer service.\nDo you want to be rated excellent for your customer service? Many companies merely use blogs to provide news or opinions relating to their products and services. More\u0026hellip; NLA goes on the defensive over eClips charges as PRCA leads industry fight back by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPR Bristol reported today that the NLA is introducing a set of charges for the distribution of newspaper website content for business-to-business. PR Week carried the story at the end of last month. According to PR Bristol from January 2010 if you circulate a web page to a client both your agency and the client will need to pay the new NLA eClip charge. Clipping agencies will become liable for the cost from September 2009 and are likely to pass on the cost.\nIn the growing number of comments on the PR Bristol site an unnamed individual from the NLA defends its position. More\u0026hellip; Facebook Advertising to Surpass MySpace by 2011 by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nMySpace has been losing “face” over the course of the last year. With sliding traffic and attention as well as shifts in management and reductions in staff, MySpace is not only a place for friends, but also a place for skeptics.\nAccording to a Compete.com, Facebook received 122,559,672 unique visits in June 2009 twice that of rival MySpace, which realized only 60,973,908 unique visitors. In year-over-year comparisons, Facebook volume skyrocketed with 248.17% while Myspace slightly recoiled, down 5.65%. More\u0026hellip; Unhub helps your website visitors find you everywhere by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nWebsite owners often have a real problem thanks to the burgeoning impact of Web 2.0 technologies. The issues is this: most people active online these days have several places which they can call \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo;. They have a web site, a Facebook page, a Twitter page, not to mention Ecademy, Squidoo or dozens of other possible places.\nThe \u0026ldquo;Unhub\u0026rdquo; bar at the top of the screen means your web site visitors can easily find out more about you. So, where, exactly, do you send people? Should you send them to your main website or to your Facebook page? Or what about starting them off at Ecademy or your Squidoo people page? It\u0026rsquo;s all potentially confusing. More\u0026hellip; United Airlines Breaks Guitars by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fascinating how a customer service mishap can turn into a world wide rave, particularly when smart people are determined to let the world know about their situation in a clever way. Companies are on notice!\nIn the spring of 2008, the band Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and Dave Carroll witnessed his Taylor guitar being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago.\nHe discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. United Airlines didn\u0026rsquo;t deny the incident occurred but for nine months the various people Dave communicated with were reluctant to take responsibility for dealing with the damage. More\u0026hellip; B2B DIY Media Buying, or Use A Pro? by Jon Carlson of LSI\nMedia Buying: DIY (Or Not?) (Read time: 6-7 minutes) With budgets tight, companies are looking for every way possible to shave pennies. Is “Do-It-Yourself” a viable option? This isn’t actually a new conversation. Two plus decades ago when I was working in the automotive segment with an ingredient brand company, we discussed this multiple times. I’m Marcom in the high-tech sector now and my senior director just tossed the topic on the table this week. Media VP, David Rowe, and I sat down over a virtual cup o’ More\u0026hellip; The Decline of Traditional Advertising and the Rise of Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nForrester Research released its five year forecast that estimates interactive marketing spending from 2009 – 2014. Forrester predicts that interactive marketing in the US will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend by 2014 and will include search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing.\nMore significantly however, overall advertising in traditional media will continue to decline in favor of less expensive, more effective interactive tools and services. More\u0026hellip; Is Crowdsourcing Content Just an Excuse for Laziness? by David Knowles of\nIf you haven’t heard, the impact crowds can have on the news, and society in general, is a hot topic at the moment. Recent examples include the use of Twitter in the Iranian elections and the Guardian newspaper inviting its readers to audit MPs’ expenses.\nBut is all the hype around crowdsourcing just an excuse for laziness on the part of those who present that content as their own \u0026lsquo;work\u0026rsquo;’? After all, the concept has been tarnished by being linked to cheap labour and ways for companies to cut costs by outsourcing to the lowest bidder. More\u0026hellip; Heartfelt Blog Posts Provide Counterpoint to Hartigan Rant by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI read half a dozen blog posts this week that kind of made a mockery of the broadside News Limited boss John Hartigan recently aimed at the blogging fraternity. For those unaware of the outburst in question, in a speech to Canberra\u0026rsquo;s National Press Club Hartigan turned on the blogging fraternity, reportedly saying:\u0026ldquo;In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance\u0026rdquo;.Naturally, the blogging community bit back. More\u0026hellip; Facebook Helps Brands and Personalities Convert Visitors to Fans by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nFacebook Connect is connecting people across the social graph to fresh content and furthermore it’s channeling outside Web events into individual lifestreams. Essentially, Facebook is solidifying its position as not only your primary social network, it’s also a emerging as a central hub for your attention, updates, news, promotion, and enlightenment.\nNow, Facebook is extending its network to the World Wide Web, allowing brands and personalities who have or will host Fan Pages to embed a widget version of the page directly into Web sites, other social networks, social networks, and blogs. More\u0026hellip; Japanese supermarket makes buying easy for your online shoppers by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nJapanese shoppers are finding it easier to buy from a new kind of online store that replicates what they see in their local supermarket. The Okuwa Company owns over 140 supermarkets in southern Japan but has recently seen a boost to its online sales thanks to supplying its customers with a new computer program.\nBuying goods online could be just like being in a real supermarket for Japanese shoppers The program allows shoppers to enter a replica store where they can virtually wander around their local supermarket on their PC, picking items from the shelves as though they were in the real shop. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/07/friday-roundup-the-nla-and-copyright/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have always admired the UK\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.nla.co.uk/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNewspaper Licensing Agency\u003c/a\u003e\n for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century\u0026rsquo;s rules to this one.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat\u0026rsquo;s a repeat of the opening sentence to a \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/nla-agency-or-anachronism\"\u003eblog post\u003c/a\u003e\n of mine from 2007. And in the last couple of weeks the NLA appears to just get sillier and sillier and less and less in tune with how the world works today. They have announced their imminent intention to begin charging agencies and clients for sending URLs to each other.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYes, you did read that right. I can assure you, that is the case, and no laughing please from those of you outside of the UK!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the NLA and copyright"},{"content":"I was given a book last night. Free.\nFree, as in I didn\u0026rsquo;t pay for it, and \u0026ldquo;Free\u0026rdquo; as in the book\u0026rsquo;s title.\nThe author is Chris Anderson , editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of the widely acclaimed 2006 book \u0026ldquo;The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More \u0026rdquo; (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8 ).\n\u0026ldquo;Free\u0026rdquo; (ISBN 9781905211470 ) takes a look at the rise and rise in recent years of business models pivoting around the provision of stuff for free. The book has some interesting chapters for anyone involved in marketing, particularly in relation to Web search and publishing (the widely held expectation of not having to pay for Web content and the rise of free papers during the decline of traditional media).\nIndeed, The London Paper was one of the sponsors of last night\u0026rsquo;s event.\nIf you fancy a shorter read however, the MarCom Professional bloggers have some interesting insights into the world of marketing and PR as always this week. Brought to you, free :-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSo you want to write an ebook? 30 tips for success by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nEbooks are one of the most effective forms of new marketing. Ebooks have tremendous perceived value and therefore people tend to pass them on. They help solve problems and therefore buyers appreciate the content, branding the writer as someone worth doing business with.\nEbooks lead to sales!\nMany people have achieved business success by writing an ebook. So can you.\nMartin Soorjoo sent me his latest ebook The Black Book of Lie Detection: Effective techniques from a professional lie detector. More\u0026hellip; Google isn\u0026rsquo;t really a search engine after all by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nGoogle is no longer a search engine. Instead, it is fast becoming a \u0026ldquo;short cut\u0026rdquo; engine to get to content we already know about. The fact that \u0026ldquo;Michael Jackson\u0026rdquo; is the current number-one search term on Google should not amaze us. But the remaining \u0026ldquo;searches\u0026rdquo; show a surprising trend.\nEven typing in these few characters can be too much work for many people The second search term on Google is \u0026ldquo;facebook\u0026rdquo;. That means you can click on the first result to get straight to the Facebook home page. More\u0026hellip; Unveiling the New Influencers by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTraditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns.\nPersonality wasn’t absent is certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications.\nFor the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted. More\u0026hellip; The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nIn Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers (and here on MarCom Professional), he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.\nIf you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008. Of course I recognise we\u0026rsquo;ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I\u0026rsquo;m tracking. More\u0026hellip; You really should stop chasing web traffic by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nHow many Twitter followers have you got? Are you ashamed by the low number of contacts you have on LinkedIn? Do you wish you had more friends on Facebook? Have you ever wanted more visitors to your web site? Wherever you look online there is an apparent competition to reach the top in a vast array of league tables.\nDo you constantly check your web statistics?But it\u0026rsquo;s all nonsense; you are truly wasting your time if you worry about all of this, not to mention the stress and anxiety it is causing some people..! You can find blog posts about increasing your Twitter following and there are tools to let you know how much traffic your web site gets. More\u0026hellip; Adfonic launches mobile ad marketplace to rival AdMob by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI have been watching the Adfonic guys with interest since I met them in London prior to Mobile World Congress. I saw Paul and Wes last night at a function pre-launch and I asked them who they saw their major competitors were. “Admob” was the answer. I’m happy to give them some promotion below and enclose their launch release. Competition is a good thing and I hope they do well.\nLONDON, UK – July 1, 2009. Launched today, advertisers and agencies can bid for advertising on mobile sites and apps, creating a new revenue stream for mobile publishers. More\u0026hellip; A snapshot of Mobile Marketing in the UK by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nYesterday in the Times Newspaper a great 16 page supplement from Raconteur Media was included on mobile marketing – with great quotes from a number of leading companies and figures from the UK mobile marketing scene – including a number of MMA members.\nYou can download the PDF or browse the document online. Either way – it is a great snapshot of what is happening in the UK from a brands, agencies and technology perspective – well worth downloading and reading at your leisure. More\u0026hellip; Text 100 Global Blogger Survey results are in… time to listen by Jordan Stone of Text 100\nLast week, Text 100 released the results of our Global Blogger Survey which we conducted during April and May of this year. Over 449 bloggers from 21 countries took the time to fill out the survey and tell us what they think about how PRs interact with them, and more importantly, what they want from PR professionals.\nSo what did we find out?\nText 100 Global Blogger Survey Report FinalView more presentations from Text 100 Public Relations.\nYou can review the presentation findings in full on Scribd and Slideshare, but I’ve picked out what I think are some of the key lessons from the survey: More\u0026hellip; Advertising and the art of unconstrained thinking by Mark Pinsent of Mark Pinsent\nI’ve been thinking about Arun Sudhaman’s article in PR Week – following his time at the Cannes Lions – and the thought that it is still advertising agencies that come up with the really big ideas rather than PR agencies. I’m sure the article will cause some controversy and hand wringing from the PR community…when it contains quotes such as: “PR agencies have historically been subordinate…” it’s somehow inevitable. But I think it’s largely accurate. More\u0026hellip; Free Copywriting Swipe Files and Audio Interviews by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nThe simple act of copying sales letters and ads written by master wordsmiths should be part of every aspiring copywriter’s daily routine. Copying them word for word can ingrain into your mind what it feels like to compose high converting landing pages and emails. It’s almost as though you can plug into the writer’s mind and see through their eyes how they constructed a compelling argument on the page.\nStudying different styles of copywriting can also help develop your own. Just as music composers are influenced by other musicians, you can evolve your writing style by sponging up the techniques and wordplay written by some of the greats. More\u0026hellip; The first Influence Scorecard meeting by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nThanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who\u0026rsquo;ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I\u0026rsquo;m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven\u0026rsquo;t checked back with Charlene since February\u0026hellip; are you around next week Charlene?)\nI do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!\nGiven that I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/07/friday-roundup-freemium/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI was given a book last night. Free.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFree, as in I didn\u0026rsquo;t pay for it, and \u0026ldquo;Free\u0026rdquo; as in the book\u0026rsquo;s title.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author is \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson_%28writer%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eChris Anderson\u003c/a\u003e\n, editor-in-chief of \u003ca href=\"http://www.wired.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWired\u003c/a\u003e\n magazine and author of the widely acclaimed 2006 book \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; (\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSources\u0026amp;isbn=1401302378\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eISBN 1-4013-0237-8\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Free\u0026rdquo; (\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSources\u0026amp;isbn=978-1905211470\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eISBN 9781905211470\u003c/a\u003e\n) takes a look at the rise and rise in recent years of business models pivoting around the provision of stuff for free. The book has some interesting chapters for anyone involved in marketing, particularly in relation to Web search and publishing (the widely held expectation of not having to pay for Web content and the rise of free papers during the decline of traditional media).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Freemium"},{"content":"\nThanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who\u0026rsquo;ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I\u0026rsquo;m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven\u0026rsquo;t checked back with Charlene since February\u0026hellip; are you around next week Charlene?)\nI do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!\nGiven that I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That\u0026rsquo;s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question.\nThe market value I see it quite simply that the sooner this relatively nascent capability of SWA starts to make a real contribution to board level decision making, the better for industry, the better for customers, the better for you the suppliers. We will make it easier to integrate SWA into Business Performance Management , making the established BPM processes more powerful in turn. We will improve organisations\u0026rsquo; sensitivity and responsiveness to the marketplace, and make marketing more dynamic, effective and accountable.\nHow does this compare to the current situation? Well, today, we have a proportion of the PR and Marketing consultancies dabbling. An unfair verb? Perhaps. But no matter how seriously a tiny minority of these consultants may regard their use of SWA to date, it is absolutely \u0026lsquo;dabbling\u0026rsquo; imho given the difference between today\u0026rsquo;s typical application and the real potential here.\nWe have a proportion of the more enlightened CMOs / Marketing Directors trying to get their heads round what these pretty charts mean and, importantly, how this information should then inform their adaptation of strategy and tactical execution. And by the very emphasis of analysis (SWA) over synthesis, the SWA industry isn\u0026rsquo;t typically leading clients through the whole of this loop.\nThe sooner we can ease this integration and close the loop, the sooner the ROI-type metrics begin to really stack up, and the sooner serious investment in SWA makes sense. At that juncture, the wider market, the early majority, mid-market and laggards, wake up and smell the coffee and approve or increase their investment too.\nThe SWA industry is then a considerably bigger pie from which to take your slice. Or to use another metaphor, all boats float on a rising tide.\nCo-opetition Many of the 70 companies I listed in my last post, \u0026ldquo;The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics \u0026rdquo;, rarely compete. Sure, their services fall under the heading of SWA, but the services offered are not like for like.\nAs I pointed out this time last year in the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , each organisation will have particular needs and expectations of SWA, just as they do of BPM. For example, some organisations with widely discussed brands may want to pay for some automated sentiment analysis capability given the sheer volume of conversation out there. Others, with more niche product lines, may not. Some will require Turkish language capability, others will not. Some will want an ongoing consultant helping them fine tune the monitoring and analysis, others just want to enter basic terms into a webpage themselves. In my work helping clients procure SWA, any one vendor will make some short-lists and not others.\nSo getting together for all the good reasons listed above also means you may find and forge future partnerships with one another. I\u0026rsquo;ve heard some people call this kind of gathering and joint focus co-opetition\u0026hellip; not sure that\u0026rsquo;s a real word though. And pragmatically, I will be making a post in the next 18-24 months along the lines of \u0026ldquo;The increasing consolidation of the Social Web Analytics market\u0026rdquo;, so participation in this venture is one of the things you can do to help position your organisation to acquire or be acquired, whatever your intent.\nUltimately, and with no attempt at claiming anything but total bias in this regard, companies involved in defining, marketing and executing the Influence Scorecard approach, will be perceived as towards the top of the game compared to the also-rans.\nWhere and when This will be finalised next week following your ongoing feedback, but with the objective of narrowing this down and allowing you to get back to me if this really doesn\u0026rsquo;t work for you, it\u0026rsquo;s looking like New York, 8-9th October 2009 or 12-13th October 2009 (I know the latter encompasses Columbus Day.) Shout now or forever hold your peace!\nPotential sponsors, do get in touch (philip@influencecrowd.com ).\nLastly, here\u0026rsquo;s a link to my presentation outlining the Influence Scorecard as currently envisaged.\nThanks again, Philip.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/07/the-first-influence-scorecard-meeting/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influencescorecard2009.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who\u0026rsquo;ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I\u0026rsquo;m also delighted that \u003ca href=\"http://www.kdpaine.com/about/who.htm\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eKatie Delahaye Paine\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.altimetergroup.com/about.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCharlene Li\u003c/a\u003e\n have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven\u0026rsquo;t checked back with Charlene since February\u0026hellip; are you around next week Charlene?)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGiven that I\u0026rsquo;ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut that\u0026rsquo;s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That\u0026rsquo;s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The first Influence Scorecard meeting"},{"content":"In Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers , he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.\nIf you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . Of course I recognise we\u0026rsquo;ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I\u0026rsquo;m tracking. And wow is this market exploding.\n(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled \u0026ldquo;Listening + Conversation Management Systems\u0026rdquo;.)\nIf you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch . Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt .\nwww.Attentio.com www.Biz360.com www.Brandimensions.com www.brandseye.com www.burrellesluce.com www.buzzcapture.com www.buzzgain.com www.buzzient.com www.Buzzlogic.com www.buzznumbershq.com www.CollectiveIntellect.com www.commetric.com www.converseon.com www.crimsonhexagon.com www.customscoop.com www.CyberAlert.com www.Cymfony.com www.digitalinfluencegroup.com www.dna13.com http://ecairn.com www.empowerresearch.com www.ethority.net www.evolve24.com www.factiva.com/factivainsight www.filtrbox.com www.firstrain.com www.howsociable.com www.impactwatch.com www.infegy.com www.infongen.com www.Integrasco.com www.intelligencetechnologies.co.uk www.jodange.com www.Kaavacorp.com www.kontagent.com http://linkfluence.net www.Magpie.net www.marketsentinel.com http://measuringinfluence.com www.mediamiser.com www.mediatenor.com www.metatale.eu/english www.metrica.net www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/Precis http://motivequest.com http://netemic.com www.networkedinsights.com http://newmediastrategies.net www.nielsen-online.com www.onalytica.com www.overtone.com www.Radian6.com www.RelevantNoise.com www.reportinternational.com www.repumetrix.com http://reputationhq.com www.reputationinstitute.com www.samepoint.com www.sentimentmetrics.com www.sentimetrix.com www.sometrics.com www.synthesio.com www.sysomos.com www.techrigy.com http://telligent.com www.trackur.com www.trendrr.com www.ubervu.com www.Umbriacorp.com http://vanno.com www.vico-research.com/en www.VisibleTechnologies.com www.vmsinfo.com www.vocus.com/content/pranalytics.asp www.whitevector.com www.wisewindow.com _____________________\nEach and every vendor here is invited to contribute to or collaborate on the Influence Scorecard initiative\u0026hellip; please get in touch if this is of interest to you, whether or not you are listed here, whether or not you are into Social Web Analytics, Business Performance Management, Reputation Management, or Competitiveness.\n_____________________\nSocial Web Analytics is often referred to as Social Media Analytics, but I believe there\u0026rsquo;s a difference. Social Media is just one aspect of the Social Web, as explained in my post here .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/the-increasingly-crowded-market-of-social-web-analytics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; latest post, \u003ca href=\"http://www.briansolis.com/2009/06/unveiling-the-new-influencers/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eUnveiling the New Influencers\u003c/a\u003e\n, he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Social Web Analytics eBook 2008\u003c/a\u003e\n. Of course I recognise we\u0026rsquo;ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I\u0026rsquo;m tracking. And wow is this market exploding.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled \u0026ldquo;Listening + Conversation Management Systems\u0026rdquo;.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just \u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp\"\u003eget in touch\u003c/a\u003e\n. Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialtarget.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNathan Gilliatt\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics"},{"content":"It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called \u0026ldquo;transition period\u0026rdquo; and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.\nIt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I\u0026rsquo;m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.\nMost encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It\u0026rsquo;s concise. It\u0026rsquo;s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how.\nDo let me know what you think. (For those unfamiliar with the SlideShare embed below, you might like to know that clicking the little icon that looks like a presentation screen will make the presentation go full screen for ease of viewing.)\nBut one last thing before you take a look, I\u0026rsquo;m also trying to fix the when and where of the meetup. Current thinking is New York in October or November, but let me know if you have any other preferences\u0026hellip; especially if you\u0026rsquo;d like to host us or sponsor the venue!\nCheers.\nView more documents from Philip Sheldrake .\n________________________\nUpdate 3rd July 2009: see \u0026ldquo;The first Influence Scorecard meeting \u0026rdquo;.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/an-outline-of-the-influence-scorecard/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called \u0026ldquo;transition period\u0026rdquo; and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influencescorecard_strip.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I\u0026rsquo;m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial Web analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I\u0026rsquo;m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It\u0026rsquo;s concise. It\u0026rsquo;s an outline, and focuses on the \u003cem\u003ewhat\u003c/em\u003e rather than the \u003cem\u003ehow\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An outline of the Influence Scorecard"},{"content":"When media training people, it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes a challenge to convey exactly what might be considered quotable, or a soundbite in common parlance. You know\u0026hellip; not too long, not too short. Punchy. Insightful. Possibly controversial. Maybe funny.\nIn fact, Wikipedia just informs me that Mark Twain described the concept as \u0026ldquo;a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense\u0026rdquo;.\nWell, Paul Gambaccini is obviously expert at it. Of all the tributes paid to Michael Jackson today, his in the one that has stuck with me. Not verbatim, it went something like this on Radio 4\u0026rsquo;s Today programme:\nThere will only be one Michael Jackson. His life was in three parts. The Jackson Five years. The incredible Quincy Jones albums. And then the years as a freak.\nRIP Michael.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nVideo Podcast on Digital PR for the Third Sector by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nThis week, I was asked to be part of a panel for the PR Week video podcast , alongside the Refugee Council’s Gerdi Rees and Charmaine Griffiths from the British Heart Foundation. The panel was discussing the role of digital in voluntary sector PR, following the news that Oxfam has appointed a digital PR specialist as part of a plan to transform the way it uses online communications:\nMore\u0026hellip; Social Media is Rife with “Experts” but Starved of Authorities by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nPerhaps Lewis Carroll was peering into the looking glass when he wrote “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” In it, we were introduced to Tweetle Dum and Tweetle Dee, a curious duo that always shared a fruitful, entertaining, and complementary conversational exchange even though they always agreed to battle each other.\nSome suggest that the significance of Alice’s encounter with the twins explores how curiosity leads to the unknown and therefore, may not be worthy of pursuit. More\u0026hellip; Being regular is more important than being frequent for bloggers by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nBloggers often debate how often should they publish. \u0026ldquo;Should I blog every day?\u0026rdquo;, they ask, \u0026ldquo;Or should I blog twice a week or once a week?\u0026rdquo;, they add. Every blogger has the same quest - finding the perfect frequency of blogging. They are seeking a \u0026ldquo;magic pill\u0026rdquo; kind of answer; they want some expert to say \u0026ldquo;Once a week is the perfect frequency\u0026rdquo;, for instance.\nToo much blogging?\nBut here\u0026rsquo;s the truth; there is no \u0026ldquo;perfect\u0026rdquo; frequency of blogging. More\u0026hellip; Future of journalism debate: editors required by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe debate over the future of media continues but one thing is for sure, it’s too soon to rip-up the editorial model. The sheer volume of conversation taking place around the Iranian election result are cluttering up channels and making it impossible to hear voices that are coming directly from the country. On social networks from Flickr to Twitter messages of sympathy and support are generating huge volumes of noise.\nBroadstuff’s Alan Patrick reckons that it’s a new type of spam: More\u0026hellip; Bing a success\u0026hellip;so far by Andrew Allen of Vermont design Works / Vermont Online Marketing\nBing, the much hyped new search engine developed by MSN has so far lived up to its tremendous and expansive marketing campaigns. Microsoft might have finally learned that when web site users think of online search, MSN is not top of mind. It is still a distant third in the search engine battle (Google, Yahoo, and then MSN, now Bing).\nHowever, some of the new search features of Bing are quite fun to use. The importance for my online marketing is that Bing is becoming a much effective online marketing tool. More\u0026hellip; Launching ideas at the U.S. Air Force by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI recently spent the day at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, AZ to meet with public affairs officers and senior leaders of 12th Air Force / Air Forces Southern Air Combat Command. In this video, I ask my friend Capt. Nathan Broshear about his current role as Director of Public Affairs, how he uses social media, and a little about his 6 months in Baghdad working in public affairs in a war zone.\nCapt. Broshear says of his work: \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re not launching missiles, we\u0026rsquo;re launching ideas.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; The Anatomy of a Bad Site in a Good Google SERP by Mindy Gofton of I-COM\nSo I was doing a bit of research this morning in Google under the query \u0026ldquo;affordable health insurance.\u0026rdquo; I got the following result: Enlarge image in a new window\nNow, bearing in mind that I\u0026rsquo;m searching on google.co.uk, I\u0026rsquo;ve been given 3 American sites in the top 5 - although on the whole the results are for relevant websites (even though I don\u0026rsquo;t really need American health insurance). The most interesting, however, is site #4, Rochester Gentle Dental.\nThe name alone confused me as that sounds like the name of a dental clinic, not a health insurance provider, but it could be a small health insurance company offering dental insurance. More\u0026hellip; Google launches adsense beta for mobile apps by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nGoogle announced via their mobile blog today that they have launched a beta version of adsense for mobile apps.\nAdsense for apps means inserting ‘context relevant’ mobile ads into applications and comes off the back of what google describes as a successful trial period.\nInserting ads into applications certainly seems like a good idea from a app publishers point of view. In theory ads can help fund an application, especially those that are given away for free. Inserting ads that are relevant to the app and its users makes even more sense, right? Better targeting means more clicks, means better results for publishers and advertisers. More\u0026hellip; An outline of the Influence Scorecard by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP\nIt has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called \u0026ldquo;transition period\u0026rdquo; and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.\nIt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I\u0026rsquo;m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/friday-roundup-michael-jackson-tribute/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen media training people, it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes a challenge to convey exactly what might be considered quotable, or a \u003cem\u003esoundbite\u003c/em\u003e in common parlance.  You know\u0026hellip; not too long, not too short. Punchy. Insightful. Possibly controversial. Maybe funny.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn fact, \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundbite\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWikipedia just informs\u003c/a\u003e\n me that Mark Twain described the concept as \u0026ldquo;a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell, \u003ca href=\"http://www.paulgambaccini.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePaul Gambaccini\u003c/a\u003e\n is obviously expert at it. Of all the tributes paid to Michael Jackson today, his in the one that has stuck with me. Not verbatim, it went something like this on Radio 4\u0026rsquo;s Today programme:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThere will only be one Michael Jackson. His life was in three parts. The Jackson Five years. The incredible \u003ca href=\"http://www.quincyjones.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQuincy Jones\u003c/a\u003e\n albums. And then the years as a freak.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRIP Michael.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Michael Jackson tribute"},{"content":"There is a problem with social media. Conclusions should be drawn from the collective, from the aggregate of all social interaction, conversation, commentary, tagging, ratings etc. As the assertion goes, there\u0026rsquo;s wisdom in them there crowds.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not how we\u0026rsquo;re all used to working.\nWe have evolved, I think you\u0026rsquo;ll agree, to tune into one person at a time. Listen to one person. Watch one person. If I asked you to tell me what the population of London was thinking on a certain topic, unless that topic was their restricted choice of political expression and the question coincided with a local election, you\u0026rsquo;d be hard pressed to tell me.\nWe like our individual news readers, individual film stars, individual celebrities. And our individual journalists. You see, we can trust (most) journalists because they\u0026rsquo;ve had to subscribe to a code of conduct, a code of ethics. They have standards to maintain in executing their task at hand.\nNow see what happens when \u0026ldquo;professional\u0026rdquo; media tries to go trendy and incorporate social media\u0026hellip; do watch Jon Stewart\u0026rsquo;s Daily Show video here about CNN\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;unverified material\u0026rdquo; . Gawd bless CNN for making it clear it\u0026rsquo;s all about as reliable as any reference stating \u0026ldquo;so said a man in the street who calls himself tiddlywinks\u0026rdquo;. Someone needs to introduce these guys to social Web analytics .\nHope you enjoy this week\u0026rsquo;s Roundup.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nA Soliloquy: The Universal Language of Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\n© Tyler E Nixon (This is a striking photograph)\nWhile I was traveling in NY for InternetWeek and DC for the Vocus conference recently, Mark Olson sent a note inviting my thoughts on a post he was authoring on the subject of authenticity versus authority. I immediately replied, “I’m in.”\nThis is a subject that is garnering much of my attention and contemplation as they are among the key words that orbit the social media marketing universe and are in danger of spinning off course and into a black hole of obscurity. More\u0026hellip; Everything You Think You Know about SEO is Wrong by Mindy Gofton of I-COM\nWhen people find out I work in search engine optimisation I get two reactions. The first is confusion from people who have never heard of SEO. The second is disgust - from people who have.\nSEO consultants are like the used car salesmen of the internet, or so people seem to think. Even other industry professionals seem to believe that an SEO expert will as soon steal your wallet and use your credit cards to squat on 1000 different domains that will rank above your website by repeating keywords ad nauseum before they\u0026rsquo;ll actually help your business. More\u0026hellip; Social Media is the New \u0026lsquo;Punk Rock\u0026rsquo; by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nLove this video by communications and training consultancy Engage/ORM. It paints a picture comparing the rise of punk rock with that of social media. Great stuff! (Hat-tip @themediapod). More\u0026hellip; How an understanding of body language transforms your public speaking by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSome of my more popular blog posts in recent months have been about public speaking.\nTop ten tips for incredibly successful public speaking\nPresentation 201: Why public speaking is like billiards\nSo I wanted to offer another set of ideas for successful public speaking. I was thinking about the differences in what I do now as a professional speaker with 50 gigs a year compared to what I was doing five years ago when I speaking about once a month.\nThe importance of body language\nThe big difference in the way I present is that I am now focused on body language. More\u0026hellip; Is Twitter The CNN Of The New Media Generation? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is the unabridged version of my latest post on TechCrunch, “Is Twitter the CNN of the New Media Generation?“\nThis past weekend the Twitterverse spoke-out in exasperation and opposition against traditional media networks (CNN specifically) and the absence of instantaneous coverage of the Iranian election and the resulting fallout. “We the people” wanted real-time information regarding the violent protests that erupted on the streets of Iran and the stories probing potential foul play in the results. More\u0026hellip; 6 Degrees of Celebrity: Bing, xRank and Related Searches by Mindy Gofton of I-COM\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with xRank today, a tool from Bing that allows you to search for celebrities and brings up related results such as biographies, videos, images, shopping, popularity trends and any other range of available information.\nI was impressed by its ability to actually map relationships between seemingly unrelated things. For searches for minor celebrities, the results are rather intriguing as xRank seems to be able to map some rather insightful connections. For example, a search for the lead singer of American indie-folksters The Decemberists brought up the following: More\u0026hellip; You must keep your customers at arm\u0026rsquo;s length online by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nCustomers shouldn\u0026rsquo;t become your friends in places like Facebook. That\u0026rsquo;s the conclusion you can draw from new research from the University of Pennsylvania which looked at the whole basis for friendship. When we see people as true friends, we appear to change the way we relate to the individuals. The research shows that we engage with them without any need for anything in return.\nMaking online friends with customers could lose you money\nIf you become friends with your customers your brain will make it less likely that you will seek something from them in return for the relationship. More\u0026hellip; Brands are bottom of the internet heap by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nIranian bloggers could teach some major international brands a thing or two. The current uprising of emotion and anger within Iran is getting the inevitable clampdown from the authorities. But they are up against technologically adept youngsters who are able to publish their views online.\nProtesters in Iran defy the internet clampdown\nFor three days now, blogs, Twitter and other social networks have enabled the protesters to get their views known and probably to help organise themselves. More\u0026hellip; We are one. We\u0026rsquo;d like to look like one, talk like one, act like one. by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group\nThere is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That\u0026rsquo;s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.\nWhich is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn\u0026rsquo;t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn\u0026rsquo;t care. More\u0026hellip; The truth about blog and twitter content syndication by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of blog syndication. I write a post once on my Web Ink Now blog, push the button, and it appears in many places such as my Amazon page, sites like MarCom Professional, the search engines, Newstex Blogs on Demand, and more.\nBut many bloggers don\u0026rsquo;t understand how syndication works and why it is important. And some are downright fearful of syndication.\nThe ability to provide blog content to many places through syndication is incredibly valuable. With no extra work, syndication allows you to reach a potential audience of millions of people you would not otherwise reach. More\u0026hellip; Social media succession planning by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nImage via CrunchBase We’ve just completed a piece of planning work for a prospect and spotted the issue that Econsultancy calls social media succession planning in its Online PR and Social Media Trends briefing.\nIt’s an issue for any organisation where an individual is the face of the company in social networks. The risk to the business is the individual building up relationships with customers and then choosing to leave the organisation.\nIn the sector that we’ve been researching brands are represented on Twitter either by a corporate account or an individual, or in a few instances both. More\u0026hellip; Econsultancy publishes online PR and social media trends report by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nSocial media is growing up. Econsultancy’s latest Online PR and Social Media Trends briefing outlines how the marketing community is engaging with this new channel.\nCelebrities may have popularised social media sites such as Twitter but marketing folk have been quick to follow.\nThe report cites instances of how social media is being applied for qualitative research, track conversation around a brand, develop brand, drive sales, build relationships with journalists and manage customer relationships. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/friday-roundup-quoting-the-social-web/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is a problem with social media. Conclusions should be drawn from the collective, from the aggregate of all social interaction, conversation, commentary, tagging, ratings etc. As the assertion goes, there\u0026rsquo;s wisdom in them there crowds.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut that\u0026rsquo;s not how we\u0026rsquo;re all used to working.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe have evolved, I think you\u0026rsquo;ll agree, to tune into one person at a time. Listen to one person. Watch one person. If I asked you to tell me what the population of London was thinking on a certain topic, unless that topic was their restricted choice of political expression and the question coincided with a local election, you\u0026rsquo;d be hard pressed to tell me.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe like our individual news readers, individual film stars, individual celebrities. And our individual journalists. You see, we can trust (most) journalists because they\u0026rsquo;ve had to subscribe to a code of conduct, a code of ethics. They have standards to maintain in executing their task at hand.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - quoting the social Web"},{"content":"There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That\u0026rsquo;s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.\nWhich is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn\u0026rsquo;t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn\u0026rsquo;t care.\nI put \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo;, doesn\u0026rsquo;t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s why we use \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rdquo;.\nSecondly, the \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; also indicates what\u0026rsquo;s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is.\nThis is often apparent in water-cooler chat in large organisations, when two or three people have a good old gossip about \u0026ldquo;the company\u0026rdquo; and about what \u0026ldquo;the company\u0026rdquo; is doing to them, or how \u0026ldquo;the company\u0026rdquo; is treating them, or how \u0026ldquo;the company\u0026rdquo; works, and why John or Jane is or is not a \u0026ldquo;company person\u0026rdquo;. This transforms into \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; when referring to the layer of management and above that\u0026rsquo;s beyond the individuals\u0026rsquo; usual level of contact. \u0026ldquo;Why have they done that?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;They don\u0026rsquo;t understand the shopfloor.\u0026rdquo;\nJoined up This has some interesting ramifications for internal communications, but for now I\u0026rsquo;ll carry on as I started by looking at how external perceptions can pivot on how joined up that organisation\u0026rsquo;s people and systems are.\nAnd what better way than by example? And what better example than one that will work cathartically for me as I will get to let off some steam at the same time :-)\nTwitter\nTWITTER: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not going to use the NokiaMessaging [NM] account to talk about non NM issues\u0026rdquo;\nSo said a direct message over Twitter from @nokiamessaging . Apparently, @nokiamessaging is not a Nokia Twitter profile, but a Nokia Messaging Twitter account. Wow, OK, sorry about that! Silly of me. But how about pointing me to someone who could be just a little more helpful, say a response like\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Hi, I\u0026rsquo;m the expert on Nokia Messaging, so @nokiacalendar please get back to @sheldrake\u0026rdquo;\nForum\nPerhaps I\u0026rsquo;d have better luck on a suitable forum, and what better forum than the one Nokia themselves have set up. (Or is that \u0026ldquo;Nokia itself has set up\u0026rdquo;?).\nBut no, it appears Nokia doesn\u0026rsquo;t view the forums as a place to chat much with its customers. Unfortunately, when you do that\u0026hellip; or rather don\u0026rsquo;t do that\u0026hellip; when one part of your organisation sets up a place to converse but another side of the organisation refuses to engage, you end up incubating little but bad feeling. Put it this way, I\u0026rsquo;ve circulated the following URL, that links to the forum thread in question, as far and wide as I can:\nhttp://tinyurl.com/E75GmailFail How many people does the Nokia team wish to see the thread of disgruntled customers, let alone the wording of this short-url?\nThe real world\nHow about the new shop on Regent Street? \u0026ldquo;The Flagship London Store\u0026rdquo; according to the press release announcing its opening Feb 2008. I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to speak with two different people there in the same day. Very nice people, and definitely ready and willing to sell me on the new hardware. Unfortunately, I am already a customer and it\u0026rsquo;s the software I have a problem with.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, we don\u0026rsquo;t do that here.\u0026rdquo;\n_________\nI don\u0026rsquo;t need to go on for one simple reason\u0026hellip; You have undoubtedly experienced exactly this same kind of thing. So imagine the competitive advantage that can be wrought by organisations like Nokia if they got their game together and started to act like \u0026ldquo;one\u0026rdquo; to you and me.\nThe first thing they need to do to start acting like \u0026ldquo;one\u0026rdquo; is to recognise me as \u0026ldquo;one\u0026rdquo;. In other words, they have to link my twitters, my forum contributions, my email, my phone calls, my instore visits, with me. Whilst we all like to think of ourselves as people not numbers, I know numbers can be assigned uniquely when names are rarely unique, so I\u0026rsquo;d have no problem with being known primarily (the \u0026ldquo;primary key\u0026rdquo; in database terminology) by a unique customer number, closely followed by the secondary fields of name and email address.\nIt is then incumbent on Nokia to link my communications channels with this customer record. Moreover, the most effective way for them to do this is to entice me to do it for them by offering me some benefit I could not otherwise secure. Say, oh I don\u0026rsquo;t know, off the top of my head, GETTING NOKIA\u0026rsquo;S MOST ADVANCED MESSAGING PHONE EVER TO SYNC FULLY AND RELIABLY WITH GOOGLE MAIL, CONTACTS AND CALENDAR.\nCalm down Sheldrake. What I mean is\u0026hellip; they could offer me three quick response support tickets or something like that.\nInfluence and be influenced The strapline for my soon to be launched new consultancy is \u0026ldquo;influence and be influenced\u0026rdquo;. We help organisations (and their agencies) gear themselves up better to exert influence and, importantly, improve the organisation\u0026rsquo;s porosity to feedback from customers and other stakeholders, whether direct or indirect, implicit or explicit.\nI wrote an open letter in a Nokia forum thread to Nokia\u0026rsquo;s UK Marketing Director Will Harris inviting him to meet up so I can share my frustrating experiences dealing with his company over a coffee, and possibly a biscotti if I\u0026rsquo;m feeling generous. I still hope he might take me up on the offer. I\u0026rsquo;ll let you know.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/we-are-one-wed-like-to-look-like-one-talk-like-one-act-like-one/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That\u0026rsquo;s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/nokia-flagship-london-lg7.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn\u0026rsquo;t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn\u0026rsquo;t care.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI put \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo;, doesn\u0026rsquo;t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat\u0026rsquo;s why we use \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSecondly, the \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; also indicates what\u0026rsquo;s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"We are one. We\u0026#039;d like to look like one, talk like one, act like one."},{"content":"Well, we know what the big news is this week! The corresponding blog post has attracted over 68,000 comments at the time of writing\u0026hellip; which is quite a lot.\nIs it about the economy? No. Saving the planet? No. A remake of Barbarella? Not even.\nNo, the big news this week is Facebook usernames \u0026hellip; get yours before someone else with the same name does. The feature goes live 12.01am tomorrow EDT.\nAnd what better reading material to keep yourself alert this evening as you wait for the minute hand to tick round than today\u0026rsquo;s Friday Roundup selection.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nClip this coupon for $1 million dollar off Ft Myers FL home by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a clever marketing \u0026amp; PR approach that I really like.\nIn an economy when there is a glut of luxury homes on the market, what can a homeowner do to make his property stand out? Why, get people talking about it of course!\nHomeowner Rich Ricciani created a fun and creative world wide rave by thinking up the idea of running a coupon for $1 million dollars off the price of his $7 million Ft. Myers, FL home in newspapers.\nUnlike the vast majority of people who just think of ideas, Rich actually followed through. More\u0026hellip; Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAre we seeing the Twitterverse through rose colored glasses?\nIn January 2009 I pondered whether or not Twitter was a viable conversation platform. After all, Twitter is one of the darlings of Social Media and it is conversations and the democratization of content that fuel the rapid expansion and adoption of social tools and services.\nJust ask any social media \u0026ldquo;expert\u0026rdquo; and they\u0026rsquo;ll tell you that you must absolutely establish a Twitter account and commence the process of responding to everyone who Tweets about your company, market, or competition. More\u0026hellip; Shout loudest and you will be heard on the internet by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nGuy Kawasaki is an American venture capitalist who knows a thing or two about the world of technology. As a former Apple employee he has been involved with Silicon Valley businesses for over 25 years. He is an adviser to several leading technology companies and is a prolific writer, blogger and speaker. He is in high demand.\nGuy Kawasaki But I have a problem with him; I am sure he is a nice chap, who is a real expert in his field. I\u0026rsquo;ve never met him even though he follows me on Twitter and I follow him. More\u0026hellip; Are you ready for the two-tier internet? by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nCommittee members who regulate the domain names used on the Internet are about to meet in Australia amidst confusion and protest against their latest planned changes. A year ago ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced it would be introducing \u0026ldquo;generic\u0026rdquo; domain names. Now, several surveys show that could be doomed to failure.\nThe \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; internet names could soon get lost in a domain name muddle. The idea is that instead of having \u0026ldquo;.com\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Bad taste by Hamish Thompson of Twelve Thirty Eight Ltd\nA cautionary tale this time, involving Gordon Ramsay the chef. He was interviewed on one of Australia’s leading current affairs programmes recently and in the days that followed is alleged to have said some unsavoury things about the programme’s presenter.\nThis video is the prologue to her next programme, during which she took the opportunity to respond to Ramsay’s alleged comments. Her response has attracted the support of the Australian PM.\nWhether the furore will turn Ramsay’s trip down under into more of a demotional tour than the promotional one that he had intended remains to be seen. More\u0026hellip; Everybody is wrong by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhat conventional wisdom that \u0026ldquo;everybody knows\u0026rdquo; can you challenge? I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten tremendous pushback from thousands of people over the past decade on these ideas. But I’ve also had thousands of people reach out to me to say that these ideas have been incredibly helpful to them.\nSome of the best ideas come from contrarians.\nHere are some things I’ve challenged in the past ten years.\n\u0026ldquo;Everybody knows that marketing is about promoting your product.\u0026rdquo;\nEverybody is wrong. More\u0026hellip; Your website and how it would change if it had an \u0026ldquo;About You\u0026rdquo; section rather than \u0026ldquo;About Us\u0026rdquo; by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group\n\u0026ldquo;Nobody cares about your products and services (except you).\u0026rdquo; I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying \u0026ldquo;Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t quite so catchy!\nThink about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you\u0026rsquo;d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance. More\u0026hellip; Authenticity vs. Authority by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMark Olson asked a bunch of marketers to write a one-paragraph riff on Authenticity vs. Authority. We did not see what the other’s had written until he posted the responses today. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I said:\nI remember in college there was a professor who had tons of authority. He was tenured, had written books, and was the head of the department. Although he had authority, he was not a popular teacher and his classes were empty. I recall other teachers who were young and dynamic and had no authority. More\u0026hellip; How to avoid social networking chaos by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nSocial networking is taking up more and more time for internet users. In the past year, the average number of minutes per day spent on social networking sites has doubled. Indeed, Facebook has seen a 700% rise in average minutes usage since April 2008.\nWorn out after all that social networking? You\u0026rsquo;re not alone..!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not surprising that we are all being sucked in to the social side of the internet; after all, humans are social beings. We depend upon friendships for all sorts of things, such as self-esteem, enjoyment and even trade. More\u0026hellip; A Copywriting Principle that\u0026rsquo;s Becoming Vital for SEO by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nFor a while now, I’ve been using this blog as a pulpit for preaching to anyone who’ll listen on the benefits of great content. Building traffic to your website is one thing. But you still have to consider what you’re going to do when visitors arrive.\nAre you merely going to offer them the same self congratulatory copy they’ll find in your brochure? Or offer them useful content that answers their questions, demonstrates your expertise and builds trust in your business?\nWell, thankfully my clarion call for investing in great content is now being taken up by the SEO brigade. More\u0026hellip; How to start a PR company in 2009 with Google and a credit card: version 2.0 by Andrew Smith of escherman\nBy far and away my most popular blog post of 2008 was How To Start A PR Company with Google and a Credit Card. As of this morning, the page has had nearly 2000 views since I originally published it in March of last year. The general principle espoused in the post remains true – but I thought I’d update a few things.\n1. Do I need to own my own computer?\nLast year I suggested you could get a cheap laptop for a few hundred pounds – certainly if you opt for a netbook, that is still true. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/friday-roundup-facebook-usernames/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWell, we know what the big news is this week! The corresponding blog post has attracted over 68,000 comments at the time of writing\u0026hellip; which is quite a lot.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs it about the economy? No. Saving the planet? No. A remake of Barbarella? Not even.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo, the big news this week is \u003ca href=\"http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFacebook usernames\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026hellip; get yours before someone else with the same name does. The feature goes live 12.01am tomorrow EDT.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd what better reading material to keep yourself alert this evening as you wait for the minute hand to tick round than today\u0026rsquo;s Friday Roundup selection.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Facebook usernames"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Nobody cares about your products and services (except you) .\u0026rdquo; I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying \u0026ldquo;Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t quite so catchy!\nThink about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you\u0026rsquo;d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.\nWhen you were tendering your PR contract, you didn\u0026rsquo;t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.\nSo, on that basis, why does your website have an \u0026ldquo;About us\u0026rdquo; section, or equivalent, but not an \u0026ldquo;About you\u0026rdquo;? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true.\nOf course, developing content for an \u0026ldquo;About you\u0026rdquo; section is harder, because there are more types of \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rdquo; than there are \u0026ldquo;us\u0026rdquo;. Not only that, but you probably know \u0026ldquo;us\u0026rdquo; much better than \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rdquo;. But that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t deter you, it should excite you.\nYou see, if you can better relate to visitors to your website, then they feel more confident that yours is the organisation that can help them best with their needs, their challenges, their desires, their pain points. I would claim without hesitation that they are more likely to pick up the phone or place the order with you. (And whilst I\u0026rsquo;m on the topic of telephones, you know that marvellous device with which you can actually speak to people, PUT YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBER ON EVERY PAGE! Sorry to shout, but why put another click or series of clicks between you and a conversation with a prospective customer?)\nSite structure Hopefully, I\u0026rsquo;ve excited you to get together with some colleagues to have a think about \u0026ldquo;About you\u0026rdquo;, and, if I may anticipate where that might lead in just one regard, you will come round to looking at your site\u0026rsquo;s overall structure.\nIf you have an incredibly simple proposition with one tightly defined stakeholder / prospect, then you won\u0026rsquo;t need to review the website structure, but most organisations have at least four or five and usually seven or more kinds of visitors to their websites that might include:\nCurrent customers Prospective customers Suppliers Prospective suppliers Partners Prospective partners Employees Past employees / alumni Prospective employees Shareholders Prospective shareholders The local community / neighbourhood Industry analysts and researchers Journalists Bloggers and pundits Competitors You will need to prioritise your \u0026ldquo;About you\u0026rdquo; types, and then ask yourself, if I was a supplier / prospective customer / employee / journalist, what would I need? What are my challenges and problems? What are my pain points? And you know what, if you can\u0026rsquo;t answer these questions, just get on the phone and ask them. Talk to your HR department and your sales team and your community liaison and your product engineers.\nYou can almost envisage a homepage then that simply asks the visitor to declare who they are. You might have six categories, and a seventh catchall. You can then look to deliver that individual a website experience tailored to their needs, which serves them much better and therefore serves you much better too. Not wishing to get into the technical details of website systems and design here, but as modern websites clearly demarcate content, structure, function and style, you won\u0026rsquo;t be needing to do six times the amount of work to serve a website to six categories of visitors.\nAnd don\u0026rsquo;t just skip over competitors. Why? Every visitor is a unique human being, not a faceless organisation, and if hiring is tight in your industry you should be looking to convert this party into the prospective employee category of visitor. And simply saying \u0026ldquo;Welcome competitors, how may we help?\u0026rdquo;, conveys a certain confidence of purpose to other visitors wouldn\u0026rsquo;t you agree?!\nThere are more challenges waiting to tantalise in this review of course, but I believe this is one of the most valuable projects any CMO or Marketing Director can conduct. It is an illuminating process, but most importantly it is one that should have clear ROI type metrics associated with it.\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to know how you get on.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/your-website-and-how-it-would-change-if-it-had-an-about-you-section-rather-than-about-us/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/david.meerman.scott/nobody-cares-about-your-products-and-services-except-you\"\u003eNobody cares about your products and services (except you)\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u0026rdquo; I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying \u0026ldquo;Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t quite so catchy!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThink about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you\u0026rsquo;d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you were tendering your PR contract, you didn\u0026rsquo;t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, on that basis, why does your website have an \u0026ldquo;About us\u0026rdquo; section, or equivalent, but not an \u0026ldquo;About you\u0026rdquo;? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Your website and how it would change if it had an \u0026quot;About You\u0026quot; section rather than \u0026quot;About Us\u0026quot;"},{"content":"Wow, couldn\u0026rsquo;t stop picking great posts for this week\u0026rsquo;s Roundup. What other marketing communications insight brings you all this in one nifty email?\u0026hellip;\nA look at what makes P!nk special and how your brand can learn from her Straight forward advice for GM\u0026rsquo;s marketing team at a time when they really need to listen Debunking \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo; A fantastic video poking fun at clients who try and get too much for nothing ; and A counter-balancing reminder to consultancy folk what it\u0026rsquo;s like to be a client All the best, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nWhat Brands Can Learn From P!nk by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nLet\u0026rsquo;s face it, once you\u0026rsquo;re known around the world solely by your first name, you\u0026rsquo;ve got to be pretty famous. A really, really hot \u0026lsquo;brand\u0026rsquo;. But when your name is generic - a colour for instance - then \u0026lsquo;wow\u0026rsquo;, you\u0026rsquo;ve obviously done something right over a significant period of time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m talking about P!nk, of course, who seems to be getting stronger and stronger while her peers such as Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne and Christine Aguilera tread water. The P!nk story continues to gain momentum as she works her way through a record-breaking Australian tour - four months, 525,000+ tickets sold, and 14th and 15th new shows announced for Melbourne\u0026rsquo;s Rod Laver Arena. More\u0026hellip; Losing customers is hard but staying friends is possible by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nOne of my clients signed up to BudURL services when it was in Beta. They provide click stats. They played around for a while but failed to find utility after a couple of months. Today I got a nice email form the BudURL team\nSome time ago, you downgraded your BudURL plan to a free account. After we wiped a few tears from our eyes and stopped stuffing our faces with chocolate, we started wondering if it was us or some other factor that lead to our break-up. Here is a quick, 3 question survey that will lend a hand in making us the kind of application you always wanted us to be. More\u0026hellip; Don\u0026rsquo;t Laugh, This is Serious! by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nOkay, you have my permission to laugh! This is an excellent piss-take on the client-supplier relationship. Anyone who has worked in a PR agency (or similar) will get a giggle out of this, albeit through clenched teeth! Hat-tip to Emily Wearmouth (Thoughts-On-Everything blog). More\u0026hellip; Positioning magic at the top end of the market by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOn Saturday I enjoyed an evening of very intimate magic—a showcase of modern conjuring—by Steve Cohen, the \u0026ldquo;Millionaire’s Magician\u0026rdquo;.\nSteve\u0026rsquo;s story is a fascinating example of personal branding success with exclusivity as a market position.\nSteve doesn\u0026rsquo;t advertise his Chamber Magic shows. He doesn\u0026rsquo;t sell his services. It\u0026rsquo;s his positioning plus word of mouth (and word of mouse) that gets him attention and selling out his shows many months in advance. More\u0026hellip; Bluetooth Marketing - Fangs or no fangs? part 2 by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nBack in March we published a blog piece about the barriers to successful Bluetooth marketing. The piece was picked up by Gregor Isbister, Managing Director of Breeze Tech. Gregor kindly agreed to write a response to our original piece, in which he deals with many of the issues we raise. Despite the fact we think we know it all at WLM, we probably have to admit that Gregor is better positioned to analyse Bluetooth as a marketing tool, his company being an acknowledged leader in the field.\nGregor’s reponse is as follows: More\u0026hellip; “Insecure, threatened, worried, exposed, skeptical, suspicious”: How PR buyers feel by Andrew Smith of escherman\nDavid Maister’s book Managing The Professional Service Firm remains the gold standard text on the subject, some 16 years after it was first published. In fact, the book is a collection of essays and articles that he had written over previous years, stretching as far back as 1982.\nThe main thing that struck me about re-reading this again recently was how little things have changed in terms of the major issues still impacting professional service firms of all kinds – everyone from lawyers, accountants, consultants and, of course, PR agencies. More\u0026hellip; How to make blogging easy by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nBloggers in business settings frequently give up writing their blogs fairly promptly after that first flush of enthusiasm is waning. Indeed, most blogs are set up, contributed to occasionally and then left to wither and fade away. But it need not be like this.\nYou need to plan your blog in advance The reason that many bloggers give up - especially in business - is that work gets in the way. Profiting from a blog is not an \u0026ldquo;overnight success\u0026rdquo; story (in spite of what some of the so-called \u0026ldquo;gurus\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; What Copywriters Need to Know About the Changes in SEO by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nThere was a time when I ranked on page one of Google for my trophy keyword (copywriter), but then thought it wise to change my domain name and lose my hard won ranking in the process. Despite implementing redirects, an assortment of Wordpress plugins and anything else that might make Google happy, my website continues to languish in banishment (for UK listings anyway) until Google sees fit to forgive my stupidity and allow me back in from the cold.\nSo, in the meantime I’ve been scouting for SEO tips, and discovered a few things on the Conversation Marketing blog which copywriters ought to know: More\u0026hellip; How to avoid the viral marketing bug by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nMarketers are a happy bunch of people, especially when they are slapping each other on the back for \u0026ldquo;fantastic campaigns\u0026rdquo; or dreaming up creative ideas. No doubt at next Monday\u0026rsquo;s Marketing Society Awards in London, there will be an excessive use of the words \u0026ldquo;brilliant\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;fantastic\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;amazing\u0026rdquo;. Going down the marketing road takes your eye of sales But being brilliant, fantastic or amazing is only really any good in terms of your ego. What matters most are sales. More\u0026hellip; Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook up 700% by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI just read an interesting report published by Nielsen that examines time spent on multiple Social and Micro Networks. The study compares total minutes in April 2009 compared to April 2008. The results are not as much surprising as they are revealing.\nAccording to Nielsen, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year.\nTwitter, the social media darling that can never seem to satisfy our insatiable appetite for all things orbiting the Twitterverse, experienced extraordinary growth in the last year with total time spent up by over 3,700%. More\u0026hellip; Attention GM: Here are the top 5 marketing ideas for your reinvention by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThis morning when I opened my Boston Globe, I found a full-page ad from General Motors. The ad and a new television commercial both say that GM is re-inventing. (I\u0026rsquo;ve re-written the newspaper ad text at the bottom of this post.)\nHey GM that\u0026rsquo;s great and I wish you the best.\nBut I wonder if, during the reinvention of the COMPANY, you are really serious about re-inventing your MARKETING?\nI see some tiny glimmers of hope. The new site at GMreinvention.com is quite good. I found some interesting and valuable information to check out on the site. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Monday Amsterdam video on mobile advertising by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nShown below is the video of the talk I delivered in Amsterdam to an enthusiastic audience of 400 people at Mobile Monday on 1st June 2009 titled:\n“This time…it’s personal. How mobile challenges everything we thought we knew about advertising“.\nFrom the website description…\n“Andrew, a mobile advertising evangelist, talks about how mobile impacts advertising. Your mobile tells a whole lot about you, but the advertising industry has not yet tapped into the full potential. More\u0026hellip; Is Twitter Evolving from the Facebook to the Myspace of Microblogs? Analyzing Twitter trends and demographics by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhen I attended TWTRCON in San Francisco and also the 140 Twitter Conference in Mountain View recently, the intent of businesses was perspicuous. Speakers and attendees were on hand to actively share, inquire, and learn about how to increase visibility, engagement, and brand presence on Twitter and other social networks.\nEqually paramount was the division of those who believe they’re already successful on Twitter and those who have yet to discern measurable value for the long-term.\nThe consensus defined engagement as a way to join the conversations that were transpiring around their brands – More\u0026hellip; Social web analytics key to proving value of PR by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe measurement debate continues. Niall Cook makes the case on the Hill \u0026amp; Knowlton Collective Conversation blog that Social media influence cannot be measured. It all depends what you want to measure. Influence cannot be measured without direct conversations with your audience before and after a campaign to determine its attitudinal and emotional impact. Its expensive and is likely to dwarf your budget and is why such a rigorous approach is rarely undertaken to support a PR campaign.\nThe digital environment does enable us to identify audiences with relative ease and get close to a measure of influence by monitoring web traffic at points along a communication framework (brand) or buying cycle (sales). More\u0026hellip; Tell us about an ad you’ve come across and loved today? by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nThis was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.\nDeloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker, their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey”. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/friday-roundup-5th-june-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWow, couldn\u0026rsquo;t stop picking great posts for this week\u0026rsquo;s Roundup. What other marketing communications insight brings you all this in one nifty email?\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA look at \u003ca href=\"/posts/trevor.young/what-brands-can-learn-from-pnk\"\u003ewhat makes P!nk special\u003c/a\u003e\n and how your brand can learn from her\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eStraight forward \u003ca href=\"/posts/david.meerman.scott/attention-gm-here-are-the-top-5-marketing-ideas-for-your-reinvention\"\u003eadvice for GM\u0026rsquo;s marketing team\u003c/a\u003e\n at a time when they really need to listen\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"/posts/graham.jones/how-to-avoid-the-viral-marketing-bug\"\u003eDebunking \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA fantastic \u003ca href=\"/posts/trevor.young/dont-laugh-this-is-serious\"\u003evideo poking fun at clients who try and get too much for nothing\u003c/a\u003e\n; and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA counter-balancing \u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.smith/insecure-threatened-worried-exposed-skeptical-suspicious-how-pr-buyers-feel\"\u003ereminder to consultancy folk what it\u0026rsquo;s like to be a client\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll the best, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 5th June 2009"},{"content":"This was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.\nDeloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker , their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey ”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. Not an inconsequential finding for the advertising industry.\nWhich begged a second question “What is TV?”, and this garnered more responses than my first question of the evening, which went uncomfortably unanswered. How could such a simple question about describing a great ad, particularly when we have hundreds every day to chose from, draw such a blank response? (I\u0026rsquo;ve posted here one of a series of ads from Lloyds TSB that I loved because they tell a story rather than simply hit me over the head with a product.)\nWell, despite chairing a debate on how advertising is morphing, I have spent most of my time in recent years persuading Marketing Directors to invest less in advertising and more in public relations, or more precisely in creating content that is useful to the right people at the right time and right place, and in conversational marketing. Opening up. Being more interactive, friendly, human. And as most people don’t procure 30 second ads or outdoor ads or newspaper ads or mobile ads or any ads, any entity that prioritises advertising in its marketing mix looks less like the individual to whom they are marketing\u0026hellip; less like me\u0026hellip; and therefore less likely to build empathy. But more on that in a few paragraphs.\n“Television” has a number of meanings. First off is the tangible one\u0026hellip; the box, or more lately the slab, with a screen on which the picture changes so frequently that the brain is deceived into thinking it’s real life motion. Then there’s the meaning that’s more content oriented, where the word is used to describe the programming that’s watched on the slab rather than the slab itself. And this then proceeds all the way to simply defining televisual or video content, where this “television” may be consumed across a variety of devices, a variety of form factors, whenever and wherever the consumer wishes. Paul confirmed that he believed the survey respondents still largely associate the term “television” with the device in the living room, although increasingly they are aware that they are consuming “television” on the computer, with innovations such as the iPlayer in the UK and Hulu in the US.\nWe were also delighted to have expert contributions throughout the evening from Gary Knight, Brand Partnerships Director at ITV , Nicki Lynas, Head of Research at the Internet Advertising Bureau , and James Collier, Commercial Director of Current TV . Their insights and those from all conversationalists last night were fascinating in too many respects to do justice here, but the new nature of adverts and the metrics to gauge effectiveness were two threads that ran throughout the evening.\nThe nature of advertising Andrew Grill introduced the conversationalists to the 3P’s, each necessitate to mobile advertising (Andrew’s professional focus), but I believe the 3P’s may well end up applying universally. (See Andrew’s post here about Ogilvy’s Jonathan MacDonald ). They are:\nPermission - people will decide what they see / receive / engage with Privacy - people will decide where their data is and how it is used Preference - people will decide what content they find relevant\u0026hellip; inference and assumption has limited lifespan. Take the 30 second ad. Take a 30 second ad about Ronseal Power Sprayer ; why not? I painted my fence three years ago, and I believe it will go another four. So every time Ronseal pays to interrupt my viewing pleasure with a Ronseal Power Sprayer ad this year, they’ve wasted their money. Hey, but at least I have a fence unlike many people they’ve just paid to reach.\nBut what if I did want to paint my fence later this summer? What if I wanted to clear my garden, redesign it, add plants and a shed and a gate, as I did three years ago? Then the ad that would be useful to me is one from Ronseal in a quick 10 seconds that would inform me that if I’m up for a bit of a garden overhaul then Ronseal has all the information I need and a handy garden design tool available to me at ronseal.co.uk/mygarden. What’s more, I can compare my designs with everyone else who’s dropped in, and before you know it I could be swapping hints and tips with other people like me, and even critiquing local retailers and garden centres with others in West London.\nNow that’s a powerful marketing mix. Sure, Ronseal interrupted my listening or viewing pleasure with the 10 second advert, so you could say they didn’t have my permission. But on the basis that I know I must expect commercials simply on the basis that I have chosen to listen to or watch a commercial channel, then my permission is granted.\nMy use of Ronseal’s Web tools is appropriately private. I can keep things to myself, or share as I see fit. And I can express my preferences fully, such as whether I would like to be emailed next time Ronseal upgrades their garden design application, or launches a new product, or next time someone else rates Hammersmith Fencing, or even comments on one of my garden designs.\nRonseal hasn’t done this to my knowledge, but check out Business Week’s coverage of the Nike+ social network which does the same sort of thing, albeit for runners rather than gardeners of course.\nMetrics Yikes, this section deserves a book, so perhaps you won’t mind if I just say how it is today in a couple of bullet points.\nTraditional metrics for traditional advertising effectiveness suck New metrics for new advertising effectiveness suck Perhaps the experts here are Audience Science , who will gladly tell you why they’re the bees knees here. And Nicki is doing some very interesting stuff at the IAB, and so is Nielsen . But we witnessed a bit of a ding-dong last night between those who believe in Da vid Ogilvy ’s assertion that advertising has to “sell, or else”, and those who believe advertising contributes to the overall emotional attachment to a brand for the long-term. So what is it that we’re trying to measure? Return on investment? Yes says the first camp, no says the latter. Return on objectives?\u0026hellip;\nUltimately, well run organisations have clearly articulated objectives. So it’s kinda obvious to me that every penny invested in something or other should move the organisation closer to achieving those objectives in proportion to the overall investment. And the longer advertising, and marketing and communications as a whole, lack science in sound measurement, it will be beholden to myth, bluff and obfuscation. It will be far easier to do more or less the same as you did last year than get the balance most appropriate for this year, a point David Meerman Scott makes in his open letter to GM following their recent “re-invention”.\nConvergence So, depending on whether your glass is 50% up from the bottom or 50% down from the top, convergence has thrown a spanner in the works of the advertising industry, or created an opportunistic flux where the most nimble and imaginative will thrive. Perhaps because it’s a topic close to my heart, I feel we could easily have invested a day in this conversation than just an evening\u0026hellip; and may be that’s how we’ll run it when the Convergence Conversation revisits the subject next year? By then, it\u0026rsquo;s distinctly possible that we’ll be looking to update our definition of “advertising” itself.\nInfluence Crowd So I’ll finish with a quick plug. Having completed my post-sale transition period at Racepoint Group , my new consultancy, Influence Crowd , will open its virtual doors this month. Following the success of my ebook, “The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 ”, we will be working with the social Web analytics vendors around the world in distilling that science, in working with ahead-of-the-pack CMOs in making it happen, and re-gearing their organisations to influence and be influenced™, measurably. These leading organisations will be better placed to collaborate with their marketing, advertising and PR consultancies in establishing and maintaining the optimal strategic and tactical balance to their advantage and their customers\u0026rsquo;s advantage.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/06/tell-us-about-an-ad-youve-come-across-and-loved-today/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis was the question I posed upfront at the \u003ca href=\"/posts/colin.batten.2/convergence-conversation-event-04-june-2009\"\u003eConvergence Conversation\u003c/a\u003e\n I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDeloitte kindly hosted us, with \u003ca href=\"http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/executive_profile/0,1010,cid%253D126607,00.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJolyon Barker\u003c/a\u003e\n, their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director \u003ca href=\"http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/employee_profile/0,1007,sid=2303\u0026amp;cid=98070,00.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePaul Lee\u003c/a\u003e\n presenting an overview of their third “\u003ca href=\"http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D108581%2526cid%253D235500,00.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe state of the Media Democracy Survey\u003c/a\u003e\n”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. Not an inconsequential finding for the advertising industry.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich begged a second question “What is TV?”, and this garnered more responses than my first question of the evening, which went uncomfortably unanswered. How could such a simple question about describing a great ad, particularly when we have hundreds every day to chose from, draw such a blank response? (I\u0026rsquo;ve posted here one of a series of ads from Lloyds TSB that I loved because they tell a story rather than simply hit me over the head with a product.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tell us about an ad you\u0026#039;ve come across and loved today"},{"content":"Crystal clear, unarguable insight. That\u0026rsquo;s what I like. Sure, articulating complex stuff usefully can be most impressive, but stating the obvious when it\u0026rsquo;s only obvious with hindsight or with the assistance of an able guide, that\u0026rsquo;s cool in my book.\nGraham Jones gets the complex stuff\u0026hellip; he\u0026rsquo;s known as the \u0026ldquo;Internet Psychologist\u0026rdquo; after all! But he\u0026rsquo;s rather good at seeing the world for what it is, when the rest of us are running around with our costs-per-click, bounce rates and adword strategies.\nCheck out his post this week \u0026ldquo;How to ensure your web site makes money from offline marketing \u0026rdquo;. Seems he\u0026rsquo;s found some excellent examples of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and all in a quick scan of the daily press.\nHave a super weekend.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nThe Art of the Publicity Stunt: Not for the Faint-Hearted, But Still as Effective as Ever! by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI love a cunning (publicity) stunt.And now, with the full gamut of social media in full swing to help spread the word, there\u0026rsquo;s even more reason to consider adding the occasional stunt to your brand\u0026rsquo;s marketing mix (but only if it makes strategic, creative and economic sense!!).\nIn the marketing PR business, one of the hardest gigs is to create and deliver a creative stunt that ticks all the boxes - and even then you need Lady Luck on your side in terms of making a media splash.\nTaylor Herring\u0026rsquo;s Publicity Stunt Hall of Fame - CHECK IT OUT!\nI ran across this recently - the Publicity Stunt Hall of Fame - very cool, a brilliant list of some of the best publicity stunts ever, compiled by UK-based Taylor Herring Public Relations. More\u0026hellip; Why your agency needs a \u0026ldquo;customer advocate\u0026rdquo; by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage via Wikipedia\nAviva is trying to get its hands on a shedload of cash called a \u0026rsquo;landed estate\u0026rsquo; made up of retained profits from some of its investment policies over the past 20 plus years. A long process of negotiating how much to give to policy holders; how much to give to shareholders and how much to keep back for future payout needs. The company appointed Claire Spottiswode as the independent voice of the policyholders, calling her an \u0026lsquo;advocate\u0026rsquo;. This post is not about the work she\u0026rsquo;s been doing (excellent in case you are curious) but the amazingly well handled communications that her office has created via her communications director, Jonathan Haslam. More\u0026hellip; Event: Measurement Camp London by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nThis piece is cross posted with the 33 Digital blog.\nAlways keen to learn what other people in the industry are doing with measurement and metrics on their campaigns, 33 Digital went down to the latest Measurement Camp in London. Hosted by Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes, the event took place at The Good Agency and was attended by about 60 people.\nThe format of the event was to have two presentations from different campaigns that acted as case studies for how people are measuring their campaigns. More\u0026hellip; B2B Corporate Hospitality. Is It Worth It? by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nCorporate Hospitality. Is it going to flourish as companies try to secure the loyalty of their clients in the face of difficult economic conditions, or is it going to die a horrible and painful death as budgets are cut and redirected to the tried, tested and instantly measurable?\nI’ve never really been big on accepting corporate hospitality. I don’t have the slightest idea how cricket works for instance – they’re in, they’re out, they’re not out, they play for days, then draw. More\u0026hellip; Blogging is doing you more harm than good by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nBloggers the world over are sitting in front of their computers at this very moment trying to write something. As you read this, someone, somewhere else in the world is struggling to write something. Why? Because someone, somewhere has told them that blogging is good for them. Stuck for ideas? Then stop blogging And true enough, blogging is good for you; but only if you are a good blogger. The problem is that of the millions of bloggers in the world, there aren\u0026rsquo;t that many that are actually any good at it. More\u0026hellip; This is Not a Sponsored Post: What You Need to Know About Sponsored Conversations \u0026amp; the FTC by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is the unfiltered version of my latest TechCrunch post, \u0026ldquo;This is Not a Sponsored Post: Paid Conversations, Credibility \u0026amp; The FTC.\u0026rdquo;\nCredit: Kevin Dooley\nIn the eyes of imaginative and opportunistic advertisers and marketers, bloggers and online influencers are the new celebrities and athletes. Brands are showering them with endorsement deals rich with products, cash, trips, exclusive access to information, and VIP treatment each and every day, creating a new genre of star spokespersons. More\u0026hellip; 10 things you absolutely have to know about mobile advertising by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nAs suggested by the UK arm of the IAB.\nNice set of quotes from well known practitioners in this space. Worth a quick look and a re-tweet etc\nSimply use http://tr.im/tenthings to re-tweet easily.\n1. It’s an always on medium. Consumers love their mobile phones so much that researchers found when they took peoples phones away for a day they claimed to feel a phantom ‘tingle’ in their pocket that normally proceeds the excitement of a text/call. Stephen Upstone, Managing Director of European Business Development, AdInfuse. More\u0026hellip; Mobile web take up across Europe up 4% on last year says Forrester by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nAccording to a report in New Media Age, mobile internet usage has grown by 4% in Europe. According to the Forrester report, some 24% of Europeans regularly access the internet on their mobile phones.\nThe research found mobile internet use increased over the past year, from 20%, and found the growth in take up increased for consumers who owned smartphones.\nSome 35% of iPhone owners and 30% of smartphone users regularly accessed the internet.\nForrester revealed cost perceptions and the lack of transparent and affordable mobile internet tariffs were key barriers in growth in take up. More\u0026hellip; The New Rules of Social Media book series by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nToday, my publisher, John Wiley \u0026amp; Sons, Inc. announced a new series of books that I will be editing called The New Rules of Social Media book series.\nThe idea of the series is to expand on the ideas of my book The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR with books that expand on the ideas and provide valuable detail on different aspects of social media marketing.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve got two amazing books to kick off the series:\nThe first book, scheduled for publication in October 2009, is Inbound Marketing: More\u0026hellip; sneak peek at upcoming UK mobile advertising survey by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nAhead of the UK mobile advertising conference to be held in London on June 15, where the results of a groundbreaking survey on UK mobile advertising usage will be revealed - we have some interesting stats that have just been released below:\n64% of consumers would grant permission to receive mobile advertising if they are incentivised FIVE advertisements per day is the most accepted by consumers 52% of consumers don’t mind listening to a brand message while waiting for someone to pick up the phone 54% of consumers would send an interesting offer they have received to More\u0026hellip; Gazing into the Twitterverse by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTwitter connects people through a rich and active exchange of ideas, thoughts, observations, and interests in one, highly collaborative and promising ecosystem. The Twitterverse advances micro interaction and connections through an expanding network of applications, engendering the potential for macro reach and resonance online and IRL (in real life).\nFollowing the recent debut of The Conversation Prism v2.0, Jesse Thomas (@jess3) and I proudly introduce an alpha version of The Twitterverse. While the landscape for Twitter approaches 1,000 different applications, this map visually charts the important tools to help communications, service, marketing, and community professionals more effectively navigate, engage, analyze and measure participation on Twitter. More\u0026hellip; Half your online contacts will disappear by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nThe people you knew online seven years ago are a different bunch to the group you now spend most of your time with. That\u0026rsquo;s the conclusion from an interesting research study conducted in Holland which showed that you lose about half your contacts from your social network every seven years.\nYour social network will lose half its contacts in seven years Admittedly the study was conducted with \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; social networks, but the same effect is likely to happen online in places like Facebook and Twitter. More\u0026hellip; How to ensure your web site makes money from offline marketing by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nNewspaper readers are often enticed by advertising offers which give them savings - \u0026ldquo;half price\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;two for one\u0026rdquo; and so on. Many advertisers now add their web site details to the advert. But they may as well not bother.\nNo sign of hay fever at Boots.com Take adverts in yesterday\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Times\u0026rdquo;. Tesco was advertising \u0026ldquo;Joint Savings\u0026rdquo; - half price leg of pork which it said was available at its web site, tesco.com. So, what happens when you go to the link? Well, you firstly have to decide which section of the shop you want. More\u0026hellip; 10 Beautiful Blog Designs by David Knowles of\nSpending hours on a blog post can be a waste of sweat and tears if visitors don’t stop for a read, which is why blog design is so important. Blogs should be functional, easy to navigate and easy on the eye. So you should think carefully about the elements you need to include and how your blog can reflect your personality.\nGood blog design aids readability, and provides an elegant frame in which your carefully chosen words can shine.\nPulling readers into your content\nWeb visitors are a judgemental bunch, with the attention spans of gnats. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/friday-roundup-the-internet-psychologist/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eCrystal clear, unarguable insight. That\u0026rsquo;s what I like. Sure, articulating complex stuff usefully can be most impressive, but stating the obvious when it\u0026rsquo;s only obvious with hindsight or with the assistance of an able guide, that\u0026rsquo;s cool in my book.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/people/graham.jones\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGraham Jones\u003c/a\u003e\n gets the complex stuff\u0026hellip; he\u0026rsquo;s known as the \u0026ldquo;Internet Psychologist\u0026rdquo; after all! But he\u0026rsquo;s rather good at seeing the world for what it is, when the rest of us are running around with our costs-per-click, bounce rates and adword strategies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCheck out his post this week \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/graham.jones/how-to-ensure-your-web-site-makes-money-from-offline-marketing\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHow to ensure your web site makes money from offline marketing\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;. Seems he\u0026rsquo;s found some excellent examples of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and all in a quick scan of the daily press.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHave a super weekend.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - the Internet Psychologist"},{"content":"A brief Roundup this week. Firstly, we had dozens more members join this week, so \u0026ldquo;welcome\u0026rdquo; to everyone who has joined since we last said \u0026ldquo;welcome\u0026rdquo;!\nSecondly, good to see everyone at the Dog and Duck in Soho, London, on Wednesday, including Ted Shelton and Marissa Root of The Conversation Group over from San Francisco, courtesy of Mark Adams .\nAnd lastly, a quick heads up re. another London event, this time hosted by Deloitte on the impact of convergence on advertising , 4th June, chaired by yours truly. See you there? And if you\u0026rsquo;re running a meetup, let us know and we\u0026rsquo;ll plug it here in the Friday Roundup.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nConversational Marketing - Should You Believe the Hype? by David Knowles of\nYou hear a lot of buzzwords and phrases in our fast paced marketing world. But one that’s continuing to gather pace and fans as it rolls into boardrooms is that of ‘conversational marketing’.\nEveryday we form relationships through the things we say and the way we respond to those said by others. With it so important in the real world, it’s unsurprising that marketers are eager to adopt adopt a conversational approach to engaging with consumers.\nThe idea of marketing being a ‘conversation’ More\u0026hellip; Thinking Digital: Exploring new publishing models by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nWired deputy editor Ben Hammersley joined the ranks of speakers at Thinking Digital this afternoon that have called time on the traditional publishing model. “[The premise that…] people won’t pay for content is a myth propagated by big media. The reality is that people won’t pay for their media anymore,” he said.\nHammersley said that consumers will pay for quality, crafted content pertinent to their personal interests.\n“Content publishers need to stop chasing numbers and pursue quality, elegance and craftsmanship instead. More\u0026hellip; Reviving the Traditional Press Release by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource\nThe press release is over 100 years old and for the most part, its evolution is mostly stagnant for the majority of its lifespan. However, the press release has evolved more in the last decade than it has over the century thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and most notably, the Social Web. The tired and oft disregarded press release is finally tasting reinvention as it transforms to chase the new channels of influence as well as adapt to the rapidly shifting behavior of content discovery, consumption and sharing. More\u0026hellip; Community managers - This season\u0026rsquo;s must-have accessory by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nThis year’s must-have accessory for any business or marketing team seems to be a community manager. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had nearly a dozen emails - either direct or via LinkedIn - from companies who were calling upon my network to find Social Networks Managers, Community Relations Executives, etc. [If you\u0026rsquo;re of the right breed, skip to the bottom for information] I couldn’t help but think about how much things have changed in the past few years.\nWhat’s it like being a Community Gal?\nI don’t care what fancy title a company makes up, I’ll always boil them down to being the Community Gal/Guy. More\u0026hellip; Volkswagen Tiguan mobile advertising case study by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nAt the Mobile Advertising 2009 conference in Amsterdam last week, we were treated to an eye-opening presentation from Jens Klitzke, who is Head of International CRM Programs, at Volkswagen.\nJens walked through an excellent case study surrounding the launch of the Volkswagen Tiguan.\nBasically, they built a “long lead” marketing campaign to promote the launch of the new Tiguan before the car even existed - using the web and mobile.\nA quick summary of Jens’ presentation is below, and you can see some of his slides on Flickr. More\u0026hellip; Free of charge is the future for online business by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPeople will not pay for the services you provide online. That\u0026rsquo;s the stark conclusion you could draw from a new survey which looked at whether or not people would subscribe to popular internet services, such as YouTube, Wikipedia or the BBC iPlayer. The survey found that the vast majority of people simply will not pull out their credit card to pay for material they already get free of charge. The biggest proportion of people prepared to pay was 25% for the BBC iPlayer, but only 2%, for instance, would pay for Twitter. More\u0026hellip; Anti-Starbucks filmmakers hijack Twitter marketing campaign by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSimon Owens points us to a fascinating example of what can \u0026ldquo;go bad\u0026rdquo; on Twitter. The instant, always-on aspects of Twitter can make a well-organized \u0026ldquo;campaign\u0026rdquo; take off in an unintended direction. Check out Simon\u0026rsquo;s blog post Anti-Starbucks filmmakers hijack the coffee company’s own Twitter marketing campaign to learn how an anti-Starbucks filmmaking group hijacked the Starbucks hashtags developed for a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and forced the company to abandon the contest within hours after its launch. More\u0026hellip; Guardiantech: 564,698 Twitter followers: 0.4pc (or less) click through rate on links by Andrew Smith of escherman\nThe Guardian Technology Twitter account has 564,698 followers (as of lunch time today). Helpfully, they use bitly as their URL shorterner of choice for distributing links for Guardian news stories and blog posts. Which means anyone can see the click through rates for any given link. Looking at the last week or so, the highest I’ve found so far is around 2.300 for this story. Generally, the click through rates are around the 1,500 mark. So – even with a huge bunch of followers, the click through rates for links put out by Guardiantech on Twitter are around 0.4pc or less. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/friday-roundup-22nd-may-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA brief Roundup this week. Firstly, we had dozens more members join this week, so \u0026ldquo;welcome\u0026rdquo; to everyone who has joined since we last said \u0026ldquo;welcome\u0026rdquo;!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSecondly, good to see everyone at the Dog and Duck in Soho, London, on Wednesday, including \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/tshelton\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTed Shelton\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/marissasays\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarissa Root\u003c/a\u003e\n of \u003ca href=\"http://www.theconversationgroup.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Conversation Group\u003c/a\u003e\n over from San Francisco, courtesy of \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/cluetrainee\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMark Adams\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd lastly, a quick heads up re. another London event, this time \u003ca href=\"http://www.convergenceconversation.com/posts/colin.batten.2/convergence-conversation-event-04-june-2009\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehosted by Deloitte on the impact of convergence on advertising\u003c/a\u003e\n, 4th June, chaired by yours truly. See you there?  And if you\u0026rsquo;re running a meetup, let us know and we\u0026rsquo;ll plug it here in the Friday Roundup.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 22nd May 2009"},{"content":"Well I don\u0026rsquo;t know about you, but I\u0026rsquo;m totally confused. What is happening at Blyk ?\nFor those beyond the UK\u0026rsquo;s shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer\u0026rsquo;s completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing.\nBut on comparing this claim to Seth Godin\u0026rsquo;s articulate definition of permission marketing, I posted at the time that this wasn\u0026rsquo;t the game Blyk was playing . The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA\u0026rsquo;s Alex Farber:\n\u0026ldquo;Blyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships \u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Blyk\u0026rsquo;s MVNO shift causes industry stir \u0026rdquo;.\nNow if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex\u0026rsquo;s articles means, it\u0026rsquo;s Bena Roberts of GoMo News . Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Is anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me? \u0026rdquo;\nPerhaps MarCom Professional members will post the lessons to be learned from this debacle next week. Right now, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure whether we\u0026rsquo;re going to learn more about mobile advertising or a PR \u0026ldquo;how-not-to\u0026rdquo;.\nHave a super weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone who has Tweeted to say they\u0026rsquo;ll be at the Dog and Duck on Wednesday .\nPhilip and the MarCom Professional team.\nTwitter Visits Surpass New York Times and Wall Street Journal by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe race to 1,000,000 followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN followed shortly thereafter by the Oprah Effect and the ensuing celebrity stampede has propelled Twitter beyond two of the world\u0026rsquo;s most prominent media brands.\nAccording to Compete and Quantcast, as documented by PaidContent, Twitter.com soared past the online properties of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.\nThe truth is stranger than fiction\u0026hellip;but it is reality.\nI believe that Twitter will only continue to distance itself from other top media brands as it continues to seduce new users into the \u0026ldquo;conversation,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; IAB says UK mobile advertising market worth £28.6M in 2008 by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nThe UK’s first mobile advertising expenditure study shows the UK market was worth £28.6 million in 2008 according to the IAB. IAB and PwC research reveals mobile ad spend higher than market expectations and doubled in size year on year. According to the press release below…\n___________________\nExpenditure on mobile advertising in the UK exceeded market expectation in 2008 to reach a total of £28.6 million, according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) – More\u0026hellip; The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI\u0026rsquo;m happy to announce an updated version of my free ebook, \u0026ldquo;The Art and Science of Blogger Relations\u0026rdquo; is now available on Scribd and Docstoc as a free download. For all of you Kindle enthusiasts, it is also available in Amazon\u0026rsquo;s Kindle Store.\nThe methodologies and tactics required for effective blogger relations will shatter everything you were taught or thought you know about traditional PR. Part \u0026ldquo;un\u0026rdquo; common sense, part market expert, part enthusiast, and part customer, together, this guide will help you embody the new techniques and mastery necessary to effectively excel in media, analyst, and blogger relations today and tomorrow - while building long term, meaningful relationships along the way. More\u0026hellip; Blinkx and you won\u0026rsquo;t miss it - myChannel comes a step closer by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nI\u0026rsquo;ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian\u0026rsquo;s article \u0026ldquo;Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal\u0026rdquo;.\nBlinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy), and Miniweb is into \u0026ldquo;next generation TV\u0026rdquo; with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.\nNow you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. More\u0026hellip; How a focus on buyers doubled Web site traffic, increased Google positioning, and sold more product by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nVictor Konshin, the author of the #1 book on gout, Beating Gout: A Sufferer\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Living Pain Free, shares with us his before and after experience of a new Web site design. Read on to learn how he made the number one page for an important search term and how his new Web site is selling more books.\nSo many Web sites that I take a look at are just big online brochures. The people who create a product centric site really miss out on an opportunity to educate and inform. When visitors are provided with something of value, they become eager to do business with the company that helped them. More\u0026hellip; What Nobody Told Gordon Brown about YouTube and Social Media by David Knowles of\nOh, poor old Gordon Brown. He tries to experiment with a new tool for engaging with voters and it gets attention for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps someone should have told him that YouTube isn’t just another platform for pushing your message (and not to rely on cue cards to be reminded when to smile).\nIn Gordon’s defence, he simply made the same mistake many brands are guilty of: using new tools, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, for shallow self promotion, rather than offering people content they actually want. More\u0026hellip; How to be liked online by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPeople buy things from people they like. For years, sales directors have been able to tell us that their biggest sales come from the sales staff who are the most likeable. And you know from your own experience that if you liked the sales person you were dealing with, you were more likely to buy. There is a clear link between \u0026ldquo;likeability\u0026rdquo; and sales success.\nLiking people we meet is easy - but how do we get judged online? So, online, how can you show how likeable you are? How can you be seen as likeable when we don\u0026rsquo;t have direct contact with individuals? Thankfully, new research conducted at Tufts University in Massachusetts shows us what to do. More\u0026hellip; Why do 47 UK tech PR firms bother with Google advertising when nobody clicks? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAccording to Google’s own figures, there are currently 47 UK PR firms who are bidding on the phrase “technology PR”. Given that there are around 53 searches per day in the UK on the term, you might think this makes it worthwhile for these firms to invest some time and energy on the exercise. Google also suggests that in order to gain a number one advertiser slot, you’d need to be paying in the region of £6 per click through. However, based on Google’s own Adword Traffic Estimator tool, the number one ranked advertiser can expect to get zero click throughs. More\u0026hellip; Google launches fight back against Twitter in reputation search and monitoring by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nGoogle has launched a stack of new search features that make up the ground that it’s lost to Twitter as a real time reputation monitoring tool.\nGoogle search and the email alert service Google Alerts enable keywords to be tracked and content to be served from the web once it has been spidered by Google. But it’s very hit and miss: there is no sentiment and its ability to order web pages by publication time and date is limited.\nCompare that with Twitter search and the growing slew of reputation monitoring tools that make use of the Twitter KPI such as Twilert and Twendz. More\u0026hellip; Vodafone Completes Roll Out of Mobile Advertising Services to 18 Markets in 18 Months by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nInteresting release from the team at Vodafone about their mobile advertising roll-out.\nSome of the services coming up from Vodafone I have been personally involved with and it will be good to see Vodafone roll these out in a range of markets.\nThe full Vodafone release is here.\n____________\nVodafone announces today that it has fulfilled its ambition to expand the availability of its mobile advertising services to 18 operating company markets in the last 18 months. Despite the worsening economic climate, Vodafone has also enjoyed strong revenue growth from mobile advertising services during 2008/9 and plans to continue the roll out, expanding both the portfolio of mobile advertising services and their reach. More\u0026hellip; Has Twitter broken the social media ‘rules’ by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nLots of buzz on online today about the small changes Twitter have made to their replies settings. If you haven’t heard what the change is, basically users can no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. As Twitter themselves put it:\n“Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. More\u0026hellip; Significant by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCredit\nI’ve just returned from Next09 in Hamburg and Disruptive Media in Stockholm where I’ve unveiled my new focus for what just may serve as the foundation for one of the next two books I hope to write.\nAs we are tempted by social networks and the kinship of new friends, followers, and fans, we intentionally or inadvertently, create a new era of personal recognition and attention that extracts an unconditioned human response and consequently shapes an unpredictable personality and behavior over time. More\u0026hellip; Jonathan MacDonald with the facts on the Blyk story by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nBusy day here in Amsterdam at the Mobile Advertising 2009 conference, with my friend Jonathan MacDonald chairing - I’m up tomorrow.\nToday there has been a lot of noise and discussion in the press about the changes at Blyk and in Jonathan’s post \u0026ldquo;Blyk Is Not Closing: The Facts As Of 13th May 2009\u0026rdquo; he sets out the facts.\nThe official line from Blyk is below (via Jonathan)\nBlyk is expanding, not closing shop… Blyk is looking to evolve its UK operation in line with a global strategy of partnering with operators. More\u0026hellip; Volvo hires media buying agency to handle online PR: not such a bad idea? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nIt has been a busy few weeks, so this blog post covers a lot of ground from Internet World, to the recent NMK online PR debate and the repercussions of Volvo’s decision to hire Mindshare to handle digital PR. First up, Gerry Brown (*), Bloor Research’s Lead Analyst on Digital Marketing, reports that the recent Internet World show at Earl’s Court saw a 26pc increase in visitor numbers.\nAs Gerry says: “Over 22,000 seats were filled in free seminars and keynote presentations. More\u0026hellip; Twitter as a media relations tool brings PR back to basics by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nImage by Irish Typepad via Flickr Have you signed up to Twitter yet? The hype is dissipating and you’ll find all of human life online. Every genre and sector of the media is represented on Twitter which has led PRs to scramble to the platform to pitch stories on behalf clients.\nJournalists love it as it enables them to ignore and block spam pitches. And unlike email the 140 character format forces PRs to be succinct. Best of all they can choose who they follow, ignore or block.\nJournalists on Twitter aren’t hard to seek out. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/friday-roundup-15th-may-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWell I don\u0026rsquo;t know about you, but I\u0026rsquo;m totally confused. What is happening at \u003ca href=\"http://www.blyk.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlyk\u003c/a\u003e\n?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor those beyond the UK\u0026rsquo;s shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer\u0026rsquo;s completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut on comparing this claim to Seth Godin\u0026rsquo;s articulate definition of permission marketing, \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/permission-marketing\"\u003eI posted at the time that this wasn\u0026rsquo;t the game Blyk was playing\u003c/a\u003e\n. The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA\u0026rsquo;s Alex Farber:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.nma.co.uk/blyk-scraps-consumer-offer-to-concentrate-on-operator-partnerships/3000484.article\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.nma.co.uk/blyks-mvno-shift-causes-industry-stir/3000534.article\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlyk\u0026rsquo;s MVNO shift causes industry stir\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex\u0026rsquo;s articles means, it\u0026rsquo;s Bena Roberts of \u003ca href=\"http://www.gomonews.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoMo News\u003c/a\u003e\n. Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.gomonews.com/is-anyone-else-extremely-confused-about-blyk-or-is-it-just-me/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIs anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Blyk"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian\u0026rsquo;s article \u0026ldquo;Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal \u0026rdquo;.\nBlinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy ), and Miniweb is into \u0026ldquo;next generation TV\u0026rdquo; with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.\nNow you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not the point.\nJust over four years ago I posted a blog about \u0026ldquo;myChannel \u0026rdquo; which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there\u0026rsquo;s 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels. Everyone has their own.\nmyChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources\u0026hellip;\nMy subscriptions (which will have to include The Wire and the TED talks ) My friends, or at least the ones I think share similar interests and taste Automated \u0026ldquo;if you like that you\u0026rsquo;ll like this\u0026rdquo; discovery Commercially driven suggestions, the \u0026ldquo;sponsored link\u0026rdquo; to number 3\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;organic results\u0026rdquo; The channel will adapt its recommendations based on\u0026hellip;\nMy recent flags (eg, \u0026ldquo;guitar\u0026rdquo; indicates I\u0026rsquo;m starting a new hobby) The device I\u0026rsquo;m using The day of the week and time of day - it learns my routine and anticipates my needs My mood / willingness to interact, learn or just be entertained Prior selections / recent browser history My location My company - who I\u0026rsquo;m with The Blinkx - Miniweb isn\u0026rsquo;t the only nod to this reality as any Spotify fan or ardent iPlayer user will testify. The only thing we have to work out is whether it will be funded by interruption of my consumption and interaction with intrusive and \u0026rsquo;non-skippable\u0026rsquo; (albeit personalised) adverts, or by my paying a \u0026lsquo;utility\u0026rsquo; to host and serve the channel for me.\nThe turmoil in business models between the general situation four years ago to a myChannel future has been the topic of past convergence conversations , and will be again no doubt!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/blinkx-and-you-wont-miss-it-mychannel-comes-a-step-closer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian\u0026rsquo;s article \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/may/11/digitalvideo-television\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/blinkx.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.blinkx.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlinkx\u003c/a\u003e\n is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to \u003ca href=\"http://www.autonomy.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAutonomy\u003c/a\u003e\n), and \u003ca href=\"http://www.miniweb.tv\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMiniweb\u003c/a\u003e\n is into \u0026ldquo;next generation TV\u0026rdquo; with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut that\u0026rsquo;s not the point.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJust over four years ago I posted a blog about \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/mychannel\"\u003emyChannel\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there\u0026rsquo;s 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels.  Everyone has their own.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003emyChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Blinkx and you won\u0026#039;t miss it - myChannel comes a step closer"},{"content":"Time for a change. Having sold Fuse PR to Racepoint Group in 2006, and as much as I will miss everyone, it\u0026rsquo;s time for me to leave the business in very fine hands and, well, do something else instead.\nOne thing I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to is developing and growing MarCom Professional. We\u0026rsquo;ve got some cool ideas, as you\u0026rsquo;d expect I hope, and we\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your feedback and ideas too. So, fancy a pint? If you are in London on the 20th May, I invite you to join us at the Dog and Duck in Soho.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve just made an event post with the what, where and when, and I hope to see you there. Of course, if you fancy having your own meetup elsewhere, please make an event post and we\u0026rsquo;ll promote it in next week\u0026rsquo;s roundup.\nTalking about \u0026ldquo;where and when\u0026rdquo;, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to see if Andrew Grill makes it on the 20th. As he describes in his post this week , he\u0026rsquo;s fired up Google Latitude on his mobile to communicate his location real-time to gain practical insight into what location based services might actually feel like for the end user. Pontificating on location based marketing is all very well, but its success will pivot on gaining insight like this into the consumer experience.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\n9021OMG How Blatant is That?!? by Chris Applegate of Outside Line\nIn these days of campaign seeding, blogger outreach, teasers for TV spots, and grassroots promotion, it’s refreshing to see that some people are still playing it old-school. Witness this weeks episode of 90210, and Dr Pepper’s non-to-subtle product placement. Apparently the line of dialogue “We’re on a road trip. Drinking Dr. Pepper is practically a requirement” actually features in the episode, but we’ll have to take Vulture’s word on that, as we’re too busy watching Lost and Green Wing to sully our Sky+ planners with American teen cheese … More\u0026hellip; In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing \u0026lsquo;Relations\u0026rsquo; from IR by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nWhat follows is the unedited version of my post on TechCrunch, \u0026ldquo;Corporate Tweets and the SEC: Sometimes It’s Better To Keep Your Mouth Shut.\u0026rdquo;\nCredit: Daniel Y. Go\nLast year, I covered the landmark SEC decision to recognize corporate blogs and potentially other forms of Social Media as a recognized form of meeting public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) – in some cases. It was a significant validation of a widely recognized medium for facilitating information between companies and stakeholders. More\u0026hellip; Advertising Spilling Over by Chris Applegate of Outside Line\nWe highlighted a BMW advert a few weeks back where Content played second fiddle to Placement, with a BMW mockingly towering over an Audi billboard, answering it’s call.\nAs we said then, very aggressive, very American. But what if you were to go somewhere else? Somewhere like American but without the bravado?\nYup, it’s Canada - Montreal in fact - where a paint company promoted their “recylced paint scheme” with a genius bit of billboard work, recycling the Apple paint spills, and again making Placement the king. More\u0026hellip; Where am I? With Google latitude now everyone knows by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nAs many of you know, I worked in the mobile location (LBS) space for nearly 4 years while GM of Seeker Wireless, and as such I still have a real passion for the LBS space.\nI have been following closely what Google have been doing with Google Mobile Maps, Google latitude, and now the Google latitude API.\nToday I read on the Google latitude site that they now have the ability to allow a badge or application to display your current location - as detected by Google mobile maps (GMM).\nThis is significant, because now bloggers and developers can use the power of Google’s massive location platform (with a user’s permission) to start to do some really smart things with location and LBS. More\u0026hellip; Scott Monty of Ford Motor Company discusses social media by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nYesterday I was at the worldwide headquarters of Ford Motor Company and had an opportunity to connect with my friend Scott Monty, Ford\u0026rsquo;s digital and multimedia communications manager.\nI asked Scott about what social media initiatives are happening at Ford. Watch the video to hear Scott talking about the new Fiesta Movement, working with bloggers (hint: they are not all the same!), and why all large companies need to be active in social media.\nDirect link to YouTube video here.\nIt was particularly interesting for me to learn about the Fiesta Movement. More\u0026hellip; Collapsonomics and surviving a recession by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nI have written about new business models and new ways of working and earning in the new economy. Now Dougald Hine who I met earlier this year has started a new project specifically to write and consult on the wittily-named \u0026ldquo;Collapsonomics \u0026ldquo;. Here\u0026rsquo;s the definition collapsonomics, n.\n1. The study of economic and state systems at the edge of their normal social and economic function, including preventative measures to avoid destructive feedback loops and vicious cycles.\n2. A consulting practice based on the scientific and historical understanding of collapse conditions, and responses to them. More\u0026hellip; Lines Blur as \u0026lsquo;The Idea\u0026rsquo; Reinforces its Hero Marketing Status by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nIn marketing, advertising, public relations, promotions etc, there is constant talk (and rightly so) about the idea of being \u0026lsquo;king\u0026rsquo;. And, as Tourism Queensland\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;Best Job in the World\u0026rsquo; campaign has clearly demonstrated, what was inherently a \u0026lsquo;PR idea\u0026rsquo; has been largely developed and driven by an advertising agency - Cummins Nitro. He/she with the best idea wins! The line between marketing disciplines is certainly blurring, even more so as social media starts to work its way into the communications equation. More\u0026hellip; FriendF(r)eed? by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nThere’s been a lot of buzz on Twitter of late about the rapid increase in FriendFeed follower notifications that people are getting.\nFriendFeed recenty redesigned its design to become more in line with Twitter’s ’stream of consciousness’ style. Facebook also recently tried to do something similar with the changes to their news feed.\nThis was a a smart move by FriendFeed; Not only can you see your friend’s status updates, but also any blog posts, images, videos, and many other social content all from your FriendFeed home page. More\u0026hellip; Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nNick Morgan asks: \u0026ldquo;Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner?\u0026rdquo;\nNick is the author of my favorite book on public speaking Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.\nI have worked closely with Nick on improving my speaking skills. He knows what he is talking about!\nNick just released a ChangeThis manifesto called Before You Open Your Mouth: More\u0026hellip; What we all really want is ATTENTION by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSince it\u0026rsquo;s Friday, I\u0026rsquo;d like to be bold and boil down thousands of conversations I\u0026rsquo;ve had over the past ten years into one word: ATTENTION.\nImage credit: engincamp\nEntrepreneurs, CEOs, and business owners want people to pay attention to their company. Marketers, PR pros, advertisers, and salespeople are on the payroll for one reason: To generate attention.\nIn thinking about attention, there seem to be four main ways to generate it today.\nYou can BUY attention\nThis is called advertising. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/friday-roundup-8th-may-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTime for a change. Having sold Fuse PR to Racepoint Group in 2006, and as much as I will miss everyone, it\u0026rsquo;s time for me to leave the business in very fine hands and, well, do something else instead.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne thing I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to is developing and growing MarCom Professional. We\u0026rsquo;ve got some cool ideas, as you\u0026rsquo;d expect I hope, and we\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your feedback and ideas too. So, fancy a pint? If you are in London on the 20th May, I invite you to join us at the Dog and Duck in Soho.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 8th May 2009"},{"content":"Chew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional?\nWhere and when\u0026hellip; http://tinyurl.com/dogduck , Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009.\nUpdates here and @sheldrake . Hope to see you there!\nP.S. The current description of what MarComProfessional is about is here FYI.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/marcom-professional-meet/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eChew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere and when\u0026hellip; \u003ca href=\"http://tinyurl.com/dogduck\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://tinyurl.com/dogduck\u003c/a\u003e\n, Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUpdates here and \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n. Hope to see you there!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e P.S. The \u003ca href=\"/static/about\"\u003ecurrent description of what MarComProfessional is about is here\u003c/a\u003e\n FYI.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"MarCom Professional meet"},{"content":"Those of you with whom I\u0026rsquo;ve discussed social Web strategy, or even helped define and execute it, will know my analogy of the social Web with the social life of a typical city. For example, the Facebooks, MySpaces and Bebo\u0026rsquo;s are the mega night clubs on the ring road. The blogs and small forums are the pubs and bars on the high street. The likes of Ning are the market stalls or local fair rides. The tweeting of Twitter is the chitter chatter in passing and over the garden fence.\nAnd this isn\u0026rsquo;t analogy for analogy\u0026rsquo;s sake, this is a great way to orientate social Web newbies to the norms and expectations of social media, applications and services.\nTake the example of participating for the first time in a Facebook group, or a business forum, or blog meme. Enough to make the most confident of net newbies hesitate. Yet no-one enters a room buzzing with people they don\u0026rsquo;t know and starts gobbing off immediately before assessing the etiquette and the tone of the conversation, so why do that online? Social media newbies just need to look out for the analogous sort of things to which they are so naturally accustomed offline.\nOffline - is drinking from the bottle acceptable? Online - is proper punctuation and spelling expected?\nOffline - who\u0026rsquo;s got gravitas, attracting people around them? Online - whose point of view is attracting the most comment, the most feedback and interaction?\nOffline - how blunt or subtle does one need to be in getting your point over? Online - ditto.\nOffline - what\u0026rsquo;s the tipping policy? Online - to whom is it good form to show appreciation, and how do others do it?\nOffline - how much time do you need to listen to the vibe before being able to contribute approriately? Online - ditto, listen!\nThis week\u0026rsquo;s post from David Meerman Scott conveys the same kind of approach. To David, social media is a cocktail party. Now that\u0026rsquo;s a lovely way to look at life.\nBest regards, Philip and the Marcom Professional team.\nIAB UK debate outcome says Mobile ‘provides value for money’ by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nUnfortunately as I have been “ɹǝpun uʍop” all week (I have a raft of posts pending on the Australian market), I missed out on attending the IAB debate on mobile advertising held in London this week.\nA review on the event from the IAB website is provided below. Looks like a great event - and further evidence that mobile should be on everyone’s integrated plans.\nAs analysts picked over the implications of Alistair Darling’s latest Budget, mobile marketers convened at the IAB offices last night to debate whether mobile offered a viable marketing solution in these troubled economic times. More\u0026hellip; What\u0026rsquo;s Caught the PR Warrior\u0026rsquo;s Eye This Week? by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nPlenty of stuff for the PR Warrior to get excited about this week. Here\u0026rsquo;s a snapshot: Twitter Forces PR Pros to Get to the Point (Journalistics Blog)Jeremy Porter explains the \u0026rsquo;love-in\u0026rsquo; both journalists and PR people are having with Twitter. The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines (Copyblogger)Still on Twitter, Brian Clark celebrates the \u0026ldquo;triumphant return of the short headline\u0026rdquo; and provides some handy hints in doing more with less. Why All Corporate PR Droids Should be Shot (Stilgherrian)An enlightening blog post highlighting the scourge of corporate waffle-speak and why those who perpetrate it should be, errr, shot. More\u0026hellip; Value based remuneration for agencies by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nImage via Wikipedia\nWell a major brand is rocking the over-the-line (OTL) boat - Coke \u0026lsquo;suggests\u0026rsquo; that agencies get rewarded based on value . Traditionally, defining the value of an assignment has been the job of the agency, which tells its client how many people and how much time it\u0026rsquo;ll need to accomplish a given project. Under its new model, Coke will determine the value of assignments based on a range of factors including the work\u0026rsquo;s strategic importance, the talent involved and whether other agencies could duplicate the work — More\u0026hellip; Sky+ Owners Suddenly Feeling Less Smug by Chris Applegate of Outside Line\nNews coming over from the US suggests that TV advertisers are beginning to fight back in their battle against the PVR, with Tivo announcing they’re selling “banner space” targeted at those people who fast-forward through the advertising breaks on their pre-recorded programs.\nYou might remember the tech community guffawing when CEO of Turner Broadcasting said “anytime you skip a commercial you’re actually stealing the programming” back in 2002, and it’s surprising it’s taken those involved so long to get their act together. More\u0026hellip; Thoughts on new media in the Dominican Republic by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed an incredible four days in the Dominican Republic, learning a great deal about new media in this quickly developing economy.\nIn this blog post, I provide some ideas for government, politics and industry and some thoughts for the future based on my discussions with dozens of people.\nOn Thursday I spoke at FUNGLODE, an NGO think tank in Santo Domingo, to a packed house of business and government leaders, but it was the enthusiasm of the young people in the audience, especially marketing and PR students that made the event a pleasure. More\u0026hellip; Nine out of ten people won\u0026rsquo;t use Twitter - exactly what you want by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nTwitter users are small fry as far as the internet is concerned. In spite of mega media coverage, 19 out of every 20 people still don\u0026rsquo;t use Twitter. According to the latest figures collected by eMarketer, only around 3% of US internet users are Twitter users as well. Even with all the current hype and endless column inches about Twitter - it has passed most internet users by.\nAnd the growth predictions don\u0026rsquo;t look that good either. The past year has seen Twitter usage grow by an amazing 1,381% according to Nielsen. More\u0026hellip; Fijian bloggers plug gap left by censored media by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nPolitical upheaval in Fiji triggered by the repeal of the constitution has seen foreign journalists sent home and state censors placed in the editorial offices of all publishers.\nThe country’s media is not allowed to report news that is critical of the ruling regime. Publishers initially responded by publishing blank pages (image via Jachin Sheehy’s Flickr stream) until closure threats resulted in state reporting.\nNews led blogs such as Coup and a Half, Fijigirl, Fiji Uncensored, Intelligensiya and Tears for Fiji are currently the only way of sharing uncensored news and have taken the place of the media. More\u0026hellip; Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCredit\nSeems that even the shiniest applications on the Web also face the same growing pains as any product, no matter where it resides on the adoption bell curve.\nWhile many widely speculated the total number of new users who were introduced to Twitter as a result of the now infamous race to 1,000,000 followers, we do know that the number seems to hover between 500,000 and 1.2 million. When compared to the estimated existing user base of ~5 million heading into the race, the final number represents a significant spike in visibility, trials, and subsequent adoption. More\u0026hellip; Book review: PR and the Social Web by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nRob Brown’s (@robbrown) book PR and the Social Web is published tomorrow. We got hold of an early copy and have passed it around the office. Nick Bishop, who heads our corporate team, has posted a review on his blog. Here are the highlights. Rob Brown’s ‘Public relations and the Social Web’ is incredibly well-timed. It’s also incredibly well written. But it is a book for the converted or those willing to be converted and probably not for those uninterested in social media. More\u0026hellip; With mobile it’s personal - marketers must respect customer information by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nHere is a lesson in how not to use mobile as a channel. I just had an experience that proves to me that some companies still don’t get the personal nature of mobile, and the overarching need to ask PERMISSION to engage.\nI won’t name the company concerned because they have removed my mobile number from their database and apologised, but the experience is worth sharing as a reminder to companies using mobile as a channel to think very carefully about how they handle private data supplied by customers. More\u0026hellip; The battle between the suits and the creatives is back on by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI caught an interesting article in today’s Financial Times by John Gapper titled “Madison Avenue feels the squeeze“.\nIn the article, John looks at how the battle between the “suits” (account execs) and the creatives (the ones who craft the campaigns) seems to be back on.\nQuoting from the article, John says\n“Four decades later, the face-off between the people in suits – this time in media planning agencies – and the creatives is back again. Now, it is fuelled by recession rather than growth, and the internet rather than television – More\u0026hellip; Social media is a cocktail party by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;m fond of thinking of the Web as a city.\nSeeing the Web as a city helps make sense of each aspect of online life and how we create and interact.\nCorporate sites are the storefronts on main street peddling wares. Craigslist is like the bulletin board at the entrance of the corner store; Ebay, a garage sale; Amazon, a bookstore replete with patrons anxious to give you their two cents. Mainstream media sites like The New York Times online are the newspapers of the city. Chatrooms and forums are the pubs and salons of the online world. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/05/friday-roundup-night-clubs-and-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThose of you with whom I\u0026rsquo;ve discussed social Web strategy, or even helped define and execute it, will know my analogy of the social Web with the social life of a typical city. For example, the Facebooks, MySpaces and Bebo\u0026rsquo;s are the mega night clubs on the ring road. The blogs and small forums are the pubs and bars on the high street. The likes of Ning are the market stalls or local fair rides. The tweeting of Twitter is the chitter chatter in passing and over the garden fence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd this isn\u0026rsquo;t analogy for analogy\u0026rsquo;s sake, this is a great way to orientate social Web newbies to the norms and expectations of social media, applications and services.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTake the example of participating for the first time in a Facebook group, or a business forum, or blog meme. Enough to make the most confident of net newbies hesitate.  Yet no-one enters a room buzzing with people they don\u0026rsquo;t know and starts gobbing off immediately before assessing the etiquette and the tone of the conversation, so why do that online? Social media newbies just need to look out for the analogous sort of things to which they are so naturally accustomed offline.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOffline - is drinking from the bottle acceptable? Online - is proper punctuation and spelling expected?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOffline - who\u0026rsquo;s got gravitas, attracting people around them? Online - whose point of view is attracting the most comment, the most feedback and interaction?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - night clubs and social media"},{"content":"The likelihood of outstanding business success is greater with great teamwork. I\u0026rsquo;d say that was an obvious and uncontroversial thing to say!\nFor the Friday Roundup, I\u0026rsquo;d condense the management texts I\u0026rsquo;ve read and the experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had to date into five teamwork must-haves:\na shared and clearly articulated vision; mutuality (individual success is team success, and vice versa); honesty; clearly defined roles and responsibilities; and a self-sustaining determination and hunger for success. These qualities are being put to the most extreme of tests in current times. The economic climate today requires great teams to tend to these must-haves like never before, to keep them resilient and vibrant. But the ultimate test is for those teams that observers within or without rate as sub-par today.\nSurvival for these teams now depends on them getting their act together, and quickly. Team members need the wherewithall to recognise that now is the time to step up to the mark, to realise that trivial disputes and petty politics are no longer quite so trivial but actually make the difference between great and just good enough, and therefore impact the chances of survival. The team must identify how to get great in days not months, aggressively weeding out staff that cannot or will not make the effort or the grade.\nLooking on the bright side, the teams that do make it through this recession, that do manage to instil these must-haves for great teamwork, will be fitter and more successful in the longer-term too. And being a member of such teams is considerably more satisfying.\nHard times can be good times.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team (a great team btw!)\nNew Zealand All Blacks: Experimenting with social media to reach global fans by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nEarly today I had an opportunity to visit the Wellington headquarters of the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU), at the invitation of David Barton-Ginger who serves as the online manager. The New Zealand Rugby Union is the governing body of rugby in New Zealand, administering all parts of the game in NZ from grass roots, Air New Zealand Cup, Rebel Sport Super 14 and the All Blacks (the national team).\nDavid has a challenge and he would like your help.\nWhile he has gotten started with social media (see below for details), David is in the middle of a process to convince the managers of NZRU to \u0026ldquo;lose control\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Marketing lessons from the [Grateful] Dead by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nAlert readers of this blog and my books will recall that I discuss the Grateful Dead as an example of an organization with great marketing. I\u0026rsquo;m a fan, having listened to the music since the first live show I went to as a teenager in 1979. I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to slip a Grateful Dead reference into each of my five books and usually manage a mention in my speeches.\nCounter-culture marketing\nThe band is a big case study in contrarian marketing. Each of the band\u0026rsquo;s many marketing innovations seems to be based on doing the opposite of what other bands (and record labels) are doing at the time. More\u0026hellip; So Ya Wanna Make a Viral Video? Good Luck With That! by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI tend to roll my eyes when companies and brands - generally through their advertising or digital agencies - proudly proclaim they\u0026rsquo;re producing a \u0026lsquo;viral video\u0026rsquo; and expect it\u0026rsquo;s going to be watched by millions. Now, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong with producing cool videos (or games) for the internet. Often it can be a good tactic (BMW did it successfully years ago - remember \u0026lsquo;The Hire\u0026rsquo;?). But the number of times I\u0026rsquo;ve seen companies waste money on videos that quite frankly are pretty self-indulgent, well, let\u0026rsquo;s just say it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense. More\u0026hellip; PR: Probably Receding, or Potentially Revitalised? by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI can’t make the nmk debate tonight but the debate about the future of the PR industry as it modernises is likely to be highly engaging. There’s a reason for this - some people are leading the way, others are crawling slug-like under stones. At Speed we’ve been tracking the size of the market and the emergence of digital for more than 18 months. Outside the public groups, commentary on the industry is hard to come by even from the trade associations. Probably because no-one has had the balls to do it and reveal their own weakspots. More\u0026hellip; Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve written over the years, in the era of the Social Web, we are all brand managers. While I spend a significant portion of my time sharing the importance of listening and observing to noteworthy conversations and the enveloping cultures that define relevant online communities. When it comes to participation and engagement however, identity is often an afterthought by most companies.\nKnowem is a new service that help businesses take a proactive step to securing their brand and product identities across the Conversation Prism a.k.a. More\u0026hellip; Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nThe Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater\u0026rsquo;s entry into the \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; media monitoring six years back\u0026hellip; and they\u0026rsquo;ve done pretty darn well in that regard.\nFor speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy\u0026rsquo;s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman), and I understand this will form a \u0026lsquo;base\u0026rsquo; or a foundation for their endeavours going forward. More\u0026hellip; Why Celebrity Endorsements Can Give Your Brand the X Factor by David Knowles of\nYour advertising has to compete with a lot of noise these days. With so many channels competing for attention, creating advertising that gets you noticed can be tricky. Not only do you need to engage the interest of ad weary consumers. But your ads also need to have the ‘wow’ factor that makes people sit up and think ‘I want one of those’.\nWorking out how to create ads that jump out and pull people in is a tricky puzzle. This is why so many brands are waving their cheque books at celebrities and signing them up to give their ads the ‘X’ More\u0026hellip; Stop what you are doing and get or update your Google Profile now by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nWhat happens when you enter your name into Google? Do you come up number one? If not, are you on the first page? And if you do appear, is it something valuable? Or is the listing a photo of you as attending your ten-year high school graduation party (or worse)?\nYou need to be found on Google. Personal branding is essential in today\u0026rsquo;s world.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re looking for a job, potential employers will search your name. 2) If you\u0026rsquo;re a lawyer, consultant, or real estate broker, your clients will search your name. More\u0026hellip; BBC in web IPTV service first by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nThe BBC has started broadcasting live feeds from is major terrestrial channels (BBC1 and BBC2). The service is currently in beta.\nThe BBC also quietly unveiled a web IPTV application around a TV programme last night. Viewers of the Apprentice were able to watch the programme via the web, predict which candidate would be fired, and participate in a live discussion.\nIt’s a shame that the Apprentice chat widget wasn’t a live Twitter feed using the #apprentice hash tag but then a moderated channel hosted by the BBC is probably a lot safer than an open Twitter channel. More\u0026hellip; B2B Marketing Entrepreneur? by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nI’ve always been deeply suspicious of anyone introducing themselves as an ‘Entrepreneur’. It’s one of those wank words I find impossible to say out loud. Women don’t seem to like the word ‘moist’, but for me, it’s ‘entrepreneur’. Eww. I’m less disturbed when the term’s used to describe someone else. It’s strictly the self-use of the word that bugs me. So, “Richard Branson is an entrepreneur”, is wholly acceptable. More\u0026hellip; Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource\nFollowing the solo media vs. traditional media race that led Twitter into both relevance and irrelevance, the result is that the carefully guarded community and its unique culture are now permanently altered – for better or for worse.\nAccording to estimates sourced by Engadget Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block, Twitter grew by 1.2 million users simply as a result of the “Oprah-effect.”\nTechCrunch\u0026rsquo;s MG Siegler also explored the process for estimating Twitter’s path into the mainstream. More\u0026hellip; Get people talking about you - a surefire way to online success by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nWord of mouth marketing is so important there is even an association for it. You certainly want people talking about you and your business - but only if it is positive. Yet many online businesses struggle with getting people to mention them in the first place. If you don\u0026rsquo;t get people talking about your internet business, you are going to find it very difficult to survive. Get people talking about your business Oscar Wilde said: \u0026ldquo;There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/friday-roundup-teamwork/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe likelihood of outstanding business success is greater with great teamwork. I\u0026rsquo;d say that was an obvious and uncontroversial thing to say!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the Friday Roundup, I\u0026rsquo;d condense the management texts I\u0026rsquo;ve read and the experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had to date into five teamwork must-haves:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ea shared and clearly articulated vision;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003emutuality (individual success is team success, and vice versa);\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ehonesty;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eclearly defined roles and responsibilities; and\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ea self-sustaining determination and hunger for success.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese qualities are being put to the most extreme of tests in current times. The economic climate today requires great teams to tend to these must-haves like never before, to keep them resilient and vibrant. But the ultimate test is for those teams that observers within or without rate as sub-par today.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - teamwork"},{"content":"The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater\u0026rsquo;s entry into the \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; media monitoring six years back\u0026hellip; and they\u0026rsquo;ve done pretty darn well in that regard.\nFor speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy \u0026rsquo;s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a \u0026lsquo;base\u0026rsquo; or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.\nI enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and \u0026lsquo;prettiness\u0026rsquo; of charts, and pricing.\nWe debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.\nData visualisation Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.\nFirst up is a TED video from this year\u0026rsquo;s conference (February) by JoAnn Kuchera-Morin of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara . I\u0026rsquo;ll defer to the official description of CREATE\u0026rsquo;s Allosphere if you\u0026rsquo;ll allow me:\nThe AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent.\nThere are currently two projectors, soon to be multiple high-resolution video projectors, mounted around the seam between the two hemispheres, approaching eye-limited resolution on the inner surface. The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (around 500 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is/will be suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Other clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, effector-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments.\nAnyway, probably best understood in the video. If anyone has two large hemispheres they no longer want, please let me know @sheldrake .\nOn a more immediately applicable scale, check out SweetNTweet below. It shows a lovely little application (built with the open source Processing 1.0 ) in which search keywords are entered and to which Tweets from Twitter gravitate in the form of candy-coloured petals. On reaching their destination they reveal their 140 characters of wisdom and beauty :-)\nDoes it really show any promise of helping PR consultants visualise their landscape. Nope, but it\u0026rsquo;s really quite pretty and might spark something more relevant in your mind!\nPrevious posts on visualisation: Influence… it’s a numbers game Can you see it? Making influence visible. Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails Visualise your SEO Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/meltwater-visualising-influence-and-a-big-sphere-that-might-not-fit-conveniently-in-your-office/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.meltwater.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMeltwater\u003c/a\u003e\n Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater\u0026rsquo;s entry into the \u0026rsquo;traditional\u0026rsquo; media monitoring six years back\u0026hellip; and they\u0026rsquo;ve done pretty darn well in that regard.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor speed to market, they are currently white labelling \u003ca href=\"http://www.techrigy.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTechrigy\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/aaronnewman\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@aaronnewman\u003c/a\u003e\n), and I understand this will form a \u0026lsquo;base\u0026rsquo; or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Web Analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n vendors, the importance of the UI and \u0026lsquo;prettiness\u0026rsquo; of charts, and pricing.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"data-visualisation\"\u003eData visualisation\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office"},{"content":"AVE. Three little letters I thought had been dragged and dropped into the PR waste basket some years back. Right next to \u0026ldquo;column inches\u0026rdquo;, you know what I mean. Yet I have come across Advertising Value Equivalent no fewer than four times this week, coincidentally and oddly.\nThe first definition returned by a Google search is provided courtesy of SourceWatch : \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;to \u0026lsquo;measure\u0026rsquo; the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign\u0026rdquo;. The description goes on to describe how you ask yourself the question \u0026ldquo;Mmmm, how much would this space have cost me to buy advertising stylee?\u0026rdquo; and then you multiply that by, oooh I don\u0026rsquo;t know, 3, or 4, or 10?\nPublic Relations is about exerting influence and being influenced. We do this by sparking debate. Creating stimulating content, and demonstrating insight, passion and leadership by finding and starting conversations about the issues that matter to the marketplace, to our customers and prospects, and to our customers\u0026rsquo; customers.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the AVE of that conversation exactly?\nMeasurement and evaluation is a critical PR discipline. But we\u0026rsquo;ve got to get our chomps round smarter ways to guage influence and reconcile campaign effectiveness against objectives. Social Web Analytics is a good place to start. SWA marks the maturing of public relations as a chartered profession in my opinion.\nFree social media ebook and video: New Media and the Air Force by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe United States Air Force Public Affairs Agency, Emerging Technology Division just released a new ebook and video about how social media is used in the Air Force. The ebook and video contain excellent information for all organizations and should serve as a blueprint for social media guidelines for those who do not have them.\nEbook New Media and the Air Force (Please note that this file is nearly 2MB, so be patient)\nVideo Air Force New Media video on YouTube\nFor those of you who work in large organizations struggling with social media, please share this with your bosses. More\u0026hellip; Clever Tactical Ad Executions That Punch Above Their Weight by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nIsn\u0026rsquo;t it ironic it\u0026rsquo;s often the small (but savvy) tactical advertising executions that generate the most attention and therefore are the most cost-effective.Companies spend millions of dollars producing and airing advertising the general populace doesn\u0026rsquo;t see or care about. But then a \u0026lsquo;small\u0026rsquo; ad punches well above its weight because it\u0026rsquo;s cleverly executed and relevant (and unexpected). Two cases in point: I went to print an article from Wired.com when this little gem (below) appeared. More\u0026hellip; There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy - supporting perspective in Ad Age post by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nA few days after I posted the succinctly titled \u0026ldquo;There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile\u0026rdquo;, B.L. Ochman posted \u0026ldquo;Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Tweet\u0026rdquo; on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.\nRight up there at number 1:\n\u0026ldquo;You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It\u0026rsquo;s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.\u0026rdquo;\nNow my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake) questioning my definition of the word \u0026ldquo;strategy\u0026rdquo;. More\u0026hellip; Is Advertising Enough? by David Knowles of\nIn its Madison Avenue strutting heyday, advertising was the only way to sell. Back when people spent their evenings reading newspapers or glued to the TV, brands relied on ads to grow desire and plant jingles in people’s minds.\nBut unfortunately for the once cocksure ad man, people and times have changed.\nThe old adage of ‘advertise or die’ is now being replaced by ‘evolve or die’. People are binning newspapers permanently, and fast forwarding or switching off the TV altogether. More\u0026hellip; A New Alternative to Twitter Search: Identifying Tweets, Trends and People Related to Your Keywords by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTwazzup, a new search for Twitter, debuted recently and it just may replace you\u0026rsquo;re activity on search.twitter.com for the time being (thanks Louis Gray).\nAs Twitter vies for its place as your online attention dashboard, keyword search and the ability to link those discussions to real people becomes the key to relevant engagement.\nTimelines serve as our centralized activity hub and determine what we read, what we say, and who we respond to simply by the information that continually flows through it. More\u0026hellip; N=5 weighs in for Fitness First by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nHere’s a neat campaign from Dutch creative agency N=5 in Amsterdam for Fitness First in which the weight of a person sitting at a bus stop is displayed on the adjacent poster display.\nAs Viral Blog spotted the experiential work echoes a campaign by Electrolux last year where a billboard measured the level of noise in the surrounding area. More\u0026hellip; Can Twitter Impact our Emotional Compass? by Anna Gueldenhaupt of Racepoint Group UK\nYesterday the Daily Mail reported that the volume of online content, driven by social media, could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people’s brains. The author, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, said:\n“For some thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection”. More\u0026hellip; The Race to 1,000,000 Followers Sends Twitter and Social Media into Relevance and Irrelevance by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource\nIt started as a simple and seemingly harmless contest. Who would be the first person on Twitter to reach 1,000,000 followers?\nThis wasn’t yet another follower push open to just anyone on Twitter however, not even the Weblebrities who helped propel the popular micro community to an emerging, iconic pop culture status; it was (and at the moment, still is) a race between the world’s most visible celebrities and prominent media brands.\nIt started when Ashton Kutcher, a television and movie star who’s also keenly astute and observant to the promise of new media challenged CNN and its founder, Ted Turner to the race. More\u0026hellip; The Domino\u0026rsquo;s Effect by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe latest viral video on the Web today isn\u0026rsquo;t related to an upcoming summer blockbuster, nor the next Chocolate Rain sensation or even the next Obama Girl. Today\u0026rsquo;s social video frenzy is a real time case study of what happens when the employees of a franchise use online video to inadvertently cause a global domino effect that financially and emotionally impacts other franchises, employees, customers as well as bruising the corporate brand overall.\nTwo employees from an individually owned Domino\u0026rsquo;s store shot and shared a few devastating videos that will appall anyone and everyone who can actually stomach them. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/friday-roundup-ave-v-swa/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAVE. Three little letters I thought had been dragged and dropped into the PR waste basket some years back. Right next to \u0026ldquo;column inches\u0026rdquo;, you know what I mean. Yet I have come across Advertising Value Equivalent no fewer than four times this week, coincidentally and oddly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first definition returned by a Google search is provided courtesy of \u003ca href=\"http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Advertising_Value_Equivalency\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSourceWatch\u003c/a\u003e\n: \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;to \u0026lsquo;measure\u0026rsquo; the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign\u0026rdquo;. The description goes on to describe how you ask yourself the question \u0026ldquo;Mmmm, how much would this space have cost me to buy advertising stylee?\u0026rdquo; and then you multiply that by, oooh I don\u0026rsquo;t know, 3, or 4, or 10?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublic Relations is about exerting influence and being influenced. We do this by sparking debate. Creating stimulating content, and demonstrating insight, passion and leadership by finding and starting conversations about the issues that matter to the marketplace, to our customers and prospects, and to our customers\u0026rsquo; customers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s the AVE of that conversation exactly?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - AVE v SWA"},{"content":"A few days after I posted the succinctly titled \u0026ldquo;There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile \u0026rdquo;, B.L. Ochman posted \u0026ldquo;Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Tweet \u0026rdquo; on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.\nRight up there at number 1:\nYou think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It\u0026rsquo;s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.\nNow my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake ) questioning my definition of the word \u0026ldquo;strategy\u0026rdquo;. So for clarity\u0026hellip; your social Web strategy is the long-term \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rdquo; that follows the \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rdquo; of your social Web objectives.\nI also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post\u0026hellip; if \u0026ldquo;every tweet has to be approved by legal\u0026rdquo; then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I\u0026rsquo;d also argue that your business most likely isn\u0026rsquo;t ready to do business in 2009!)\nAnd at number 3, Ochman\u0026rsquo;s post picks up on the second issue teased out in my post, that of setting clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile. To paraphrase, herein lies the danger that Twitter is adopted for monologue rather than dialogue. But employed wisely as per my last post, with real people on hand to pick up on the conversation, the corporate Twitter profile can be an appropriate flag waver and conversation starter.\nOf course, the social Web is about people, and not information technology. So it would be good to see Ad Age adopting so-called pretty URLs that people can understand than the incomprehensible ones they have today.\nSo rather than:\nhttp://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article _id=135827\nthey \u0026rsquo;d have:\n..//adage.com/digitalnext/top_10_reasons_your_company_probably_shouldnt_tweet\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-twitter-strategy-supporting-perspective-in-ad-age-post/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA few days after I posted the succinctly titled \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-twitter-strategy-but-you-should-have-clear-expectations-for-your-co\"\u003eThere is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;, B.L. Ochman posted \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=135827\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTop 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t Tweet\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight up there at number 1:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It\u0026rsquo;s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow my post elicited some responses via Twitter (\u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@sheldrake\u003c/a\u003e\n) questioning my definition of the word \u0026ldquo;strategy\u0026rdquo;. So for clarity\u0026hellip; your social Web strategy is the long-term \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rdquo; that follows the \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rdquo; of your social Web objectives.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post\u0026hellip; if \u0026ldquo;every tweet has to be approved by legal\u0026rdquo; then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I\u0026rsquo;d also argue that your business most likely isn\u0026rsquo;t ready to do business in 2009!)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy - supporting perspective in Ad Age post"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Innovate\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Pleased to\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Unique\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Focused on\u0026rdquo;. And of course, \u0026ldquo;Leading Provider\u0026rdquo;.\nKeeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and engaging isn\u0026rsquo;t always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that\u0026rsquo;s the job, that it\u0026rsquo;s the way, is an easy trap to fall into.\nWhich is why I like David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s Gobbledygook analysis . Now in its second year, it does what David wants it to do\u0026hellip; makes you think about everything you write.\nSee, now I\u0026rsquo;m wondering about my use of the word \u0026ldquo;engaging\u0026rdquo; before. Is that hackneyed? Is that a marketer talking to marketers leaning lazily on an industry-word-of-the-decade? Hey, just doing a quick check on dictionary.com tells me it doesn\u0026rsquo;t even mean what I thought it did; apparently it means attractive, charming, winning , and not, as I\u0026rsquo;d assumed, the potential to compel someone to engage with whatever. Keeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and so good it makes the target want to respond in a useful way isn\u0026rsquo;t always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that\u0026rsquo;s the job, that\u0026rsquo;s the way, is an easy trap to fall into.\n:-)\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nan almost perfect mobile campaign by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nA few weeks ago I came across a mobile anti-knife campaign from the Central Office of Information (COI) here in the UK called “it doesn’t have to happen” (IDHTH). You can see the campaign at idhth.mobi (looks best on your mobile).\nThe campaign is being seeded across mobile sites - you can see the call to action (admob ad) on the left here as shown on one of my mobile sites. The campaign is well thought out - simple website (and a .mobi) to go to and once there, the campaign (directly aimed at youth) allows you to download a “pocket beats java soundboard”. More\u0026hellip; 9 out of 10 Marketers Are Using Social Media. Are You? by David Knowles of For the last week people have been bookmarking, blogging and Tweeting like mad about a new report on social media marketing. Put together by popular blogger and white paper specialist Michael Stelzner, the report features responses from 700 marketers on how they’re using social media to boost their exposure. The report indicates that whilst marketers are enthusiastically joining the ‘social media gold rush’, few know where to start looking or how to unearth its riches.\nHere are a few of the report’s nuggets: More\u0026hellip; Bloggers in handcuffs? U.S. FTC proposes legislation on product testimonials by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nThe U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working on regulations covering blogs and social networking sites.\nThe revised guidelines on so-called \u0026ldquo;endorsements and testimonials\u0026rdquo; that the FTC is looking at could hold companies liable for false claims and statements made by bloggers and people who post reviews and comments on social networking sites, when the person commenting received product samples. And the people doing the posting may also be held liable.\nBloggers in handcuffs\nWhile I am not a lawyer and I have not read through the proposed wording, stories out there such as this one from Iain Thomson of VNU suggest this is an important potential worry for people who talk about products that have been provided to them by a company. More\u0026hellip; Make Money Online - Through Social Media? by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nI love of a bit of Twitter spam on a Monday morning!\nThere\u0026rsquo;s nothing quite so entertaining as to logging into email to receive three notifications that \u0026ldquo;internetmarketer\u0026rdquo; is now following us on Twitter. I dutifully clicked on all three - to rule out that they weren\u0026rsquo;t real people with interesting Twitter feeds - and discovered that two were shell accounts promoting a blog with one post about \u0026ldquo;Robert Allen Wealth Program\u0026rdquo; and one was a suspeneded account.\nThe first account sports a picture of a dead ringer for Google\u0026rsquo;s Matt Cutts, and offers 3 tweets all promoting the same splog: More\u0026hellip; The Decline of Newspaper Revenue and the Promise of the Human Network by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not news that newspaper revenue derived from advertising and subscriptions is rapidly eroding. While Madison Avenue worries about the recession and its impact on advertising in general, numbers recently published by the Newspaper Association of America indicate online advertising only continues to rise.\nPerhaps most interesting is the impending intersection between the decline of a 200 year old institution and a new medium competing for the same precious ad dollars for only the last 15 years. More\u0026hellip; Blogging is a massive waste of time by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nBloggers are wasting millions of hours of productivity around the world - and it\u0026rsquo;s getting worse. Just over two blog postings are made every second of every day - and that\u0026rsquo;s only for the regularly active blogs. According to the latest figures from blogwatcher, Technorati, around 3m blogs are updated regularly and there are over 180m people who have started a blog. With 40% of bloggers claiming to spend 10 hours a week on blogging you can begin to see that there are billions of hours of time that is now taken up blogging, which would have previously been spent doing something else - such as working\u0026hellip;!\nOf course, to a small proportion of bloggers it is work; More\u0026hellip; Riding the Rave #3: In Search of the Fifth P by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nHere is the third installment of my three part video series Riding the Rave.\nMy friends Tim Washer, Scott Teems, and I put together the three part video series to show the absurdity of working with others.\nHave you ever been in a discussion where the idea becomes more important than the goal? The conversation goes down a rat hole very quickly.\nIf you haven\u0026rsquo;t seen parts one and two, you may want to check them out first.\nRiding the Rave #1: David\u0026rsquo;s New Manager\nRiding the Rave #2: More\u0026hellip; Browsing the Mobile Web: Anyone Out There? by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nEarlier this week, I published a post on the Taptu blog looking at the challenges of creating and selling mobile applications outside of the iPhone bubble, in particular at how developer Jan Ole Suhr released a Twitter client for S60, causing a stir around the pricing. You know me, I love nothing more than a good ol’ rumble around the web, so when I came across some more tasty stats that didn’t agree with each other, I had to bite. Bango and AdMob both released recent figures for their top 20 handsets and there’s a Grand Canyon of difference in the top 3. More\u0026hellip; Google\u0026rsquo;s halo is slipping - have you checked yours lately by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nIncreasingly vocal criticisms of Google suggest that its halo is slipping. In psychological terms, it is teetering on the edge of falling victim to the \u0026ldquo;reverse halo effect\u0026rdquo;.\nThe \u0026ldquo;halo effect\u0026rdquo; itself is whereby we judge a brand, a company, or a person based on just one fact we know about them. For instance, if we find a politician is warm and friendly, we tend to think they have good policies. If we think the customer service of a particular company is good, we tend to think they are good employers. More\u0026hellip; Top Gobbledygook phrases used in 2008 and how to avoid them by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nBoston, MA - April 8, 2009 - David Meerman Scott is pleased to announce a partnership with Dow Jones and HubSpot to leverage and focus on innovative solutions for new and improved, next generation, cost effective, world class, high performance, value added outcomes. Does the sentence above suck or what??\nThat\u0026rsquo;s how so many PR people write — using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless.\nI have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. More\u0026hellip; PR via e-mail: the worst that can happen by Andrew Smith of escherman\nMark Brownlow’s excellent E-Mail Marketing Reports blog has a great post today called “E-Mail Marketing: the worst that can happen”. Given my recent post about what PR can learn from e-mail marketing best practice, I thought Mark’s post was very timely. It is well worth reading the whole post - and if you simply replace the words “e-mail marketing” with PR, the same principles apply.\nWith respect to Mark’s original post, here are the “PR via e-mail” More\u0026hellip; Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million: The Demographics Driving the Growth by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nTwitter continues to defy all those who question its relevance. Exploding from 6 million visitors at the beginning of the year, ComScore released its latest numbers that portray an almost vertical ascent through the end of February 2009, hitting an astonishing 10 million worldwide.\nPerhaps more interestingly, is the demographics that are fueling the groundswell. According to ComScore, the majority of visitors around the world were 35 years old or older, which match Nielsen\u0026rsquo;s assessment of those groups representing the majority of Facebook\u0026rsquo;s user base. More\u0026hellip; Social norms versus market norms: implications for social media and online PR by Andrew Smith of escherman\nDan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational is a fascinating look at why human beings systematically behave in an irrational fashion. Ariely is a behavioural economist - he goes a long way to exploding the traditional rational expectation theory of economics. The subject titles of the chapters in the book immediately give you a flavour of the non-intuitive findings of his research. For example: The Cost of Zero Cost - why we often pay too much when we pay nothing\nIn one experiment, a group of people were offered the choice of receiving a $10 Amazon voucher for free - or paying $7 for a $20 voucher. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/friday-roundup-hackneyed-copy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Innovate\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Pleased to\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Unique\u0026rdquo;. \u0026ldquo;Focused on\u0026rdquo;. And of course, \u0026ldquo;Leading Provider\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKeeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and engaging isn\u0026rsquo;t always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that\u0026rsquo;s the job, that it\u0026rsquo;s the way, is an easy trap to fall into.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich is why I like \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/david.meerman.scott/top-gobbledygook-phrases-used-in-2008-and-how-to-avoid-them\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s Gobbledygook analysis\u003c/a\u003e\n. Now in its second year, it does what David wants it to do\u0026hellip; makes you think about everything you write.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSee, now I\u0026rsquo;m wondering about my use of the word \u0026ldquo;engaging\u0026rdquo; before. Is that hackneyed? Is that a marketer talking to marketers leaning lazily on an industry-word-of-the-decade? Hey, just doing a quick check on dictionary.com tells me it doesn\u0026rsquo;t even mean what I thought it did; apparently \u003ca href=\"http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/engaging\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eit means attractive, charming, winning\u003c/a\u003e\n, and not, as I\u0026rsquo;d assumed, the potential to compel someone to engage with whatever. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - hackneyed copy"},{"content":"How are you feeling today?\nJolly? Then you\u0026rsquo;ll thank Trevor Young of the newly launched ParkYoung for drawing our attention to this comedic video on the perils of design by consensus\u0026hellip; a lesson in when less is more .\nThoughtful? Then you\u0026rsquo;ll want to drop in on Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; updated Conversation Prism .\nPoor? Then you might wish to review your investment in online advertising courtesy of Graham Jones. It is, he says, a waste of money .\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Social Media for Business Taster Course Presentation by Aren Grimshaw of UKNetWeb Limited\nA copy of yesterday’s ‘Social Media for Business - Social Media Taster Course‘ Powerpoint Presentations are shown below. For all those who could not get a place on the first course, please get in touch, as we are hoping to run another event on Thursday May 7th.\nSocial Media Taster Course\nSocial Media Taster Course Presentation (Niddocks) View more presentations from Aren Grimshaw. All the resources used to prepare the presenation have been added to our Delicious Social Bookmarks under the tag ’smtc’ More\u0026hellip; Google to buy Twitter - oh help\u0026hellip;! by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nGoogle is in the final stages of negotiations to buy Twitter, according to \u0026ldquo;people close to the negotiations\u0026rdquo; who have informed TechCrunch. If this turns out to be true, it could be a disaster for Twitter users. Google\u0026rsquo;s virtual monopoly position online means it will be able to do almost whatever it wants if it gets Twitter. It will, for instance, have to add advertising to Twitter in order to get its money back. And if there\u0026rsquo;s one thing that repeated studies have shown us - social networking users hate advertising with avengance. More\u0026hellip; Bluetooth marketing - Fangs or no fangs? by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nWe have an ongoing debate about Bluetooth marketing in the We Love Mobile office (you should work here, its sooo exciting), and are often asked by brands whether we think it should feature in campaigns. Such is the level of disagreement that last week we even found ourselves arguing about its merits in front of a client.\nThis blog was actually triggered by the news that T-Mobile are putting Bluetooth into their retail outlets in the UK, in order to spam (sorry, capture) people on the street as they walk past. More\u0026hellip; The Conversation Prism v2.0 by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThe Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas\nThe Conversation Prism debuted in August 2008 to provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it. In this short time span, over one million people have crossed its path.\nWhen Jesse Thomas of JESS3 and I initially mapped “the conversation,” we recognized that the act of categorizing social networks within a visually rich graphic would be momentary at best, demanding endless iterations in order to accurately document evolving and shifting online conversations as well as the communities that promote them. More\u0026hellip; Yahoo! Launches Big Purple Scooby Snack by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nYahoo! launched their new mobile portal yesterday, in mobile web and iPhone app flavours. It combines all their key mobile offerings in one giant purple stack and replaces their previous suite of downloadable apps (which I could never get to work 100%). Some of the features of the web version look good; customisable content and layout, collapsible sections and a fairly fresh look and feel. One think you can’t seem to be able to change is the Yahoo! purple, or shall we be charitable and call it ‘grape’. More\u0026hellip; Paul Gillin on Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nPaul Gillin at Blogworld Expo\nI\u0026rsquo;ve rigorously followed Paul Gillin over the years. Gillin is a long-time technology journalist who’s worked almost exclusively online since 1999. He was founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget, which was one of the most successful new media entities to debut on the Web. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief and executive editor of the technology weekly Computerworld for 15 years. In 2007, Gillin released The New Influencers and in 2008 he released Secrets of Social Media Marketing. More\u0026hellip; The spamtastic results of pay-per-Tweet on Twitter by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nThere is now an ad service called Magpie which hooks up advertisers with Twitter users. The Twitter users get paid to post links in their Twitter streams and the advertisers get exposure on the social media site of the moment.\nThis pay-per-view Twitter advertising is a bad idea for both users and advertisers. For users, it\u0026rsquo;s a very quick way to lose followers who aren\u0026rsquo;t going to want you to send them unsolicited ads for products and services you haven\u0026rsquo;t tried.\nFor advertisers, you risk ending up paying for the following sorts of garbage: More\u0026hellip; There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nI\u0026rsquo;m frequently amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology\u0026hellip; we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.\nTwitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.\nThe strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media. More\u0026hellip; Social Media Helps PR Grow Another Leg by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung\nI’ve followed for some time the argument (mainly overseas and now outdated) that the emergence of social media will be the death of public relations. Errr, nup. I don’t think so. To the contrary, I’d go so far to suggest social media is potentially the best thing to happen to the public relations industry since, well, the advent of the telephone (still a very important tool in our business). Click here to read the rest of this story. Content exclusive to Marketing Magazine. More\u0026hellip; More evidence that online advertising is a waste of money by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nLast year, in the USA alone, advertisers \u0026ldquo;invested\u0026rdquo; some $21bn in online advertising. No wonder we are in an economic mess - most of that money is being thrown away since almost no-one is looking at online adverts. Banner advertising has long been known to attract few people; current click-through rates on banner adverts are less than a quarter of a percent. In other words you have to show the advert to mroe than 400 people in order to get one person to click on it. And with conversion rates from such adverts running at less than 1%, it means you need to have more than 40,000 views of an advert to generate one sale\u0026hellip;.!\nNow, a new study of social networking users shows that they aren\u0026rsquo;t interested in adverts either. More\u0026hellip; Is the Best Job in the World the best marketing in the world? by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;m often asked: \u0026ldquo;How do I market a commodity.\u0026rdquo; My answer is predictable to those of you who read this blog: Create a world wide rave and people will share your ideas and tell your stories. Yes, even if you market a commodity.\nSandy beaches in warm and sunny locations are a commodity product.\nThis may come as a complete shock to people in tourism marketing, but it\u0026rsquo;s true. The traditional approach of showing white beach sand with footprints near lovely blue water and a bikini or two just doesn’t cut it. More\u0026hellip; Discussing Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Loic Le Meur by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI recently visited the gorgeous San Francisco offices of Loic Le Meur and Seesmic to discuss his company\u0026rsquo;s roadmap, photography, how to build online communities, as well as my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge ,\u0026ldquo;Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.\u0026rdquo;\nLoic suggest that we spend a few minutes discussing the book on camera to share with the Loic.tv community. It was an offer I couldn\u0026rsquo;t refuse - after all, Tim Ferriss had occupied the same chair moments before I arrived. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/friday-roundup-3rd-april-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHow are you feeling today?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJolly? Then you\u0026rsquo;ll thank Trevor Young of the newly launched \u003ca href=\"http://www.parkyoung.com.au\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eParkYoung\u003c/a\u003e\n for drawing our attention to this comedic video on the perils of design by consensus\u0026hellip; \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/trevor.young/redesigning-the-stop-sign---a-lesson-in-less-is-more\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea lesson in when less is more\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThoughtful? Then you\u0026rsquo;ll want to drop in on Brian Solis\u0026rsquo; updated \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/the-conversation-prism-v2.0\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eConversation Prism\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoor? Then you might wish to review your investment in online advertising courtesy of Graham Jones. It is, he says, \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/graham.jones/more-evidence-that-online-advertising-is-a-waste-of-money\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea waste of money\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 3rd April 2009"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology\u0026hellip; we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.\nTwitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.\nThe strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.\nThe strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.\nThere is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter\u0026rsquo;s sake and not for business success.\nBut back to the corporate Twitter profile, by which I mean\u0026hellip; @companyname or @brandname.\nIf I ask you to think about the last conversation you had, what comes to mind? Was it interesting? Did it leave a lasting impression? You will recall the characteristics of the other person or persons.\nBut it is always people. Try it, although perhaps you don\u0026rsquo;t need to! Ask everyone you come in to contact with today about the last conversation they had, and see how many of them say \u0026ldquo;Yes, wow, great chat with brandname at lunch\u0026rdquo;. They will say \u0026ldquo;John\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Jane\u0026rdquo; but never \u0026ldquo;Levi\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Porsche\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Dell\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Accenture\u0026rdquo;.\nDoes this mean there is no place for @companyname and @brandname?\nNo!\nIn many ways, although this is not a bullet proof assertion, Twitter is everything RSS aspired to be (at least for human use). It is simple, universally easy to create and delightfully simple to follow. The corporate Twitter profile is, then, a nifty way for Web-savvy and interested parties to keep abreast of your news.\nAs it stands, this approach is more monologue than the dialogue to which we all aspire, so we can\u0026rsquo;t stop here.\nNow, if you have some passionate social media trained members of your BrandX team, let\u0026rsquo;s call them @john and @jane, your corporate Twitter profile @brandx should aim to direct followers looking to have a chat with real people such as John and Jane. Each Twitter profile should then refer to and converse with eachother.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t rocket science; in fact it\u0026rsquo;s much the same as real life, which of course makes sense when you consider that mankind hasn\u0026rsquo;t undergone some kind of rapid evolution or psychological metamorphosis just because we have the Web or Skype or Twitter. In the pre-social Web days I might end up talking with John because I was a BrandX customer. The brand brought us together but the conversation, the dialogue, the interaction was person-to-person.\nAnd it still is.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/04/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-twitter-strategy-but-you-should-have-clear-expectations-for-your-corporate-twitter-profile/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"corporate%20twitter\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/corporate_twitter.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their \u003cem\u003eTwitter Strategy\u003c/em\u003e, or their \u003cem\u003eFacebook Strategy\u003c/em\u003e. Contrast this with offline terminology\u0026hellip; we never talk about a \u003cem\u003ePress Release Strategy\u003c/em\u003e or a \u003cem\u003eFeatures Tracking Strategy\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no such thing as \u003cem\u003eTwitter Strategy\u003c/em\u003e, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter\u0026rsquo;s sake and not for business success.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile"},{"content":"This slideshow made me laugh.\nView more presentations from The Kaiser .\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by its success.\nYou can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and \u0026lsquo;clients\u0026rsquo; that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.\nYou could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.\nYou could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious\u0026hellip; with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more \u0026lsquo;many-to-many\u0026rsquo;.\nYou could attribute it to its avoidance of rules. Things like the @ way of addressing other Tweople and hashtags emerged from the community. Community sourced innovation lives or dies according to the community\u0026rsquo;s regard for that innovation, so QED only good stuff comes out of it at no cost to Twitter.\nHowever you cut it, perhaps the most important contributing factor to Twitter\u0026rsquo;s success is the heartfelt derision from non-Tweople who don\u0026rsquo;t get it that simply serves to harden the loyalty of those that do, and loving derision and teasing from the Twitter users themselves. Even the fail whale worked to Twitter\u0026rsquo;s net advantage.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a fun take on Tweeting for a Friday. In the meantime, if anyone is considering a Web innovation, the list of success attributes above might not be a bad starting point in shaping your own innovation and improving its chances of success.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/friday-fun-with-the-garden-of-tweetdom/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis slideshow made me laugh.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView more \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentations\u003c/a\u003e\n from \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/TheKaiser\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Kaiser\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by its success.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and \u0026lsquo;clients\u0026rsquo; that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious\u0026hellip; with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more \u0026lsquo;many-to-many\u0026rsquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday fun with \u0026quot;The Garden of Tweetdom\u0026quot;"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s always difficult to pick out the highlights of the highlights from a week of MarCom Professional posts, but here goes\u0026hellip;\nIf social media thought leader Brian Solis didn\u0026rsquo;t occasionally blog from face-to-face events I\u0026rsquo;d swear he eats and sleeps solely on the big old WWW. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to join a service, pre-beta, pre-alpha, or whatever, where Mr. Solis isn\u0026rsquo;t already embedded! Well his new book is out, as you will see from his post this week , \u0026ldquo;Putting the Public Back in Public Relations\u0026rdquo;.\nHaven\u0026rsquo;t got hold of it yet\u0026hellip; but half way through David Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s World Wide Rave .\nAnd for pure poetry, you must check out the presentation brought to our attention by Trevor Young. Intriguing and powerful copy.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nPacking a Punch With Powerful Words by Trevor Young of One19\nThis brief presentation (discovered via the wonderful Presentation Zen) is very cool. It\u0026rsquo;s simple and clever and clocks in at just 1:44 mins, but still manages to pack a punch. But, make sure you watch through for the twist. According to Presentation Zen, this presentation placed second in the AARP U@50 video contest. More\u0026hellip; Internet marketing experts make huge mistake by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nInternet marketing \u0026ldquo;experts\u0026rdquo; are fond of telling us about certain \u0026ldquo;systems\u0026rdquo; that work. They show us page after page of PayPal histories confirming that they have been paid tons of money for their work. And they tell us - \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s easy\u0026rdquo; - all you have to do is follow their system.\nThe problem is they could make even more money; the \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; used by almost all internet marketing gurus is badly flawed. Here\u0026rsquo;s why.\nAll the \u0026ldquo;top\u0026rdquo; internet marketing experts will tell you that you need to add bonuses to your offerings. More\u0026hellip; join the conversation - the really mobile project by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI’ve been sent this link www.thereallymobileproject.com from a number of sources this morning - and it’s worth a look.\nSome leaders in the UK mobile space are launching something really cool - really soon.\nI’ve just spoken to one of the people involved - and it will be worth the wait.\nSo head over to the really mobile project and click on the image and join the conversation!\nMore\u0026hellip; Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI almost can\u0026rsquo;t believe that this day is finally here\u0026hellip;\nDeirdre Breakenridge and I proudly announce the availability of our new book, \u0026ldquo;Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR.\u0026rdquo;\nThe book is in stock at Amazon, the Amazon Kindle store, Barnes \u0026amp; Noble, Safari, and bookstores everywhere.\nDeirdre and I spent a good part of the last year pouring our heart, soul, and real world successes and failures into this book, and we only hope that it will help you excel in whatever role you choose to pursue. More\u0026hellip; Phorm will fail - so do not worry about it by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPhorm is a controversial online advertising system that has already annoyed the founder of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Today, the top web sites in the world have been urged to stop using Phorm since it is thought to invade privacy.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how it works: it monitors what web sites are being looked at on any particular computer. It then delivers advertising to match the kinds of topics that are being viewed. This is known as \u0026ldquo;behavioural advertising\u0026rdquo; and the marketing world is cock-a-hoop about it because they think it is the answer to their prayers. More\u0026hellip; World Wide Rave book launch video from South-by-Southwest 2009 by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nAt the South-by-Southwest festival - #SXSW - I launched my newest book World Wide Rave.\nIt was a terrific event and I was thrilled to be there.\nThis is a ten-minute video showing some highlights of the gig.\nI\u0026rsquo;m using Vimeo for this post rather than YouTube as an experiement. Direct link to this on Vimeo Direct link to this on YouTube\nAt the South-by-Southwest Interactive festival, David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR, launched his newest book World Wide Rave. More\u0026hellip; Today programme viral agency finds social media competitors aren’t always social by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications\nI caught up with Adam Abu-Nab and Chris Quigley from Rubber Republic yesterday.\nRubber Republic is the agency behind the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme viral, produced at its own cost after being challenged by presenter Evan Davies to come up with a campaign that would attract potential listeners.\nThe result has generated fierce - almost philosophical debate - in the ad and social media industries. The genesis of the debate is can a viral be called a viral before it has become viral?\nThat the Today programme viral went viral is undisputed. More\u0026hellip; Top 10 Free SEO Tools for Boosting Your Website’s Visitors by David Knowles of\nSo you’ve built your website and ready to start greeting customers. But first you need to make sure your site can be found. In follow up to last week’s post on Pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO), here are 10 free tools for boosting your search engine ranking, and welcoming more visitors to your virtual shop:\n1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – the first step in any SEO campaign is identifying your keywords. This handy tool will let you know which keywords to target, as well as offer suggestions on popular phrases you might not have thought of. More\u0026hellip; Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 3 by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nYAWN!\nA yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2).\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; More\u0026hellip; Friday fun with \u0026ldquo;The Garden of Tweetdom\u0026rdquo; by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nThis slideshow made me laugh.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by its success.\nYou can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and \u0026lsquo;clients\u0026rsquo; that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.\nYou could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation. More\u0026hellip; Persuasive Writing eBook Released - The Art of Using Words to Convince, Compel and Sell by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nThree months and several rewrites later, my eBook on persuasive writing has finally been released. It comprises of all the posts from my recent persuasive writing series, and a couple more to fill in the gaps.\nExperienced copywriters won’t discover anything new. But I’m hoping the eBook will be useful for visitors looking for advice on how to make their sales writing more compelling (or to consider hiring me to write it for them).\nIt’s underlying theme is that showy writing isn’t sales writing: More\u0026hellip; Yet more evidence that businesses don\u0026rsquo;t understand the internet by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nDespite the fact that billions of pounds worth of business is done each year online, it\u0026rsquo;s still pretty apparent that many companies don\u0026rsquo;t exploit the internet to make even more money. Indeed, a quarter of British companies don\u0026rsquo;t yet have a web site and now it seems that the FTSE100 is ignoring a potential gold-mine of revenue. According to a new study on affiliate marketing the FTSE100 firms are missing out on £370m worth of sales that could come from setting up affiliate marketing schemes. More\u0026hellip; Introducing FriendFilter, A Better Way to Make Friends on Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nA few weeks ago, I eluded to a new Twitter application that would eventually debut to help qualify the people who follow you on Twitter.\nGood friend and developer extraordinaire Christopher Peri and I proudly introduce FriendFilter in Beta. I\u0026rsquo;ve collaborated with Peri in the past to develop @microPR (along with Stowe Boyd), MicroJobs, and other apps soon to be released. His vision and technical prowess are ahead of many and I\u0026rsquo;m lucky to know him.\nFriendFilter improves the signal to noise ratio on Twitter by providing you with the intelligence necessary to effectively curate the content and the people that appear in your Twitter timeline. More\u0026hellip; Low cost marketing ideas for a recession by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nTim Reid is a human dynamo that I met online recently. He posted a question on LinkedIn What\u0026rsquo;s your BEST MARKETING TIP for those small businesses who have limited or zero marketing budget?\nTo date he has had 27 answers. All great suggestions. Please share More\u0026hellip; Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nRelationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It\u0026rsquo;s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It\u0026rsquo;s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.\nOn Social Networks we\u0026rsquo;re bound by context and not necessarily by the relationships that link us in the real world.\nWe listen to relevant keywords to learn from others who share our interests and passions. More\u0026hellip; An open letter to journalists: You have an amazing career opportunity on the Dark Side by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nA fascinating convergence is upon us right now bringing a perfect opportunity for open-minded journalists.\nSadly, many mainstream media outlets are reducing their staff journalists. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television outlets are facing tough economic challenges and unfortunately that means that many talented reporters and editors have been (or will be) laid off. I’ve had a chance to speak with several dozen journalists over the past few months and many are downcast about career prospects. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/friday-roundup-brian-solis-new-book-is-out/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s always difficult to pick out the highlights of the highlights from a week of MarCom Professional posts, but here goes\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf social media thought leader Brian Solis didn\u0026rsquo;t occasionally blog from face-to-face events I\u0026rsquo;d swear he eats and sleeps solely on the big old WWW. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to join a service, pre-beta, pre-alpha, or whatever, where Mr. Solis isn\u0026rsquo;t already embedded! Well \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/putting-the-public-back-in-public-relations-is-now-available\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehis new book is out, as you will see from his post this week\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u0026ldquo;Putting the Public Back in Public Relations\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaven\u0026rsquo;t got hold of it yet\u0026hellip; but half way through \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/david.meerman.scott/catch-the-rave-join-my-book-tour-in-new-york-boston-and-sxsw\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDavid Meerman Scott\u0026rsquo;s World Wide Rave\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd for pure poetry, you must check out \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/trevor.young/packing-a-punch-with-powerful-words\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethe presentation\u003c/a\u003e\n brought to our attention by Trevor Young. Intriguing and powerful copy.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Brian Solis\u0026#039; new book is out"},{"content":"Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.\nIBM\u0026rsquo;s awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text (\u0026ldquo;unstructured data\u0026rdquo; in the words of the experts). An analysis they\u0026rsquo;ve called \u0026ldquo;Phrase Net\u0026rdquo;. The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.\nSo I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto\u0026hellip;\nThis is just a static image of course, but if you click through to the actual visualisation then you will see that mousing-over the words gives you their number of occurrences, and mousing-over the connection lines gives you information about the number of matches.\nClick here to find the actual visualisation , and you will want to click on \u0026ldquo;word1 [space] word2\u0026rdquo; in the \u0026ldquo;Select a phrase\u0026rdquo; box to see the grab above.\n____________________\nMy other posts on data visualisation:\nInfluence… it’s a numbers game Can you see it? Making influence visible. Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails Visualise your SEO ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/visualising-content-to-improve-your-understanding-of-the-conversation/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eData visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIBM\u0026rsquo;s awesome \u003ca href=\"http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMany Eyes\u003c/a\u003e\n service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text (\u0026ldquo;unstructured data\u0026rdquo; in the words of the experts). An analysis they\u0026rsquo;ve called \u0026ldquo;Phrase Net\u0026rdquo;. The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"marcomprofessional phrase net\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/marcomprofessional-phrase-net-300x197.png\" title=\"marcomprofessional phrase net\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation"},{"content":"\nYAWN!\nA yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2 ).\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.\nJust needed to find one I really liked.\nFortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media\u0026rsquo;s guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don\u0026rsquo;t need to look any further.\nWinner of the Automotive category 2009 is Problem Playground by Collective for Honda .\nI\u0026rsquo;ll quote the awards\u0026rsquo; brochure:\n\u0026ldquo;Judges thought that Honda\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;Problem Playground\u0026rsquo; campaign was a great way to launch a new car, being both fun and engaging, as well as showing outstanding attention to detail.\nA key focus of Honda\u0026rsquo;s passion for innovative engineering is to benefit the environment, and with this in mind, the car marque wanted to increase the sales oof its Civic Hybrid model.\nThe campaign focused on increasing traffic to a website that featured a \u0026lsquo;problem playground\u0026rsquo;, inviting users to solve puzzles. The digital activity aimed to closely associate Honda with the idea of finding cost efficiencies and environmental solutions by inviting users to move the pieces of an online puzzlein order to reveal information.\nThe campaign delivered 140,000 unique users to the landing page, with consumers spending on average of 2.5 minutes on the site. Those driven to the site spent time with the content, with an average of eight pages being viewed per visit. In total, 5,500 hours were spent on the site.\nJudges said there were lots of puzzles for people to solve, with impressive integration of voice-over messages. They concluded that the campaign was an innovative way for the brand to communicate its messages on problem solving and the environment.\u0026rdquo;\nBut this post would not be complete without pointing you to another award winner from Friday evening. Congratulations to Chris Applegate and the team at Outside Line for winning Best Website for the Cravendale site. It\u0026rsquo;s been interesting reading Chris\u0026rsquo; posts on MarCom Professional as the Cravendale site came together , and now it has achieved the accolade it deserves!\nWhat better way to finish this post but to check out the Cravendale sister site at www.makethetea.com , get the kettle on, make a brew and think about how you\u0026rsquo;d like to start your conversation in an interesting way.\n___________________\nImage source: Jonathan D. Blundell ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way-part-3/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"yawn\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/yawn.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYAWN!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way\"\u003epart 1\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way---part-2\"\u003epart 2\u003c/a\u003e\n).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJust needed to find one I really liked.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media\u0026rsquo;s guest at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.revolutionawards.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRevolution Awards\u003c/a\u003e\n at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don\u0026rsquo;t need to look any further.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 3"},{"content":"I recommend the SEO Toolbar (Firefox only). You should download and install it now.\nWhy? Because your prospects and wider stakeholders may stumble across your products and services in social interaction, on- and off-line, but they also revert to search engines to find what they\u0026rsquo;re looking for.\nSearch is important.\nAaron Wall of SEOBook explains that the tool \u0026ldquo;was designed to make it easier to evaluate how strong a competing website is. The SEO Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy to get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from your browser. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this toolbar also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data.\u0026rdquo;\nSome of this stuff can be confusing to SEO newbies, but what better way to learn? You can\u0026rsquo;t break anything by installing it, so you have nothing to lose and everything to learn.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSocial networking is being hampered by lack of understanding by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nMillions of people are joining social networks every single day. The growth of Twitter, for instance, has reached an astonishing 1382% per year\u0026hellip;! Facebook has almost 200m users, LinkedIn grows daily and the growth of Ecademy is now also reaching exponential proportions. We\u0026rsquo;ve all gone social networking mad. However, things are not as they seem, based on these raw statistics. Three years ago, the usability guru Jakob Nielsen found that only 10% of people registered with social networks were actually active within them. More\u0026hellip; The U.S. Air Force and social media: A discussion with Colonel Michael Caldwell by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOn Wednesday I delivered a presentation at the United States Air Force World Wide Public Affairs Professional Development Conference. The Worldwide as they call it, is a chance for everyone who works in public affairs (PA) to get together to share ideas and learn what others have been doing by discussing communication techniques that run from traditional media relations, to partnerships, to Combat Camera and Defense Visual Information.\nA big focus this year was New Media Tactics and you can see some of the discussions on Twitter. More\u0026hellip; Top ten tips for incredibly successful public speaking by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been to something like one hundred conferences and corporate events in the past several years as I travel the world delivering keynotes and running seminars. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a few great speeches. Sadly, most speeches I see are not very good. Some are downright terrible. I\u0026rsquo;ve been collecting some observations on what makes a good presentation and also drawing from my own experience.\nMost of us have an opportunity to speak, perhaps at your industry event, or your company\u0026rsquo;s sales conference, or to a local club. More\u0026hellip; Social Media in B2B Marketing by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.\nThe B2B Marketing Magazine seminar on ‘Exploiting Social Media in B2B Marketing’ was quite an eye-opener for me. For a start the Century Club was rammed. Social Media is no longer a fringe subject. It may not be the panacea or indeed pancetta of the B2B world, but nor is it the dirty word(s) of just a few short months ago. I have the impression we’ve successfully managed to flip a very impressive bird at the traditionalists who have been hoping that it would all just go away because they had a pressing lithograph issue to deal with down at the typesetter’s. More\u0026hellip; 15 Punchy Copywriting Tips by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\n“They were easier to read than ignore” - Victor Schwab\nIt’s often said that copywriting can’t be too long, just too boring. And sales writing is often only tolerated at the best of times. So if your copy is to weave its magic it needs to be light, easy to read and captivating.\nHere are 15 tips for making your sales writing more punchy and compelling for readers:\n1. Aim for an average sentence length of around 16 words.\n2. Vary between short and long sentences to give your writing rhythm. More\u0026hellip; Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 2 by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nI posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by not just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way.\nAfter all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you\u0026rsquo;re talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.\nMy last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. More\u0026hellip; Journalists using LinkedIn profiles to vet interviewees? by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAs I noted in my recent Online PR whitepaper, there are some novel digital twists occurring within traditional media relations. Take the good old journalist interview. In the past, a journalist would probably have to take at face value a bio provided by the PR person of a prospective interviewee. On LinkedIn, although the background info provided by the person themselves might be of relevance, more value is to be had from what other people think of them ie LinkedIn recommendations. Here is a practical example. More\u0026hellip; New PR consultancy Speed launches by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nI’m lousy at keeping secrets. But this is a big one that I’ve been sitting on for the past six months or so. The formal announcement follows. For more information check out the Speed web site, our blog network, the Speed channel on You Tube, or give me a call.\nNew PR consultancy Speed launches Combination of five specialist firms creates top 50 UK PR consultancy\nMarketing services group Loewy today launched a new PR consultancy called Speed Communications.\nSpeed specialises in the consumer, technology, business and corporate sectors, and has been formed by bringing together the teams of BMA Communications, Custard PR, Lighthouse PR, Mantra PR and Rainier PR. More\u0026hellip; The Human Network: The Social Economy is Influenced by How We Communicate Online \u0026amp; Offline by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI’m just returning from the SXSW Interactive festival where thousands of “geeks” stormed Austin Texas to learn, share and celebrate what I call the Social Economy.\nIt’s something so special that I’m struggling to truly capture and convey the emotional essence and inspirational spirit that uniquely brings together innovation, ideas, and the people who galvanize change and evolution.\nWhile the economy has crippled or altogether eliminated conferences and tradeshows that usually serve as the catalyst for potential engagement, SXSW represents a spiritual and intellectual journey for many of us, fortifying the strength and future of the Social Economy and the relationships that bind us. More\u0026hellip; You cannot ignore social networking by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nSocial networkers are going to be more important to your business than you ever thought possible. Data from several different sources is revealing just how important social networking has become online - and how the search engines are beginning to suffer as a result. Let\u0026rsquo;s look at some basic data to begin with. According to All About Market Research, at the end of 2008 there were 1.57 billion people online and a year prior to that there were 1.31 billion - a 19.85% increase during the year.\nAs always, these additional online users all want different things. More\u0026hellip; All SEO Clients Should Learn about SEO by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nYesterday I taught a training course for a new client about basic SEO. During the course, the company\u0026rsquo;s web developer wondered if I found it frustrating having to spend 3-4 hours answering very basic questions about SEO so another business could decide what aspects of its optimisation to outsource and what to do in-house.\nMy reponse was simple and entirely truthful - I wish every business would proceed that way because it would make my job much easier.\nAnybody who has worked in SEO has experienced More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/friday-roundup-get-used-to-seo/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI recommend the \u003ca href=\"http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSEO Toolbar\u003c/a\u003e\n (\u003ca href=\"http://getfirefox.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFirefox\u003c/a\u003e\n only). You should download and install it now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy? Because your prospects and wider stakeholders may stumble across your products and services in social interaction, on- and off-line, but they also revert to search engines to find what they\u0026rsquo;re looking for.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSearch is important.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - get used to SEO"},{"content":"I posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by not just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way .\nAfter all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you\u0026rsquo;re talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.\nMy last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. For topical reasons I have another animation for your interest, but the main feature in this post is a call-to-action-microsite.\nBurma - It Can\u0026rsquo;t Wait Fanista , a community for entertainment enthusiasts, started a corporate initiative to drive awareness and generate consumer participation for the US Campaign for Burma.\nThe resultant microsite, www.burmaitcantwait.com , centres around an image of Aung San Suu Kyi , the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner now under house arrest in Burma, and features fifty short videos with entertainment and music celebrities describing the horrible situation in Burma and asking for public support (including the video at the top of this post featuring Will Ferrell).\nThe videos were also distributed on a YouTube Channel.\nHow effective was the microsite?\u0026hellip;\nOver 1 million video views on YouTube and the microsite Hundreds of blogs embedded the videos Achieved YouTube Editorial Spotlight – became “most discussed,” “top favorites” and “top rated” in countries around the world The campaign was covered by over 200 media articles including a New York Times feature and a LA Times article The Facebook App generated thousands of downloads with friend-to-friend acceptance rate twice the average rate The microsite had a 6:48 min average user engagement time Now that\u0026rsquo;s an interesting way to start a conversation!\n[Disclosure - the microsite was developed by Digital Influence Group , a sister company to Racepoint Group.]\nThe Crisis of Credit And here\u0026rsquo;s that topical animation I mentioned. I\u0026rsquo;m fairly business and financially literate, but I found it less than easy to establish what had happened to cause this global financial meltdown let alone explain it to others.\nAnimation to the rescue. Imagine the kudos a financial institution could reap in recent times if it took time out to converse with its highly concerned stakeholders in an interesting way, in a way that said \u0026ldquo;hey, we know what\u0026rsquo;s happened and we know how to explain it too\u0026rdquo;.\nUnfortunately, unless I\u0026rsquo;ve missed it, they are obviously too busy trying to secure their annual bonuses.\nSo the task is left to Jonathan Jarvis . Now Jonathan isn\u0026rsquo;t looking to start a conversation with you about the credit crunch, but as a Master of Fine Arts Candidate on the Media Design Programme at the Art Center College of Design , I\u0026rsquo;m sure he\u0026rsquo;d be delighted to start a conversation with you in respect of his skills and your employment of them!\nWatch this for your ah-ha moment and pass it on.\nThe Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way-part-2/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way\"\u003enot just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you\u0026rsquo;re talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. For topical reasons I have another animation for your interest, but the main feature in this post is a call-to-action-microsite.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way - Part 2"},{"content":"An indulgent post bag this week. So many fascinating posts, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t keep the short-list all that short.\nTake the debate about search engine optimisation (SEO) amongst various pockets of the digital marketing profession. My approach to SEO has always been to develop content for humans first and search engines a close second. But definitely second.\nAnd where does SEO stand when future \u0026lsquo;votes for\u0026rsquo; a webpage, as interwoven into the search engines\u0026rsquo; algorithms, come not solely from links from other websites but from more inclusive sources such as social bookmarking services like Delicious and Stumbleupon , and Twitter ed links?\nDavid Meerman Scott hints this week at his view of SEO\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;SEO and your crap filled site \u0026rdquo;! And in case you remain uncertain, click over to Graham Jones\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Search is on its deathbed\u0026hellip;bye, bye SEO \u0026rdquo;.\nAnd if you fancy getting into this sort of stuff more deeply, Brian Solis struts his visionary stuff again this week with \u0026ldquo;Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? \u0026rdquo;\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nIs Twitter improving media relations? by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nSocial networks and blogs are providing a brutal feedback loop between PR professionals and journalists. Check out these posts on Twitter that I’ve collected in recent weeks and this post from Sally Whittle.\nJournalists are outing bad practice and setting out their expectations clearly. Smart PR professionals are adapting fast and are using these new channels to develop direct relationships.\nIt must surely drive up professional standards for the PR industry? More\u0026hellip; What does the Google behavioral targeting move mean for mobile advertising? by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nRecently, Google announced that they will start “behavioral targeting” for web searches. From their announcement:\nWe think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. More\u0026hellip; FT Digital Media Conference by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nToday I’m lucky enough to be at the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference, taking place at the Millenium Mayfair in Grovesnor Square, London.\nBilled as ‘Lessons from the Digital Frontier’, the event has a line up from the who’s who of the digital media space - BSkyB, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Channel 4, BBC, and the Financial Times itself. You can find more details and the full line up here.\nRichard Waters, West Coast Managing Editor (that’s the West Coast of the US, not the West Coast of the UK, e.g. More\u0026hellip; The World\u0026rsquo;s Greatest Twitter Treasure Trove - Please Feel Free to Plunder \u0026amp; Pass On! by Trevor Young of One19\nTwitter continues to nibble away at the edges of mainstream acceptability (or is that respectability?) Here, for the first (and definitely last) time, the PR Warrior has kindly cobbled together for you lot to plunder potentially the broadest array of stuff about Twitter ever posted in the one place. THIS COULD WELL BE THE GREATEST TREASURE TROVE OF TWITTER TID-BITS EVER ASSEMBLED! This is a one-time deal folks, so sit back, dim the lights and enjoy the Twitter show. COOL TWITTER APPS, PLATFORMS + SLIGHTLY TECH STUFF More\u0026hellip; Forget Twitter, go back to email by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nTwitter is the current \u0026ldquo;in thing\u0026rdquo;; the numbers of people using it is rising exponentially. But could it have reached its peak? Remember just a year ago when the buzz was about Second Life? What happened? It didn\u0026rsquo;t even get discussed at the recent Social Media Conference in London. And remember Friends Reunited? That\u0026rsquo;s been a serious failure for ITV which is now touting it around in the hope it can sell off the doomed site. So is it possible that Twitter will go the same way - a here today, gone tomorrow \u0026ldquo;fad\u0026rdquo;? All the evidence is that Twitter is something different and is likely to survive long-term. More\u0026hellip; Presentations I Wish I’d Written #1 by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nThis presentation by Bud Cadell (”Awesomest Strategist Ever”) is just fantastic. Called Digital Media isn’t Mass Media for Cheap, the deck has beautiful images, clever and engaging design, clear messages, and highly useful and relevant content.\nThe perfect set? Judge for yourself:\nThere’s more presentations on a similar format on Bud’s blog, but this is one presentation I’d wish I’d written and I’ll be working to get my own slides to this level. More\u0026hellip; Twitter, Sweet Charity and The Rhythm of Life by Hamish Thompson of Twelve Thirty Eight Ltd\n“Daddy started out in San Francisco,\nTootin\u0026rsquo; on his trumpet loud and mean.\nSuddenly a voice said, \u0026ldquo;Go forth, Daddy.\nSpread the picture on a wider screen.\u0026quot;”\nNot since Sid Meier’s magnificent Civilization series of video games have we seen such an interesting manifestation of the evolution of a society as we are witnessing with San Francisco start-up Twitter, the remarkably enduring ‘next big thing’ which is now already three years old. More\u0026hellip; Struggling to find work? Here’s how to promote your copywriting services to clients by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nI think we’re all getting bored of hearing how times are tight and marketing budgets are getting slashed, so I thought I’d offer some tips to on how to pitch copywriting services to clients. Even in brighter times, it’s always been difficult securing funding for a web project’s written element. Businesses often care more about how their website looks than what it says. But not investing in quality copy is like creating a beautifully decorated cake with intricate icing and filling it with sawdust (analogy taken from Boagworld web design podcast about copywriting). More\u0026hellip; How U2 producer Brian Eno solves the paradox of choice (lessons for online PR) by Andrew Smith of escherman\nA recent Daily Telegraph interview with legendary music producer Brian Eno contained an instructive quote about dealing with too many choices: “In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. More\u0026hellip; Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nYou heard that right\u0026hellip;no matter how much time we sink into our inbox trying to keep up with all that barrage of never-ending mail, a new report sent over by Nielsen (thanks Sandra Parrelli) claims that Social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online activity today.\nThe report, \u0026ldquo;Global Faces and Networked Places,\u0026rdquo; features data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 and reveals some very interesting statistics worth noting.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s are the highlights:\nTwo-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time\nTime spent on social network sites is also expanding: More\u0026hellip; Google’s New Ad Preferences Explained by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nYou’re probably familiar with Google’s AdSense Contextual ad network that displays ads on websites based on the context of the content on the page. Now we are introduced to yet another type of ad network. Google has launched in beta what they call “Ad Preferences.” Ad Preferences displays ads to the user based on the user’s interests as edited by the user and as interpreted by the user’s search history, websites visited, etc. In Google’s words:\nAs you browse certain Google services and websites that have partnered with us using our AdSense program, Google stores a cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages you visit (this cookie appears as .doubleclick.net in your browser). More\u0026hellip; The future of mobile meets retail by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI came across the video presented below over at Dave Knox’s blog Hard Knox Life (he’s a Brand Manager at P\u0026amp;G), who in turn found it at Feed: The Digital Design Blog. It was previewed at the Wharton Business Technology Conference by Microsoft Labs - looking at “Microsoft 2019“. The video shows how mobile might meet retail in the future. However, I don’t see it as being 10 years away. Tesco already have the analytics behind this conceot as well as a mobile MVNO (Tesco mobile). More\u0026hellip; Riding the Rave #1: David\u0026rsquo;s New Manager by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nYou know when your marketing agency or business partner just doesn\u0026rsquo;t get it? It\u0026rsquo;s frustrating as hell.\nFriends Tim Washer, Scott Teems, and I put together a three part video series to show the absurdity of working with others.\nThis is part one. Direct YouTube link here.\nWatch this blog for parts two and three in the next several weeks.\nTim Washer is all of the following: Host. Comedian. Writer. Presbyterian.\nScott Teems is a filmmaker. His latest film is That Evening Sun, which he wrote and directed and stars Hal Holbrook. More\u0026hellip; BackType Connects the Conversation Graph by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI\u0026rsquo;m a strong supporter of BackType and the work of Christopher Golda since the debut of the highly valuable comments search engine last September.\nListening effectively requires extensive and active monitoring of not only blog posts and Tweets on Twitter, but also blog comments and other active networks that define the Conversation Prism. It\u0026rsquo;s how to identify active communities that necessitate not only responses, but ongoing participation.\nBackType brings blog post comments into the spotlight. More\u0026hellip; The Advantages of Digital Print over Lithographic by David Knowles of\nIn follow up to last week’s brochure design tips, we thought we’d discuss why you should consider printing your brochures digitally, rather than rely on good old lithographic. Digital is being hailed as a revolution for small business’ print marketing: compared to litho, digital is quick, often cheaper and can deliver messages personalised to your customers’ interests. Why is digital printing different to lithographic?\nTraditional litho ‘offset’ printing requires the creation of a plate for every print, which is then used to transfer the image via a rubber blanket onto the paper. More\u0026hellip; Tracking Brands on Twitter to Improve How You Listen and Engage by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nRecently, I reviewed Twibs, a directory that lists all brands and businesses currently using Twitter.\nElectric Artists released a new app that is a real-time listing of the top brands, media, television, entertainment, and celebrities that the team is currently following on Twitter.\nWhile this service offers appeal as a directory for consumers seeking their favorite brands and personalities on Twitter, it\u0026rsquo;s much more promising as a real-time monitor of how businesses, media properties, and celebrities are using Twitter - for better or for worse. More\u0026hellip; Search is on its deathbed\u0026hellip;bye, bye SEO by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nSearch engines have never been as important as they would like us to think. Now, that truth is suddenly coming home to roost in more ways than one for companies like Google. They would like us to think that we are constantly \u0026ldquo;searching\u0026rdquo; for things online - but we aren\u0026rsquo;t. We are \u0026ldquo;locating\u0026rdquo; stuff we already know about, a lot of the time.\nAccording to Bill Tancer, a researcher with the search intelligence company Hitwise, there is frequently a pattern to searching - often triggered by events outside the Internet. More\u0026hellip; SEO and your crap filled site by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMany people think that Search Engine Optimization involves some sort of magic formula. Sadly, quite a few SEO firms perpetuate this myth by shrouding their work in secrecy and mythology, spouting ten-dollar words like \u0026ldquo;algorithm\u0026rdquo; when they talk to potential clients. They make it seem like their SEO work is similar to driving the space shuttle and mere mortals can never do it.\nNote to regular readers: I have written about this subject several times, but it is worth a re-visit based on how many people ask me about it. More\u0026hellip; Humanizing Social Networks: Revealing the People Powering Social Media by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCompete: Top 25 Social Networks\nSocial Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share.\nAs these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention.\nFacebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yelp, and other online communities transformed the regimen and practice of marketing “at” More\u0026hellip; Giving fans and critics a voice online by Hamish Thompson of Twelve Thirty Eight Ltd\nThe Government’s announcement that it is launching an online review mechanic for public services is an interesting move. It’s an eye-catching initiative, although providing customers with a voice in relation to very specific service experiences is a risky enterprise unless handled very carefully.\nThe key issues are:\nAuthenticity – Can readers be certain that the reviews come from bona fide customers of the service? Too many online review services are prone to manipulation, bias and blatant falsehood. What is required is a closed loop system that guarantees the authenticity of the customer. Reevoo is a perfect example of this type of service and is building a widely trusted brand. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/friday-roundup-humans-first-machines-a-close-second/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAn indulgent post bag this week. So many fascinating posts, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t keep the short-list all that short.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTake the debate about search engine optimisation (SEO) amongst various pockets of the digital marketing profession. My approach to SEO has always been to develop content for humans first and search engines a close second. But definitely second.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd where does SEO stand when future \u0026lsquo;votes for\u0026rsquo; a webpage, as interwoven into the search engines\u0026rsquo; algorithms, come not solely from links from other websites but from more inclusive sources such as social bookmarking services like \u003ca href=\"http://www.delicious.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDelicious\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"http://www.stumbleupon.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStumbleupon\u003c/a\u003e\n, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitter\u003c/a\u003e\ned links?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid Meerman Scott hints this week at his view of SEO\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/david.meerman.scott/seo-and-your-crap-filled-site\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSEO and your crap filled site\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;! And in case you remain uncertain, click over to Graham Jones\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/graham.jones/search-is-on-its-deathbed...bye-bye-seo\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSearch is on its deathbed\u0026hellip;bye, bye SEO\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd if you fancy getting into this sort of stuff more deeply, Brian Solis struts his visionary stuff again this week with \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/are-blogs-losing-their-authority-to-the-statusphere\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAre Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - humans first, machines a close second"},{"content":"So last week\u0026rsquo;s Roundup featured some posts with good old fashioned moaning, and the email click through rate was amongst the best ever. Right then. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to pick a super moan to lead the Roundup today.\nThanks to Vero for a heartfelt post criticising a government social media sex education campaign that falls just a teeny weeny bit short in Vero\u0026rsquo;s opionion of delivering value representative of the four million odd pounds it cost. How not to\u0026hellip; And whilst we remain steadfastly focused on matching last week\u0026rsquo;s click throughs, how about this post by Trevor Young on how not to express yourself.\nAnd just in case you\u0026rsquo;re not going to be tempted by negative pieces this week, check out Graham Jones on how to get retweeted .\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nAdmob Mobile Banner Ads prices drop - a good time to trial? by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nAdmob has just announced that it is cutting its minimum bid prices in a bid, it claims, to stimulate the market and encourage advertisers onto mobile. This follows price cuts on operator portal inventory, which has seen CPM rates in the UK almost halved from this time last year. While a perhaps inevitable result of the global economic situation and, one must assume, a general decline in demand, price drops do mean that running banner campaigns on mobile has become cheaper and therefore now potentially viable for a wider range of applications. More\u0026hellip; Socializing the Social Media Release with PitchEngine by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nOver the past few years I have been a vocal and vigorous supporter of the Social Media Release (SMR) for one simple reason – it represented a new and promising opportunity to renew the dialog around improving the foundation for the communication of news, information, and events that left most immune to its overdue potential.\nIt wasn’t a new tool to package the useless and hollow marketing \u0026ldquo;speak\u0026rdquo; that is prevalent in so many releases today. It was and is a blank slate to reinvent how we, as human beings representing a company that helps other human beings, share our story with them in a way that means something. More\u0026hellip; THESE ARE NOT MY WORDS: \u0026ldquo;Greater business level empowerment and flexibility within a non-negotiable compliance framework will ensure more efficient and effective decision making.\u0026rdquo; by Trevor Young of One19\nIt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a good week for one of Australia\u0026rsquo;s largest brand marketers, Pacific Brands.\nHot on the heels of giving themselves significant pay rises, the Pac Brands board retrenched 1850 staff. Naturally, the media was all over it.\n(To be fair, Pac Brands is not the only company to axe large numbers of staff nor give its senior executives hefty increases in remuneration, but its actions have caused more public outrage than most). The rationale provided by the company certainly wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have helped matters. More\u0026hellip; Media 2.0 Workgroup Announces Best Practices by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nAs one of the founding members of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, I contribute to the greater collective of intellectual activity dedicated to advancing media and communication.\nFellow members, Chris Saad and Stowe Boyd have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools specifically with Eric Blantz and Khris Loux with specific regard to JS-Kit. Independently, I have also discussed and supported a more people-focused approach to connecting with courtesy of those companies that continually force the discussion by upsetting the balance between brand and community. More\u0026hellip; Mobile coupons could be just the ticket for frazzled consumers by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nRecently while I was sitting in Madrid airport having just come from a very successful meeting about mobile advertising I saw an article in the Financial Times by Jonathan Birchall titled Advertisers switch focus to money-off coupons, so I thought it worth highlighting. America is well known for its coupon culture, but it seems the economic downturn has pushed consumers and advertisers to coupons in a big way.\nQuoting from the article, Jonathan explains how brand giants such as Procter and Gamble (P\u0026amp;G) are More\u0026hellip; How to get more people to \u0026ldquo;retweet\u0026rdquo; you on Twitter by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPete Cashmore is one of those people who could make you feel rather envious. He is devilishly handsome with film star looks. He is hugely successful and much sought after for his advice. He was chosen as one of the Top 25 bloggers by Forbes Magazine. And he is the most \u0026ldquo;retweeted\u0026rdquo; person in the world.\nSo how come this young man garners such adulation? What makes people want to \u0026ldquo;retweet\u0026rdquo; him? How come your Twitter account doesn\u0026rsquo;t get the degree of attention his does? If you are not aware, \u0026ldquo;retweeting\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Google\u0026rsquo;s Matt Cutts Issues Pay-Per-Post Warning to Bloggers by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nMatt Cutts, Google\u0026rsquo;s spam cop and chief PR blogger posted a response yesterday to an article about \u0026ldquo;sponsored\u0026rdquo; blog posts. According to Cutts, paid blog posts are fine - as long as they don\u0026rsquo;t pass page rank. Simply put - if someone pays you to review their site/product/service you have to add a rel=\u0026ldquo;nofollow\u0026rdquo; attribute to any links to their site or Google might penalise you - if they find out.\nSo, here\u0026rsquo;s the scenario. WidgetWorld is a new e-commerce site in need of exposure and good press. More\u0026hellip; Reasons to be cheerful: PR Week’s Danny Rogers on signs of hope in the PR market by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nPR Week editor Danny Rogers searches for good news this week in his leader column in the UK edition of PR Week (sub required) against a backdrop of weekly reports of redundancies across the industry as a result of the worsening recession. “PR revenues in the UK are likely to see a year-on-year drop during 2009, but this is far from Armageddon,” says Rogers.\nPR is holding up as a result of three factors, he says:\nRecessions create corporate work PR is the most cost-effective element More\u0026hellip; Search behaviour is changing significantly by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nSearch engine users are changing the way they look for things; and it\u0026rsquo;s a significant jump. When the internet was a mere baby, you could easily find things. All it took was an army of editors at Yahoo! and they presented you with a list of all the good stuff. But that was only when the web was a few million pages. Nowadays, that\u0026rsquo;s the number of pages added in an hour or two and only automated search engines like Google can even hope to keep up. Over the years, though, our usage of Google has changed substantially and new research published this week signals an even bigger change in search behaviour. More\u0026hellip; Thmbnls: The Government is Screwing with Your Money (Again) by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nI had to resist the urge to use the first post name that came to mind for this one, or it simply would have been “What the fuck is the government thinking?” But then that would have been too vague, and probably applies to at least two baker’s dozens of its recent policies.\nThe reason for my gobsmackedness on this sunny Friday is the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ latest campaign to promote condom use amongst the youth.\nI’ve seen my fair share of poor More\u0026hellip; The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent the past week delivering four keynote speeches in four countries to hundreds of people each. My friends at Best Marketing invited me to their Password 2009 events, and I felt like a rock star as the road show included: Monday in Zagreb, Croatia Tuesday in Riga, Latvia Wednesday in Vilnius, Lithuania Thursday in Tartu, Estonia\nThese countries are amazingly plugged in to the Web. For example, Estonia, with a population of just 1.3 million has 806,000 Internet users. My high-speed connections in this part of the world were much faster than in most parts of the USA. More\u0026hellip; Astroturfing \u0026amp; Disclosure: Where Do You Draw the Line? by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nAs more businesses start peppering their marketing plans with social media projects, activities that previously were reserved for the geeky early adopters are now coming under scrutiny when used for commercial endeavours.\nWith all this new media growth, there’s no clear rule book yet. We’re writing it as we go, and just like the Bible, there are an awful lot of different interpretations of the same guidelines.\nCertain aspects of blogging and online brand identity are seeing their limits pushed by certain brands lately… More\u0026hellip; How to win business with your website by Tim Callington of Edelman\nLet’s say you’re a salesman, you’ve just closed a big deal and won a tidy commission. You want to celebrate, and rightly so, and you want to make a statement about your achievements and status. So you decide to buy a flash car.\nThe trouble is, all of a sudden your sales figures start to drop. The deals aren’t closing and the customers seem slightly cooler than they were a few months before. What’s happened?\nWhen you pull into the customer’s car park in your Porsche or Ferrarri you want to say that you’ve arrived, that you’re to be taken seriously and that you’ve achieved the affluence that symbolises talent and success. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/03/friday-roundup-6th-march-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo last week\u0026rsquo;s Roundup featured some posts with good old fashioned moaning, and the email click through rate was amongst the best ever. Right then. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to pick a super moan to lead the Roundup today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to Vero for a heartfelt post criticising a government social media sex education campaign that falls just a teeny weeny bit short in Vero\u0026rsquo;s opionion of delivering value representative of the four million odd pounds it cost. \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/vero.pepperrell/thmbnls-the-government-is-screwing-with-your-money-again\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHow not to\u0026hellip;\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd whilst we remain steadfastly focused on matching last week\u0026rsquo;s click throughs, how about \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/trevor.young/these-are-not-my-words-greater-business-level-empowerment-and-flexibility-within-a-non-negotiab\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ethis post by Trevor Young\u003c/a\u003e\n on how not to express yourself.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd just in case you\u0026rsquo;re not going to be tempted by negative pieces this week, check out \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/graham.jones/how-to-get-more-people-to-quotretweetquot-you-on-twitter\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGraham Jones on how to get retweeted\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 6th March 2009"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s nothing like a blog post to have a good old fashioned moan. It\u0026rsquo;s cathartic. Good for the soul.\nBrian Solis has a bit of a go at Facebook\u0026rsquo;s consistent shortcomings in good community relations. Stephen Waddington rips apart the journalistic coverage of new research that shows social networking is harmful, or does it? And I waded in on a PR Week article about Twitter that made many Twitterers very Twangry.\nTwangry. That\u0026rsquo;s a new word I learned this week. Mmmmm.\nHave a super weekend. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nCatch the Rave: Join my book tour in New York, Boston, and SXSW by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nMy new book, World Wide Rave officially releases on March 3. I\u0026rsquo;ll be holding a quick book tour the following week and I hope to see you in New York, Boston, or at the South-by-Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.\nAt each event, I\u0026rsquo;ll be telling the remarkable stories of people who have create a World Wide Rave such as Erin Weed and her amazing Girls Fight Back! program, Lisa Genova, and how she made her self-published book a New York Times bestseller, Tim Washer and how his Art of the Sale series of videos for IBM helped to humanize a huge company, and many more inspiring examples of success. More\u0026hellip; Facebook and the Future of User Generated Governance by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nShot at Web 2.0 Summit 2008\nFacebook is learning to listen.\nIn the middle of February 2009, the company was yet again a “Beacon” for bad PR as it introduced an updated Terms of Service (Tos) for its entire community of users. We the people responded with defiance and vigor and the company retracted its new language, reverted to the previous ToS, and listened to the valuable feedback that poured in from the community.\nBy all accounts, this was the right thing to do.\nToday in a blog post entitled, “Governing the Facebook Service in an Open and Transparent Way,” More\u0026hellip; Dear PR Week, it\u0026rsquo;s not about Twitter per se by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nIn an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today (\u0026ldquo;Twitter has suddenly exploded\u0026rdquo;) we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.\nI\u0026rsquo;d write here things like \u0026ldquo;AWESOME\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING\u0026rdquo;, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I\u0026rsquo;ll refrain.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute. More\u0026hellip; Search Engines on Twitter by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nThe top search engines are on Twitter. Are you following their tweets?\n@InsideGoogle\n@Yahoo\n@Live_Search\n@AskDotCom (UK)\nAnd one of my personal favorites:\n@Viewzi\nGoogle is the most represented of the companies, with many more accounts set up for various products: news, apps, etc. Here is a link that lists all Twitter accounts with Google in the name; just beware of immitators! More\u0026hellip; Inbound Marketing Summit 2.0 by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLate last year, my good friends Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin, and I organized and delivered the New Marketing Summit in Boston. It was a great two-day event where several hundred marketers and entrepreneurs got together to share ideas on the future of marketing. Just a few weeks prior to NMS, also in Boston, I spoke at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Summit, which was also a terrific event celebrating new marketing.\nHmm… Two similar events? Both in Boston. What’s up with that?\nTo make a long story short, we\u0026rsquo;ve combined the events to make a super-big, super-cool, super-exciting series of new marketing confabs called Inbound Marketing Summit. More\u0026hellip; Lazy journalism, lazy science: the Mail on social networking by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nThat today’s front paper story in the Daily Mail claiming that social media sites could harm a child’s brain is based on a House of Lords debate that took place more than 10 days ago (thanks to Chris Edwards for the link) tells you everything that you need to know about the quality of the journalism.\nLast week we learnt that from the same paper that using Facebook could raise the risk of cancer.\nUndoubtedly social media sites are changing the way that people of my generation (and much younger) communicate. More\u0026hellip; The Ties that Binds Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCredit\nBernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu of the Social Computing Laboratory at HP Labs conducted an in-depth study of the relationships that power Twitter. The team recently released its report, \u0026ldquo;Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope.\u0026rdquo;\nThe abstract:\nScholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. More\u0026hellip; Formal methods route to proving PR value (and consultancy differentiation) by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nHow many times have you lost a pitch on grounds of chemistry? It’s an issue that is so endemic in the industry that PRCA vice-chairman Richard Houghton has made it the theme of his blog: A close second. Do you think the same happens in other professional services industries such as accounting, legal or management consultancy? I don’t think so.\nMy current pet theory is that the industry’s lack of formal methods - crucially planning and measurement techniques - and its inability to map metrics into a domain that is relevant to business, which means clients are left to differentiate agencies on the basis of intangible variables such as chemistry. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/friday-roundup-27th-february-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s nothing like a blog post to have a good old fashioned moan. It\u0026rsquo;s cathartic. Good for the soul.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/facebook-and-the-future-of-user-generated-governance\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBrian Solis has a bit of a go at Facebook\u0026rsquo;s consistent shortcomings\u003c/a\u003e\n in good community relations. \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/stephen.waddington/lazy-journalism-lazy-science-the-mail-on-social-networking\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eStephen Waddington rips apart the journalistic coverage\u003c/a\u003e\n of new research that shows social networking is harmful, or does it? And I waded in \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/philip.sheldrake/dear-pr-week-its-not-about-twitter-per-se\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eon a PR Week article about Twitter\u003c/a\u003e\n that made many Twitterers very Twangry.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwangry. That\u0026rsquo;s a new word I learned this week. Mmmmm.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHave a super weekend. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Twangry"},{"content":"In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today (\u0026quot;Twitter has suddenly exploded \u0026quot;) we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.\nI\u0026rsquo;d write here things like \u0026ldquo;AWESOME\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING\u0026rdquo;, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I\u0026rsquo;ll refrain.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.\n\u0026hellip;I don\u0026rsquo;t know a Racepoint consultant who isn\u0026rsquo;t on Twitter, and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.\nOur micro-blog policy does not require consultants to declare their allegiance with Racepoint in their personal profile, but it does require them to declare interest when seeding or promoting a client or a client brand via Twitter.\nBut let\u0026rsquo;s move past these numbers to my main concern about this article; it makes next to no attempt at placing the Twitter phenomenon in context with the public relations discipline.\nSure, respect to Drew for the one quote in the article that attempts to move the agenda that way by referencing networking, story mining, issues tracking and news seeding, but the obsession with pointless data masks any kind of interesting story emerging.\nThere are many good attempts at defining public relations. Regular readers of my blog will know I gravitate towards thinking about it in terms of understanding and exerting influence in order to move stakeholders\u0026rsquo; minds and behaviour to where you\u0026rsquo;d prefer them to be. But whatever it is, it isn\u0026rsquo;t about Twittering just as it isn\u0026rsquo;t about column inches or advertising-value-equivalent.\nThe story here is, or rather should have been, about how to wield tools and services like micro-blogging in the effective execution of your PR campaign strategy and ultimate achievement of your PR objectives.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s take a look at Mat Morrison\u0026rsquo;s Twitter stream as of 10.35am today. Looking at the last 20 tweets (not a statistically significant sample I\u0026rsquo;ll grant you, but today I\u0026rsquo;ve not been inspired to be statistically inspirational), Mat @\u0026rsquo;s other Twitter users 22 times. Of these, 20 are in the PR and digital business, and 2 are unidentifiable in that regard.\nI won\u0026rsquo;t go further and analyse the content and the ensuing dialogue because I don\u0026rsquo;t know Mat\u0026rsquo;s objectives here, but you could conclude from this analysis that he may well be achieving his PR objectives if his customer is himself / Porter Novelli. If his objective is to employ Twitter in achieving campaign success for his agency\u0026rsquo;s customers, if his objective in working with PR Week on this article was to imply just this, you\u0026rsquo;re going to have to look at more of his Twitter stream than I have to begin to guess if that\u0026rsquo;s happening for him.\nIf you want to know if your use of Twitter is working for you in a professional PR context, work through the normal cascade of objectives -\u0026gt; strategy -\u0026gt; tactics -\u0026gt; measurement. There\u0026rsquo;s no shortcut.\nAnd for a bit of fun, take a look at this satirical video and ask yourself if others could look at your Twitter stream in much the same way?!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/dear-pr-week-its-not-about-twitter-per-se/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today (\u0026quot;\u003ca href=\"http://www.prweek.com/uk/home/article/884307/twitter-suddenly-exploded/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitter has suddenly exploded\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026quot;) we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d write here things like \u0026ldquo;AWESOME\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING\u0026rdquo;, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I\u0026rsquo;ll refrain.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026hellip;I don\u0026rsquo;t know a Racepoint consultant who isn\u0026rsquo;t on Twitter, and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director \u003ca href=\"http://mediaczar.com/blog/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMat Morrison\u003c/a\u003e\n feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Dear PR Week, it\u0026#039;s not about Twitter per se"},{"content":"To recap, this is where marketing communications has got to\u0026hellip;\nInterruption marketing (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.\nYour brand and reputation is defined by everyone\u0026rsquo;s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.\nYou simply have no choice, you have to converse. Dialogue is where it\u0026rsquo;s at. If you\u0026rsquo;re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you\u0026rsquo;ll get the girl.\nSo I thought I\u0026rsquo;d focus here on how to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.\nMultimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what\u0026rsquo;s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you\u0026rsquo;ve got.\nSo what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say in an interesting way? There\u0026rsquo;s no formula (that I know of!), but here\u0026rsquo;s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your \u0026ldquo;PR 2.0\u0026rdquo; synapses, one film and one animation. I\u0026rsquo;ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.\nUnfortunately, neither of these examples here direct you to the conversation (other than company name / URL). Imagine however starting a conversation this way, hosting it and then keeping the fire lit.\nFilm Here is a film about advertising. (So that\u0026rsquo;s an interesting choice for a PR consultant.)\nFirst off, it assumes you\u0026rsquo;re only watching it because you want to, so doesn\u0026rsquo;t stick to any specific duration, but at the same time keeps the pace up so keeping you 100% glued. It also fits the bill here in giving you other ideas for how to kickstart that conversation.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a conversation starter for sure\u0026hellip; and you are going to have to play it more than once or keeping hitting that pause button.\nAnimation From Studio aka , a BAFTA-winning animation production company that can do no wrong in my humble opinion, even if serving clients\u0026rsquo; perceived needs for half-a-minute or so of prime time advertising is their bread and butter.\nImagine however that your company has a vision, a unique perspective on life with which to explode convention. Now imagine presenting it as beautifully as this. How could your intended conversationalists refuse?\n(Click here for Studio aka\u0026rsquo;s semiotically outstanding communication of BUPA\u0026rsquo;s reason for being . It\u0026rsquo;s a shame however that BUPA doesn\u0026rsquo;t fully appreciate the benefits of social media and prepare the ads for social syndication.)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/conversations-start-with-something-interesting-to-say-delivered-in-an-interesting-way/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTo recap, this is where marketing communications has got to\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eInterruption marketing\u003c/strong\u003e (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYour brand and reputation\u003c/strong\u003e is defined by everyone\u0026rsquo;s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYou simply have no choice, you have to converse\u003c/strong\u003e. Dialogue is where it\u0026rsquo;s at. If you\u0026rsquo;re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you\u0026rsquo;ll get the girl.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo I thought I\u0026rsquo;d focus here on \u003cem\u003ehow\u003c/em\u003e to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMultimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what\u0026rsquo;s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you\u0026rsquo;ve got.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say \u003cem\u003ein an interesting way\u003c/em\u003e? There\u0026rsquo;s no formula (that I know of!), but here\u0026rsquo;s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your \u0026ldquo;PR 2.0\u0026rdquo; synapses, one film and one animation. I\u0026rsquo;ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way"},{"content":"What did we talk about before the current intergalactic financial burp and the rise and rise of Twitter? Just as recently as 2008, you could actually meet people quite regularly who had never heard of twitter outside the context of birdsong, but not now.\nSo \u0026ldquo;how to\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;for idiots\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the ninety nine things you\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted to know but were afraid to ask\u0026rdquo; guides now abound, which is kind of odd for anyone who was around before the hashtag and just had to sort of fumble around like teenagers discovering a new genre of music and the opposite sex at the local youth club.\nNevertheless, these things are invaluable for mass market adoption, and Ben Matthews points us to five of the best . Top marks for most attention grabbing presentation title goes to Radian6 for \u0026ldquo;Become a Twitter Ninja\u0026rdquo;.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSEO, Public Relations and Offline Marketing - Yes, You Need All Three by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nYesterday, via a tweet by @craigmcginty I was directed to a blog post by @jedhallam recommending that public relations experts should start making use of SEO for their clients. My issue with the blog post was that Jed suggested that SEO is a \u0026ldquo;technique\u0026rdquo; to be applied to help public relations efforts, and that he didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to have a full understanding of what search engine optimisation consultants really do for their clients.\nThe main issues on the table as I see them are:\nAre More\u0026hellip; Death of push marketing and employees as brand advocates by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\n\u0026ldquo;We’re living through an industrial revolution for the first time in a lifetime for anyone over 60 years old. All the rules are changing. Its no wonder everything feels a little crazy at times.\u0026rdquo; In his London session this afternoon Seth Godin sounded the death knell for push marketing as he pulled content from his books Meatball Sundae and Tribes.\n\u0026ldquo;Social networks enable everyone in an organisation to become a brand advocate. In the future individual employees will be an organisations most powerful sales and marketing resource. More\u0026hellip; Facebook and the Reality of Your Online Content by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nShot at SXSWi 2008\nA few news outlets reached out to me for comment regarding the uproar sparked by the recent change to Facebook\u0026rsquo;s Terms of Service (ToS). It inspired a public response as I am not only someone who spends a significant amount of time in the online social field studying digital anthropology and new marketing, I\u0026rsquo;m also a willing participant in and contributor to the Facebook economy.\nSo, why is everyone upset?\nWhen you read the new ToS, it\u0026rsquo;s actually quite alarming\u0026hellip; More\u0026hellip; New free whitepaper will help PR and marketing professionals kick start or improve online PR programmes by Andrew Smith of escherman\nHot off the digital press today is a new whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing entitled “Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme.” I have a very personal interest in this - I wrote it. Within the confines of a 4000 word whitepaper, we’ve tried to make it as comprehensive as possible - but clearly, all feedback will be appreciated. Let the conversation begin (see below for press release): PR and marketing professionals looking to kick start or improve their online communications programmes now have a valuable new free guide thanks to the publication today of the latest whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub). More\u0026hellip; Corporate Australia Cops a \u0026lsquo;Bloody Nose\u0026rsquo; in Edelman\u0026rsquo;s Latest \u0026lsquo;Trust\u0026rsquo; Findings by Trevor Young of One19\nFurther to a previous post TRUST: The Elusive Commodity Worth its Weight in Gold (and then some) \u0026ndash; here is some more damning evidence that companies are fast losing the respect of the people who matter most to their business - consumers.PR firm Edelman has just released the Australian results of its 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual study that takes the pulse of consumers\u0026rsquo; views of government and big business (My previous post on this subject looked at the Trust Barometer\u0026rsquo;s global findings). More\u0026hellip; Why Cutting Print Budgets Means Cutting Online Sales by David Knowles of\nSome marketers have been sounding the death knell of print for years. After all, why waste money printing out 1000s of catalogues and leaflets when people can get all the info they need from your website? The idea that print is dying is particularly convenient now we’re in the midst of a recession. Many companies are desperately bailing for survival and jettisoning costs wherever they can, with glossy brochures among the first to be shown the plank. However, what companies need to be aware of, before binning their printed brochures and catalogues altogether, is the ‘flick and click’ More\u0026hellip; Telecom TV at Mobile World Congress on Mobile Advertising by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nOn Monday 16th February at Mobile World Congress, Telecom TV held one of their Main Agenda sessions on Mobile Advertising - posing the question: “What role can Mobile Advertising play as operators seek to finance consumer data applications? What makes us think that users want or will tolerate advertising as part of their already expensive mobile contracts?”\nMartyn Warwick from Telecom TV moderated the debate between\nTanya Field, Head of Mobile Internet, Telefonica O2 Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSMA Andrew Grill, Head of Business Development, Gigafone\nSee the 14 minute program below. More\u0026hellip; 5 Top Twitter Presentations by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nTwitter has become more and more popular of late, but those who start out using the micro-blogging service always seem unsure of exactly what it is or how it works. Even if you’ve been using it a while there are still plenty of other tips, tricks and tools to discover all of the time. One of the best ways to share these is through video (see the excellent Twitter in Plain English video), but another really useful way to share these ideas is via slideshows.\nThere’s been a number of excellent presentations on Twitter appear recently, so thanks to the lovely slideshow sharing website Slideshare, I’ve collated some of the best here for you to enjoy. More\u0026hellip; Everyone is a Publisher\u0026hellip;and Why this Really Matters by Joe Pulizzi of Junta42\nThanks to BoSacks for passing over this Time article on Content Becoming a Pauper.\nThe story is worth the read, but here is a little snippet that sums up the author\u0026rsquo;s point. As you can tell, he is taking the viewpoint on the value of content as it pertains to traditional media companies.\n\u0026ldquo;The value of content has never been ethereal. It has always been directly tied to what owners could \u0026lsquo;get\u0026rsquo; for it, either through advertisers or subscribers. For content to have a value, it could never be free. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/friday-roundup-20th-february-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat did we talk about before the current intergalactic financial burp and the rise and rise of Twitter? Just as recently as 2008, you could actually meet people quite regularly who had never heard of twitter outside the context of birdsong, but not now.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo \u0026ldquo;how to\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;for idiots\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the ninety nine things you\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted to know but were afraid to ask\u0026rdquo; guides now abound, which is kind of odd for anyone who was around before the hashtag and just had to sort of fumble around like teenagers discovering a new genre of music and the opposite sex at the local youth club.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNevertheless, these things are invaluable for mass market adoption, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/ben.matthews/5-top-twitter-presentations\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBen Matthews points us to five of the best\u003c/a\u003e\n. Top marks for most attention grabbing presentation title goes to \u003ca href=\"http://www.radian6.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRadian6\u003c/a\u003e\n for \u0026ldquo;Become a Twitter Ninja\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Twitter goes massive"},{"content":"\nDespite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this year\u0026rsquo;s Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.\nSmaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.\nThis colourful image is a bank of Samsung Omnia \u0026rsquo;s demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I\u0026rsquo;d like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed\u0026hellip; it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!\nI spotted a marketing innovation from Qualcomm Mediaflo \u0026hellip; a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.\nFor example, their demo differentiated between a fictitious male and female viewer. Here\u0026rsquo;s a pic I took of an ad running for Red Bull that played on the phone for the \u0026lsquo;male customer\u0026rsquo; but not for the \u0026lsquo;female\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\nFor consumers demanding a higher quality entertainment experience from their mobile devices, LG was delighted to launch the first mobile, the LG Arena , with Dolby Mobile for an all-round superior sound experience.\nThe picture of the phone below portrays another interesting feature of the phone, cube navigation. This 3D approach is designed to free the user from menu tree hell\u0026hellip; can\u0026rsquo;t comment on how well it achieves this objective however as you\u0026rsquo;d need to use it in anger.\nGiving the consumer easy, always-on, low cost access to the Web is a hot trend, and the blurring of what\u0026rsquo;s a phone and what\u0026rsquo;s mobile computing continues. The rapidity with which this trend develops will have ramifications for your marketing mix. These are great first devices for anyone new to the mobile Web, but also serve as a light weight second machine for the more technophilic. They are designed to be low power, typically running for considerably longer between battery recharges.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with images of three such devices.\nThe first is Qualcomm\u0026rsquo;s Snapdragon based on ARM\u0026rsquo;s Cortex processor (rather than a power hungry Intel\u0026hellip; disclosure, ARM is a client). It is shown here in a netbook device running Ubuntu .\nThe second is a similar device from Texas Instruments, this time using their OMAP chip based on ARM Cortex and running Ubuntu.\nAnd lastly, for those of you who really value mobility, the LG watch cum phone cum music player cum PDA with full touch screen capability a la iPhone could make your Christmas list in 2009.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/mobile-world-congress-devices-every-marketer-should-know-about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Mobile%20World%20Congress%202009\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/mobileworldcongress2009.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this year\u0026rsquo;s Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSmaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Samsung%20Omnia\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/samsung_omnia_oled.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis colourful image is a bank of \u003ca href=\"http://uk.samsungmobile.com/mobile-phone/SamsungOmnia-overview\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSamsung Omnia\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I\u0026rsquo;d like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed\u0026hellip; it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI spotted a marketing innovation from \u003ca href=\"http://www.mediaflo.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eQualcomm Mediaflo\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026hellip; a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mobile World Congress - devices every marketer should know about"},{"content":"What\u0026rsquo;s Twitter for? Interesting question, but we know we enjoyed the Tweetstream from @cluetrainee this week. Subtle. Satirical. And beautifully efficient in poking fun at the bankers who have wrought the current financial terror and are feeling like they want to apologise this week, over and over and over again.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve appended an extract for your convenience :-) before this week\u0026rsquo;s post highlights.\n@cluetrainee gets it, but thanks to Rebecca Caroe for posting an entertaining video ridiculing those Twitterers that don\u0026rsquo;t.\nAll the best, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\n_________\nand my chauffeur is sorry too 7:35 AM Feb 10th from web\nwith no hit of irony 7:35 AM Feb 10th from web\nhonestly 7:35 AM Feb 10th from web\nI\u0026rsquo;M SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SORRY. I COULD NOT BE MORE SORRY. 7:35 AM Feb 10th from web\nis REALLY sorry. REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY sorry 7:33 AM Feb 10th from web\nis sorry on behalf of myself and the whole board, my mother, my friends, colleagues, the academy and many more too numerous to apologise for 7:31 AM Feb 10th from web\ncould not be more sorry about what\u0026rsquo;s happened 7:31 AM Feb 10th from web\nis extremely, unreservedly, unqualifiedly and profoundly sorry 7:30 AM Feb 10th from web\nis also extremely sorry for the turn of events which brought this all about 7:30 AM Feb 10th from web\nremembers to add that my apology is profound AND unqualified 7:29 AM Feb 10th from web\nis profoundly and, I think I would say, unreservedly, sorry. 7:28 AM Feb 10th from web\nInfluence Scorecard update by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nThanks\nWhilst 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\u0026rsquo;ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!\nNevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, \u0026ldquo;Thank you\u0026rdquo;. And I\u0026rsquo;d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve added some reciprocal blog links\u0026hellip; More\u0026hellip; People want to do business with people by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nDo you remember the last time you called a toll-free number and were routed through phone-tree hell (“Press 4 for customer support. Press 5 for sales.”) and then had to wait on hold? How did that make you feel? Or consider the Web sites you’ve visited recently. How many were dull and uninspiring and didn’t answer any of your questions? Did it feel like these organizations cared about you?\nOf course not.\nPeople want to do business with people. We\u0026rsquo;re human, and we crave interaction with people who know us. More\u0026hellip; Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nLarry 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.\nWith a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”\u0026hellip; he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media. More\u0026hellip; Persuasive Writing 7 - Editing Your Writing by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nIt’s believed that procrastination and writer’s block are caused by the writer’s desire to achieve perfection. The fear of composing an awkward sentence or weak turn of phrase can be so paralysing that many writers simply can’t face the simple act of typing words into their keyboard.\nBut it’s also believed that writer’s block is a myth, because you can always write something.\nFirst drafts can sometimes be a clumsy, repetitive and turgid mass of unrefined words. More\u0026hellip; Is external regulation route to improving standards in PR? by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nBlogs are for sharing ideas right? Well here’s an idea.\nWhat if the PR industry was to live and die by a professional code of conduct? It would soon clear out the “did you get my press release” telesales brigade.\nIt’s not my idea. You can thank David Phillips (@dphillips4364).\nPhillips suggests that professionals that flout the Chartered Institute of Public Relation’s (CIPR) code of conduct should face a disciplinary hearing. His blog posting follows a number of high profile web failures during the bad weather last week. More\u0026hellip; Learn about SEM from the best — SEMMYS Winners Announced by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nTwo weeks ago I posted an article urging you to vote for the top search engine marketing posts of 2008 — the SEMMYS. The votes are now tallied and the winners have been posted on the SEMMYS website. Congratulations to all the finalists and of course, to the winners. If you are interested in learning more about search engine marketing, I urge you to read the winning articles, as well as those of the finalists. And be sure to subscribe to their RSS feed because all are thought leaders in the industry and share valuable insight on a regular basis. More\u0026hellip; The 2009 Semmys Honor The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nEvery year The Semmys nominates the best posts in marketing. Last year, the Social Media Manifesto was recognized and this year, The Conversation Prism was spotlighted.\nThank you!\nWhen Jesse Thomas of JESS3 and I started to lay the foundation for the Conversation Prism, we realized that it was a much larger task then simply categorizing social networks and placing them within a visually-rich graphic or chart. My goal was to observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of conversations, how and where they transpired. More\u0026hellip; Online seminars will make you more money than ebooks by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPeople love buying things - or so we are led to believe. Current psychological thinking suggests that as we spend ever more isolated lives, going shopping plugs an emotional gap in our lives. Depression is known to lead to increased spending, for instance. Shopping and buying things helps us so much we even have \u0026ldquo;retail therapy\u0026rdquo;, to make us feel better. And now there\u0026rsquo;s even a movie about the whole subject - Confessions of a Shopaholic.\nBut new research suggests there\u0026rsquo;s an even better way for us to gain pleasure from spending money. More\u0026hellip; Finding the Tweet Spot - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nbe tweet\nTwitter is an incredible medium for listening, learning, and sharing. And, for those in the media and communications industries, it\u0026rsquo;s also a rapid and immersive education in meaningful, two-way micro messaging that helps both parties walk away with a new form of value.\nWhile there are no shortage of posts that offer tips and tricks to help you boost your Twitter followers, it is by no means a popularity contest. The surmounting ploys, friending races, theatrics, and contests to tempt those into following individuals can be fun, but short-sighted, when in fact the true technique for building relationships, regardless of volume, is the genuine act of earning and investing in them. More\u0026hellip; The Battle for Your Social Status: Facebook Builds Network Around Your Activity by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nShot at the F8 conference in San Francisco\nRecently, we discussed the evolution of Twitter and also FriendFeed as they mature into fully interactive conversation ecosystems.\nIn social media, you\u0026rsquo;ll most often hear references to the proverbial \u0026ldquo;conversation\u0026rdquo; that fuels the dynamic, two-way Web and earns those individuals and brands that invest in it wisely, increased social capital and authority.\nFacebook issued a significant announcement that may solidify its platform as the primary dashboard for sharing, responding, and listening to those who comprise your social graph, regardless of network. More\u0026hellip; 10 things for Charles Arthur to consider about the tech PR industry by Andrew Smith of escherman\nCharles Arthur at The Guardian has been musing on his relationship with the PR business and sparked a cavalcade of comment, mainly from PRs. I posted the following as a comment, but at time of writing, it hadn’t appeared, so here is my response again (apologies to regular readers who are probably familiar with many of the points I make): 1. Every time someone like Charles bemoans the “did you get my press release” tactic, PRs rush to decry the practice: “Oh no, we don’t do that”. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/friday-roundup-twitter-humour/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s Twitter for? Interesting question, but we know we enjoyed the Tweetstream from \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/cluetrainee\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e@cluetrainee\u003c/a\u003e\n this week. Subtle. Satirical. And beautifully efficient in poking fun at the bankers who have wrought the current financial terror and are feeling like they want to apologise this week, over and over and over again.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve appended an extract for your convenience :-) before this week\u0026rsquo;s post highlights.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e@cluetrainee gets it, but thanks to \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/rebecca.caroe/irony-on-twitter\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRebecca Caroe for posting an entertaining video\u003c/a\u003e\n ridiculing those Twitterers that don\u0026rsquo;t.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup - Twitter humour"},{"content":"\nThanks 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\u0026rsquo;ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!\nNevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, \u0026ldquo;Thank you\u0026rdquo;. And I\u0026rsquo;d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve added some reciprocal blog links\u0026hellip;\nNielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest, RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.\nInfluencer50 / Who are you trying to influence BuzzLogic / Influence: Looking to make another quantitative leap dna13 / Correlating PR’s influence to org performance Andiamo Systems / An exciting concept to measure influence - the Influence Scorecard Questions Where you\u0026rsquo;ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general\u0026hellip; definitions and events.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s apparent that vocabulary is important. Like all new fields, if we try working with slightly different definitions then innovation and concensus are going to be harder to forge. We\u0026rsquo;re talking about words like \u0026ldquo;influence\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;stakeholder\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;engagement\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;dashboard\u0026rdquo; etc. So whilst I partly anticipated this need in the first post , it looks like this is going to be task 1.\nAnd events. Well, the level of interest from all the corners of expertise we\u0026rsquo;re bringing together\u0026hellip; analytics, PR, social media and business performance management\u0026hellip; has been such that we\u0026rsquo;re going to give ourselves a little more time to work out the when, where and how. Please bear with us though\u0026hellip; we are pulling stuff together.\nThis task will be delayed a few days whilst I attend Mobile World Congress next week with the powerful ARM , ingenious Mozilla and addictive Taptu . If you\u0026rsquo;re there and fancy meeting up, just twitter #influencescorecard and #mwc and I\u0026rsquo;ll pick it up.\nBut my mind won\u0026rsquo;t be entirely off Influence in Barcelona, after all there\u0026rsquo;s influence through them there devices.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/influence-scorecard-update/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influencescorecard_strip.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"thanks\"\u003eThanks\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhilst the volume of responses to the \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/influence-scorecard---defining-influence-measurement-for-organisational-performance-management\"\u003eInfluence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I\u0026rsquo;ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, \u0026ldquo;Thank you\u0026rdquo;. And I\u0026rsquo;d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocial web analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n specialists for their support, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve added some reciprocal blog links\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest,  RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://blogs.influencer50.com/infuse/2009/02/09/who-are-you-trying-to-influence/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInfluencer50 / Who are you trying to influence\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.buzzlogic.com/blog/2009/02/influence_looking_to_make_anot_1.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBuzzLogic / Influence: Looking to make another quantitative leap\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://blog.dna13.com/?p=126\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003edna13 / Correlating PR’s influence to org performance\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://blog.andiamosystems.com/andiamo_word_of_mouth_mar/2009/02/an-exciting-concept-to-measure-influence-the-influence-scorecard.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAndiamo Systems / An exciting concept to measure influence - the Influence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"questions\"\u003eQuestions\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere you\u0026rsquo;ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general\u0026hellip; definitions and events.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence Scorecard update"},{"content":"Tableau Software knows just a thing or two about data visualisation. A spin out from Stanford, the company won the CODiE award for best business intelligence solution 2008\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s amazing what the faculty of visualisation can do for your intelligence, or your PR as anyone who has followed my obsession with data visualisation in public relations will know I believe. (Previous posts on the topic appended.)\nTableau Software\u0026rsquo;s Niels Hoven has posted about using visualisation techniques (and a nifty Excel plug-in from Microsoft) to delve into the content of rival websites to determine keyword effectiveness and make your final keyword selection. He even rounds off by employing visualisation to measure the effectiveness of your SEO work. Nifty.\nAll round interesting post and a worthwhile read for SEO hobbyists and pros alike.\n____________________\nMy related posts of yore:\nVisualising your world of influence with Skyrails Can you see it? Making influence visible Influence\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a numbers game ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/visualise-your-seo/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.tableausoftware.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTableau Software\u003c/a\u003e\n knows just a thing or two about data visualisation. A spin out from Stanford, the company won the CODiE award for best business intelligence solution 2008\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s amazing what the faculty of visualisation can do for your intelligence, or your PR as anyone who has followed my obsession with data visualisation in public relations will know I believe. (Previous posts on the topic appended.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.tableausoftware.com/blog/easy-seo-keyword-analysis\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTableau Software\u0026rsquo;s Niels Hoven has posted about using visualisation techniques\u003c/a\u003e\n (and a nifty Excel plug-in from Microsoft) to delve into the content of rival websites to determine keyword effectiveness and make your final keyword selection. He even rounds off by employing visualisation to measure the effectiveness of your SEO work. Nifty.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Visualise your SEO"},{"content":"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.\nWith a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”\u0026hellip; he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/does-facebook-matter-find-out-in-the-second-edition-of-marketing-to-the-social-web/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.racepointgroup.com/about/leadership.cfm\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eLarry Weber\u003c/a\u003e\n releases the 2nd edition of \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Social-Web-Customer-Communities/dp/0470410973\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarketing to the Social Web\u003c/a\u003e\n today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith a foreword by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_Wales\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eJimmy Wales\u003c/a\u003e\n of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”\u0026hellip; he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web"},{"content":"\nLast 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\u0026rsquo;d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)\nI even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here\u0026hellip;\nMoreover, 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.\nWhat 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 \u0026lsquo;influence\u0026rsquo;, \u0026lsquo;scorecard\u0026rsquo; and what we hope to achieve. Your thoughts are welcome.\nInfluence 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..\nOf 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.\nScorecard The \u0026lsquo;scorecard\u0026rsquo; is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as \u0026ldquo;business performance management \u0026rdquo; or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute :\n\u0026ldquo;The Balanced Scorecard transforms an organization’s strategic plan from an attractive but passive document into the \u0026lsquo;marching orders\u0026rsquo; for the organization on a daily basis. It provides a framework that not only provides performance measurements, but helps planners identify what should be done and measured. It enables executives to truly execute their strategies.\n\u0026ldquo;It is a management system (not only a measurement system) that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action.\u0026rdquo;\nBalanced Scorecards usually consist of four perspectives: financial, learning and growth, customer and internal processes.\nThe Influence Scorecard So, my thinking is that influence could be an additional perspective of the Balanced Scorecard and other BPM approaches. Possibly. But it might also be a filter across or augmentation to current perspectives.\nThe Influence Scorecard:\nTranslates influence (marketing and PR) objectives into operational goals Helps to communicate the objectives and cascade them down to specific groups and individuals Guides the selection of measurement criteria Defines the ways in which these measurements can be made and presented for incorporation into the BPM process, reports and dashboards Informs the mechanism for learning from these measures and the adjustment of the influence strategy then required. Steps 3 and 4 are, I believe, the most difficult to accomplish traditionally and where SWA steps up. They also represent the core part of the Influence Scorecard that sets it apart from attempts to incorporate traditional marketing into BPM to date, imho.\nThe Influence Scorecard plugs the converged \u0026lsquo;Influence Department\u0026rsquo; (or the more traditional marketing and communications departments) directly into organisational performance management. It gives all marketing and communications disciplines board level authority, responsibility and accountability in planning, implementing, measuring and reporting influence.\nNext steps We\u0026rsquo;ve started to take a look at running the event mooted in my previous post, and the more we look at it the more it has become apparent that we need an interim step to crystallise the purpose and approach so that we can then put something up to shoot at and build upon in a more widely attended event. So we\u0026rsquo;re going to convene a smaller group first up during the next couple of months followed as closely as we can by the wider event.\nI look forward to your ongoing feedback, and of course the list of interested organisations and individuals remains editable here .\nWatch this space!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/enhancing-organisational-performance-management-with-the-influence-scorecard/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Influence%20Scorecard\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influencescorecard_strip.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLast week \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/influence-scorecard---defining-influence-measurement-for-organisational-performance-management\" title=\"I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard\"\u003eI posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n. 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\u0026rsquo;d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMoreover, 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat 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 \u0026lsquo;influence\u0026rsquo;, \u0026lsquo;scorecard\u0026rsquo; and what we hope to achieve.  Your thoughts are welcome.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"influence\"\u003eInfluence\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrganisations 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..\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"scorecard\"\u003eScorecard\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \u0026lsquo;scorecard\u0026rsquo; is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_performance_management\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ebusiness performance management\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; or just plain BPM). According to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.balancedscorecard.org/BSCResources/AbouttheBalancedScorecard/tabid/55/Default.aspx\" title=\"Balanced Scorecard Institute\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBalanced Scorecard Institute\u003c/a\u003e\n:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s one of those days when I\u0026rsquo;m just going to let the highlighted posts do all the talking\u0026hellip;\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nHow Lisa Genova used social media to turn a self-published book into a NY Times bestseller by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLisa Genova created one of the coolest World Wide Raves I\u0026rsquo;ve seen. She is the author of Still Alice, a novel about a young woman\u0026rsquo;s descent into dementia due to early-onset Alzheimer\u0026rsquo;s Disease. I met Lisa at Grub Street Writers in Boston where we both lamented the traditional conventions of book marketing and strategized on how we can market our books ourselves using social media. After she wrote Still Alice and was ready to get it into the market, Lisa spent a year trying to get literary agents and editors at publishing houses to speak with her. More\u0026hellip; David Ogilvy on mobile advertising - what would he have thought? by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nSadly “David Ogilvy on mobile advertising” will never be written as the great man passed away in July 1999. It would be a great companion to his classic 1993 book “Ogilvy on Advertising“, the cover of which is shown on the left.\nHaving just read the brilliant biography on David Ogilvy “The King of Madison Avenue“ by Kenneth Roman, I can’t help but wonder what he would have made of advertising on the mobile phone.\nHe was a big fan of press and brochure advertising - great photos and long copy, and by his own admission he never really harnessed the creative power of TV. More\u0026hellip; CIPR needs to catch-up on social media guidelines by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nI’m late to this story. The CIPR has updated its social media guidelines. The original document was published in 2007. It’s a useful baseline text but do we really need another set of guidelines for social media and digital PR? The rules of engagement or either commonsense or have developed through trial and error, and have been quickly defined by PR bloggers.\nI can’t help feeling that this is a document that should have been developed as a wiki. Contributors have no idea if their submission has been used and critics such as Stuart Bruce (separate document to CIPR code of conduct is unnecessary) and Simon Collister (guidelines may contradict consumer protection law) have no opportunity to respond directly. More\u0026hellip; TRUST: The Elusive Commodity Worth its Weight in Gold (and then some) by Trevor Young of One19\nGlobal PR firm Edelman has just released its 2009 Trust Barometer report. As the name suggests, it\u0026rsquo;s an annual survey that, in essence, takes the pulse of consumers\u0026rsquo; views in terms of their perception of government and big business.\nNeedless to say, without even looking at the report, after such a tumultuous year you could intuitively take a stab at its findings - and that is the public\u0026rsquo;s trust in business and government is at an all-time low. That would be my gut feel anyway. And I know I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be alone. More\u0026hellip; Girls Fight Back! by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nErin Weed, founder of Girls Fight Back!, uses her Web site, MySpace and Facebook groups, blog, and YouTube videos as a way to promote women\u0026rsquo;s safety and self-defense issues.\nErin, a personal safety and self-defense expert who has conducted 500 seminars at schools, colleges, and corporations, started Girls Fight Back in 2001 in response to the tragic murder of Shannon McNamara, her friend and Alpha Phi sorority sister.\nGirls Fight Back makes safety education accessible, especially to young women in their teens and twenties, through her education Web site and live seminars conducted all over the United States. More\u0026hellip; Telecoms Hothouse: Mobile advertising industry calls for action by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nOn January 22nd in London, Mobile Europe hosted a roundtable sponsored by Gigafone on mobile advertising.\nThe question for the roundtable hosted by Mobile Europe Editor Keith Dyer was:\n“What do agencies, brands, technology providers and operators need to do to turn mobile advertising into a success story in 2009?”\nSounds like a job for Telecoms Hothouse, an independent initiative designed to create debate and discussion about the future of the telecoms industry. Click here to see what you can do to make mobile advertising a success in 2009, and how you can benefit from it. More\u0026hellip; Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK\nLast 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\u0026rsquo;d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)\nI even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here\u0026hellip;\nMoreover, 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. More\u0026hellip; Wittgenstein’s Poker: Why defining social media and PR won’t solve its problems by Andrew Smith of escherman\nFor those of a philosophic bent, one of the best books of recent times has been Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, which provides a brilliant overview of two giants of 20th century thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. (The title derives from the infamous meeting of Wittgenstein and Popper in room H3, King’s College Cambridge on 25th October 1946 when Wittgenstein allegedly brandished a hot poker at Popper over a fundamental philosophical disagreement.)The dispute between Wittgenstein and Popper represents the major clash of philosophical opinion in the 20th century. More\u0026hellip; Top 5 Superbowl Ads According to Google by Katy Barrilleaux of Lead Maverick, Inc.\nSuperbowl XLIII is over. NBC, advertisers and their agencies are surely pleased that the victor was not determined until the last play of the game. Congratulations go to the Pittsburgh Steelers for a hard-fought victory and the Arizona Cardinals for providing one of the more entertaining Superbowl games in years. Even before the confetti flew to signal the end of the game, the internet was all a-twitter with people casting their votes for their favorite Superbowl Ads. Here are the top 5 Superbowl Ads as determined by search volume on Google, reported by Google Trends: More\u0026hellip; First look at Google Latitude - location sharing made easy by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI’m delighted to see Google launch their Latitude product, as I have been saying for some time privately as well as during my numerous presentations on location and location advertising that this would be the next step for Google mobile maps (GMM).\nAs Google have the monopoly on worldwide automated location determination (via their GMM application and massive and ever expanding cell-ID database), the next obvious step is to allow trusted friends and family to see where you are and share your location. More\u0026hellip; The Top Social Brands of 2008: What\u0026rsquo;s Your Conversation Index? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource\nVitrue released a report on the Top Social Brands of 2008 based on an index the company launched last year.\nThe top social brands list is a result of Vitrue’s daily analysis of over 2,000 popular brands. Each day, the team analyzes online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites. Virtue then applies a series of algorithms to measure the frequency of keyword usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation. More\u0026hellip; Dell Deals with Twitter by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nIn March 2008, Gary Vaynerchuck experimented with @santagaryvee on Twitter where he would announce special Wine Library deals and opportunities exclusively for his loyal followers on the popular micro community. While he slowly phased that activity back into his main Twitter streams, many companies were introduced to a new way to engage and harness enthusiasm among those potentially interested in something new and special.\nHaving contributed to the standard of listening and responding to users and pundits on Twitter, Dell is no stranger to the power, value, insight, relationships, and education that result from meaningful and genuine participation. More\u0026hellip; econsultancy on social media trends: digital engagement and reaching the one-percenters by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nI’ve have recently discovered econsultancy’s excellent Trends and Innovation papers. These concise documents provide a quick insight into different areas of digital marketing.\nThe latest paper on social media (free to registered users) contains no surprises. But that’s not the point. It’s an excellent summary of the market and provides good sign posting for more information.\nMy key learning was contained in a single table (p10). e-consultancy asked vendors whether they had seen improvement in engagement via various online channels. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/friday-roundup-6th-february-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s one of those days when I\u0026rsquo;m just going to let the highlighted posts do all the talking\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 6th February 2009"},{"content":"\nMarketing communications operates within an increasingly complex multi-stakeholder web of influences, and the way many of us can or will be able to devine how influence goes around and comes around, how reputations get built up and eroded, is to look at it pictorially.\nMy best attempt to date at explaining this in non-mathematical language is in my post \u0026ldquo;Can you see it? Making influence visible. \u0026rdquo; Check it out. More widely, my post \u0026ldquo;Influence\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a numbers game \u0026rdquo;, lists all my posts related to this topic.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m ever so interested in data visualisation, in case you hadn\u0026rsquo;t guessed. But marketing communications is far from the only field look at visualising vast datasets to ease comprehension and interpretation; if anything, we\u0026rsquo;re at the tail end. Which is no bad thing as we inherit the prior works of other sectors and put it to use more quickly than they were able.\nBut Skyrails is a very interesting project. Led by Yose Widjaja at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales , it is defined as a social network and graph visualisation system yet its applications are manifold.\nThe image at the top of this post is from the latest set of screenshots of Skyrails available here on Flickr , and reprents a visualisation of a protein structure. I have included some other static images below because not only are they beautiful but they whet your appetite for what could be achieved in visualising and understanding influence. I finish with a YouTube video that demonstrates how the data can be manipulated in a way a static image cannot convey.\nOf all the sectors in which data visualisation is important, you could say biology is metaphorically closest to marketing communications. We talk, after all, about \u0026ldquo;virals\u0026rdquo;, and the idea of \u0026ldquo;memes \u0026rdquo; comes from the study of genes. So when you take a look, try to view how this would work in analysing your campaign\u0026rsquo;s biosystem.\nWatch how Skyrails works\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/02/visualising-your-world-of-influence-with-skyrails/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"protein%20visualisation%20on%20Skyrails\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/3081689206_5e183818be.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarketing communications operates within an increasingly complex multi-stakeholder web of influences, and the way many of us can or will be able to devine how influence goes around and comes around, how reputations get built up and eroded, is to look at it pictorially.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy best attempt to date at explaining this in non-mathematical language is in my post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/can-you-see-it-making-influence-visible\"\u003eCan you see it? Making influence visible.\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; Check it out.  More widely, my post \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/influence...-its-a-numbers-game\"\u003eInfluence\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a numbers game\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;, lists all my posts related to this topic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails"},{"content":"This week\u0026rsquo;s mix of post highlights includes a couple of thought provokers from Brian Solis, one on his work with Anheuser-Busch in creating a fusion of public relations and social media , and another on Friendfeed\u0026hellip; is it the new Twitter ?\nAnd if anything tolls the bell for a service in the eyes of the influential early adopters, it\u0026rsquo;s the arrival of \u0026ldquo;celebrity\u0026rdquo;. Stephen Waddington sounds the alarm for Twitter .\nAnd forgive me if I just hijack the last part of this Roundup intro. Marketing communications is a considerably different discipline today than it was at just the turn of the decade. The social web and conversational marketing mean influence is exerted in different ways and robust measurement is coming of age. PR is becoming fully and quantifiably accountable for the first time.\nIf this lights your screen, if it clicks your mouse, then please take time to read my post on the Influence Scorecard and let me know if you would like to help shape the cutting edge of marketing communications as it takes its place deservedly, centrally and irrevocably at the board table.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nAnheuser-Busch Debuts AB-Extras.com; Fuses PR with Social Media to Humanize Stories and Ads by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nDisclosure: I am collaborating with Anheuser-Busch on the creation and release of AB-Extras.com\nToday Anheuser-Busch announced AB-Extras.com – a social media destination for Bud fans 21 years of age and older to reveal the human element and stories behind the ads that will premier during the Big Game.\nAB-Extras.com is a unique social platform for the internal PR team at Anheuser-Busch to also work more effectively with traditional and digital press and bloggers using the tools and services that they rely upon to publish and share stories. More\u0026hellip; Gordon Brown talks digital\u0026hellip;sorry I mean nonsense by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nWhere do they get their information from in Government? Are they secretly living in some underground colony where the world is different to the one you and I live in? Or are they all so gullible they fall for anything anyone with a sharp suit tells them?\nTake today - Gordon Brown personally backs the new plan for the digital future of Britain. He reckons digital is essential to the future prosperity of the country. So is an honest, well-regulated banking system Gordon. Sorry, I digress.\nTrue, digital Britain is a necessity; More\u0026hellip; Persuasive Writing 6 – Using Metaphors to Spark Imagination by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\n“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” – Orson Scott Card\nWhether in Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s plays or Rowling’s Harry Potter, fictional writing is packed with metaphors because they’re so effective at stimulating a reader’s imagination. Metaphors are powerful because by transferring the qualities of one object onto another they can enhance an object’s emotional impact by drawing on the reader’s existing thoughts and feelings about the world around them. More\u0026hellip; Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management by Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group UK 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:\nListening 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. More\u0026hellip; Hardcore users unsettled as Twitter emerges as celeb PR tactic by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nTwitter has suddenly got very busy. A bunch of celebs have signed-up and are generating huge amounts of attention that\u0026rsquo;s edging the micro-blogging platform into the mainstream.It’s the offline PR tactic of the moment. How long before a national or celeb magazine starts publishing a list of celeb Tweets? In fact its probably already been done.\nIt’s an issue that I discussed with pals on Twitter this morning and tonight at the London Bloggers meet-up tonight.\nJonathan Hopkins (@jopkins) captured the mood. More\u0026hellip; PR industry must recalibrate to address profitability, says RealWire\u0026rsquo;s Adam Parker by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nAs CEO of RealWire, Adam Parker has built a very efficient delivery mechanism for the distribution of content from PR agencies. He’s an ex-PricewaterhouseCoopers chartered accountant and management consultant and has spent a good deal of time and effort scrutinising the make-up of the PR industry and its business model in a bid to better sell RealWire’s services as an outsourced offering.\nWe caught up for breakfast in Newcastle on Friday where he talked about business models, profitability and his efforts to sell to the industry. More\u0026hellip; AT\u0026amp;T takes flak for Idol SMS push - is operator spam really not spam? by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nI guess it must have been a slow news day, but last week the New York Times reported on a promotional text sent out by AT\u0026amp;T, which it claims had rebounded badly on the US network. AT\u0026amp;T, it seems, sent a considerable volume of texts promoting an upcoming American Idol show to some of its 75m subscribers. The issue was taken up on Twitter, and being presented by NYT and others as a ‘backlash’ against operator spam. In reports, AT\u0026amp;T rather weakly claimed that the message was not spam, because it had gone to subscribers who had voted for Idol singers in the past, and other “heavy texters.” More\u0026hellip; Is FriendFeed the Next Conversation Platform? by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nI recently discussed the viability of Twitter evolving beyond a micro community into a standardized platform for macro conversations. It\u0026rsquo;s certainly the path Facebook is traversing and both are making significant progress in the race to syndicate and aggregate the discussions that are important to us within our respective social networks.\nThere is another emerging platform worth discussing as it is quietly growing into an alternative solution to the disparate communities that are pervasive throughout the social web. More\u0026hellip; Fun with Sharpies by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI love Sharpies. I carry one in my travel bag at all times because you never know when you might need one — like the time that I accidentally gouged the wooden desk leg in a hotel room. Applied a little black Sharpie and it was as good as new! Other people dig Sharpies too, such as the guy who decorated his basement with a Sharpie or celebrities such as the Olsen Twins who use them to sign stuff or creative people like Mike Peyton, a \u0026ldquo;snake artist.\u0026rdquo;\nSo it was fun to come across the Sharpie Blog, \u0026ldquo;a dedicated space where we can showcase some of the really fun, cool, creative stuff that gets made using Sharpie markers.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/friday-roundup-30th-january-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis week\u0026rsquo;s mix of post highlights includes a couple of thought provokers from Brian Solis, one on his work with \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/anheuser-busch-debuts-ab-extras.com-fuses-pr-with-social-media-to-humanize-stories-and-ads\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAnheuser-Busch in creating a fusion of public relations and social media\u003c/a\u003e\n, and another \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/brian.solis/is-friendfeed-the-next-conversation-platform\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eon Friendfeed\u0026hellip; is it the new Twitter\u003c/a\u003e\n?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd if anything tolls the bell for a service in the eyes of the influential early adopters, it\u0026rsquo;s the arrival of \u0026ldquo;celebrity\u0026rdquo;. Stephen Waddington \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/stephen.waddington/hardcore-users-unsettled-as-twitter-emerges-as-celeb-pr-tactic\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esounds the alarm for Twitter\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd forgive me if I just hijack the last part of this Roundup intro. Marketing communications is a considerably different discipline today than it was at just the turn of the decade. The social web and conversational marketing mean influence is exerted in different ways and robust measurement is coming of age. PR is becoming fully and quantifiably accountable for the first time.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf this lights your screen, if it clicks your mouse, then please take time to read my \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/philip.sheldrake/influence-scorecard---defining-influence-measurement-for-organisational-performance-management\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epost on the Influence Scorecard\u003c/a\u003e\n and let me know if you would like to help shape the cutting edge of marketing communications as it takes its place deservedly, centrally and irrevocably at the board table.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 30th January 2009"},{"content":"\nWhen 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:\nListening 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. If I was looking for one word to sum up these needs and their focus then I\u0026rsquo;d borrow from our Chairman Larry Weber\u0026rsquo;s gravitation to the word INFLUENCE.\nThe Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun \u0026ldquo;influence\u0026rdquo; as:\nthe power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions a person or thing with such ability or power the power arising out of status, contacts, or wealth the power to produce a physical change. And we\u0026rsquo;re interested in four flows of influence:\nour own influence with our stakeholders our stakeholders influence with us our stakeholders\u0026rsquo; influence with each other our competitors\u0026rsquo; influence with our stakeholders. (I define stakeholders simply as any and every party with whom we have or would like to have a relationship and interaction for our organisational success. And I define competitors here loosely as any party whose organisational objectives for influence are at odds with our own.)\nSo really understanding influence is pivotal to organisational performance management, and Social Web Analytics (SWA) is a critical component in understanding influence.\nOrganisational Performance Management The days of assessing organisational performance solely with financial quantities are long gone. Financial reports, such as the ‘profit \u0026amp; loss’, look backwards. They are, in the language of performance measurement, lagging indicators that foretell little if anything of an organisation’s ability to meet objectives going forward.\nThis stuff is often referred to as business performance management (BPM), but I’ve opted here for the wider definition of “Organisational” over “Business” so we can include charitable and governmental organisations for example.\nModern approaches to performance measurement, such as Kaplan\u0026rsquo;s and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard , augment financial measures with leading indicators. In the case of the Balanced Scorecard, the measures can be considered in four perspectives:\nFinancial perspective Customer perspective Internal process perspective Innovation and learning perspective. From my experience of putting the Balanced Scorecard into operation, defining and understanding influence contributes to two of these perspectives. Obviously one of these is the customer perspective, but as you may know if you have read the SWA ebook, I also believe influence, and therefore SWA, should feed directly into product development and innovation. Now that\u0026rsquo;s a new role for public relations consultants!\nThe Influence Scorecard Meeting All this exciting stuff has compelled me to host a meeting of those thought leaders from around the world who are defining the measurement of influence for organisational performance management in the 21st Century. The meeting is fuelled by the following two observations.\nFirstly, debate about this issue is often narrow and isolated from the organisational performance management informing the board’s assessment and decision making processes, and this is plainly sub-optimal.\nSecondly, now that SWA has been in development for a few years, we should be modelling and forging consistent structures and taxonomies of influence data, its translation into operational indices and its application to overall organisational performance management; the Influence Scorecard if you will.\nWho should be there to contribute to the debate and set the approach to the Influence Scorecard? I’d like your help in identifying the 100 people to invite. I’ve started to list organisations and individuals below, but any and all ideas welcome (if you’re up for it personally, please put your name down with appropriate link). The list includes SWA vendor companies, social web experts, and performance management experts.\nI have made this post editable by any MarCom Professional member so you can just edit and add people and organisations to this list if you wish. Else do simply leave a comment, linkback, twitter #influencescorecard or email me\u0026hellip;\nAnd I’ll keep you posted here on the plans: venue, date, speakers, panels, workshops etc. etc.\nI hope you’ll agree this is a timely and important meeting that will leave a legacy, albeit one that will prompt yearly reviews no doubt, and we should have some fun too. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to cracking it with you…\n________________________________\nFollow up posts: 6th Feb 2009: Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard 13th Feb 2009: Influence Scorecard update 26th June 2009: An outline of the Influence Scorecard 3rd July 2009: \u0026ldquo;The first Influence Scorecard meeting \u0026rdquo;\n________________________________\nList of relevant organisations and people to invite 1st2c Andiamo Attentio Biz360 Brandimensions Brandwatch Buzzlogic Buzz Numbers CIC Data Cision Clarabridge CollectiveIntellect Converseon Corporation Service Company CustomScoop Crawdad Technologies CyberAlert Digital Influence Group DNA13 DowJonesInsight Echo Research IBM COBRA Integrasco Kaavacorp Kontagent \u0026gt;\nLinkfluence Market Sentinel Metrica / Richard Bagnall Motive Quest MillwardBrown Networked Insights New Media Strategies NielsenBuzzmetrics Onanalytica Overtone PopularMedia Radian6 RelevantNoise Report International RepuMetrix Samepoint ScoutLabs SentiMetrix Tealium Techrigy Teligent TNS Cymfony Trackur J.D.Power/Umbria Unbound Technologies VisibleTechnologies VMSInfo Vocus Weber Shandwick Robert Kaplan / The Paladium Group David Norton / The Paladium Group The Advanced Performance Institute / Bernard Marr Howard Dresner Social Target / Nathan Gilliatt Josh Peters Larry Weber Brian Solis David Meerman Scott Federated Media / John Battelle Bob Paladino Paul Niven Stephen Waddington Katy Howell Daljit Bhurji Andrew Smith Ged Carroll Neville Hobson Simon Collister Jay O\u0026rsquo;Connor , President Elect, CIPR Frank Buytendijk Will McInnes Influencer 50 / Duncan Brown Chris Brogan Dr. Kevin Money / The John Madejski Centre for Reputation , Henley Business School Drew Benvie Danny Rogers / PR Week Charlene Li / The Altimeter Group Richard Owen, John Abraham \u0026amp; Laura Brooks / Satmetrix / Net Promoter Score Anthony Nadalin , IBM Chief Security Architect, Co-Chair of OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems Nat Sakimura, NRI Senior Researcher, Co-Chair of OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems Kevin Lucas Don Bulmer Dr. Roland Schatz / Media Tenor Seth Godin Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Yakir Siegal / Monitor Group ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/influence-scorecard-defining-influence-measurement-for-organisational-performance-management/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Influence%20Scorecard%202009\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/influencescorecard2009.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen I first decided to write \u003ca href=\"http://socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Social Web Analytics eBook 2008\u003c/a\u003e\n, 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:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eListening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAcquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eUnderstanding 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.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e","title":"Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management"},{"content":"\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the \u0026ldquo;Social Web\u0026rdquo; and not \u0026ldquo;Social Media\u0026rdquo;. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:\n\u0026ldquo;social web analytics\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 18,600 results \u0026ldquo;social media analytics\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 20,100 results Interestingly, however, the term \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; attracts more than twice the search count estimate as \u0026ldquo;social web\u0026rdquo;:\n\u0026ldquo;social web\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 8,250,000 results \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 19,700,000 results So what\u0026rsquo;s going on? What is social media? Social media is a subset of the social web.\nSocial media is a term that describes all the media that isn\u0026rsquo;t industrial media, and by industrial media I refer to what some call \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; and others call \u0026ldquo;mass\u0026rdquo; media. Stuff that\u0026rsquo;s designed, procured and waved under your nose by a company aiming to meet a consumer need (and, usually, flog some space to advertisers along the way).\nSo social media enables consumers to be producers. Or more precisely, it\u0026rsquo;s media where the company that facilitates the media gets out of the way, allowing the public to interact with one another, pivoting around relationships, points of view and / or content (excepting of course where the company flogs some space to advertisers along the way).\nSo what else goes alongside social media in constituting the social web? The social web consists:\n1. Social media (MySpace , Facebook , Bebo , Amazon customer reviews, blogs , Twitter , Flickr , YouTube )\n2. Applications (such as Twhirl , Tweetdeck , widgets for your desktop and phone, visualisation tools , instant messenger, Skype )\n3. Services (such as geolocation feeds , social search from Google for the desktop and Taptu for the mobile, and social aggregators such as FriendFeed , although aspects of the latter fall under the definition of social media)\n4. The network of Internet connected devices (PCs, phones and netbooks, and soon just about any electronic device from which a participant on the social web can contribute or draw information).\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about the broadest definition of the social web, and not one you\u0026rsquo;ll see everywhere. But it\u0026rsquo;s the one that interests me, and the definition I expect the social web analytics space will embrace in the long run.\nSo there\u0026rsquo;s your answer.\nBut just as we think we\u0026rsquo;ve got a definition, others find an associated but different use for the term. Interestingly, well possibly just for geeks anyway, the term \u0026ldquo;social web\u0026rdquo; has also been adopted by those seeking to make the network social at a lower level in the stack. In other words, it represents a new protocol layer (called XDI - Extensible Resource Identifiers Data Interchange if you please) which sits on top of the World Wide Web (HTTP) layer which in turn sits on top of the Internet (TCP/IP) layer. This could be really really interesting indeed, but maybe not quite yet :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/whats-the-difference-between-the-social-web-and-social-media/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"social\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/social.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been asked at least a dozen times why \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Social Web Analytics eBook 2008\u003c/a\u003e\n refers to the \u0026ldquo;Social Web\u0026rdquo; and not \u0026ldquo;Social Media\u0026rdquo;. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;social web analytics\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 18,600 results\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;social media analytics\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 20,100 results\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInterestingly, however, the term \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; attracts more than twice the search count estimate as \u0026ldquo;social web\u0026rdquo;:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;social web\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 8,250,000 results\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; - Google estimates 19,700,000 results\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"so-whats-going-on-what-is-social-media\"\u003eSo what\u0026rsquo;s going on? What is social media?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial media is a subset of the social web.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What\u0026#039;s the difference between the social web and social media?"},{"content":"Optimists might say the cream rises to the top in a recession. What\u0026rsquo;s definitely clear from this week\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional highlights is that the effective marketing skillset has changed and continues to change apace, and it\u0026rsquo;s not a great leap to conclude that those that \u0026ldquo;get it\u0026rdquo; earlier than others will reap competitive advantage, or indeed simply survive this economic winter.\nAndrew Grill, for example, examines an article in the FT painting a dismal picture for the advertising industry if it fails to adapt to the changes in media .\nOr perhaps now\u0026rsquo;s your time to write a book? Trevor Young brings an absorbing slideshow to our attention portraying Rohit Bhargava\u0026rsquo;s route to book top-sellerdom for *Personality Not Included .\nLastly, a quick hello to everyone who has joined us here on MarCom Professional in recent weeks, you are most welcome. If you like what you see, please do invite your colleagues with the simple \u0026ldquo;Invite\u0026rdquo; feature at the top of all our webpages.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nThe Intersection of Facebook \u0026amp; MySpace by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSource\nAn interesting and highly anticipated phenomenon occurred in December 2008, one that received very little fanfare.\nDecember was a particularly busy month for Mark Zuckerberg\u0026rsquo;s high profile social network. According to Web metrics firm Hitwise, Facebook’s share of US Internet traffic hit an all time high on Christmas Eve 2008, earning 2.18% of all US Internet visits.\nPerhaps more significant, the traffic volume between Myspace and Facebook intersected at the end of 2008 with Facebook surpassing MySpace according to my analysis of several traffic charts. More\u0026hellip; Social media is media (and the opportunity for the PR industry) by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nSocial media isn’t media. It’s social. So says Mark Earls (@herdmeister). I discovered Earls’ blog yesterday (thanks to Robin Grant (@robingrant), MD of We Are Social).\nEarls is the author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. Here’s what he says.\nSocial Media - blogging, tweeting, facebooking and so on - is NOT [primarily] about information (what we write, say or read - just as advertising and all those things we criticise are not either); More\u0026hellip; How an active Facebook group drove 15,000 people to the Singapore Tattoo Show by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI speak at dozens of conferences a year all over the world. Since organizers usually book me many months in advance, I have some visibility into how they promote the events. It tends to be the same old methods: Send an email and a direct mail to everyone who attended last year, buy some email and postal mailing lists and send some more promotions. Most shows build good Web sites and most have decent SEO. But that\u0026rsquo;s usually it.\nWhat if you\u0026rsquo;re charged with promoting a brand new show?\nBecause there\u0026rsquo;s no previous attendees to draw from the work is much more difficult. More\u0026hellip; Not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world warns IPA by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI caught an interesting article in the Financial Times which outlines a report from the IPA on how media agencies are slow to embrace the online world. Quoting from the report\nThe Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. More\u0026hellip; Read This, Get Personality by Trevor Young of One19\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading *Personality Not Included in chunks over the past month or so. The book, by PR consultant and prominent blogger Rohit Bhargava, is worth a look if, like me, you enjoy reading marketing books that are relevant and written with energy by authors who don\u0026rsquo;t take themselves too seriously. *Personality Not Included explores the theme of the \u0026lsquo;faceless corporation\u0026rsquo; and looks at how many of today\u0026rsquo;s companies lack authenticity and personality.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s up to date and is littered with short, sharp examples (from the relatively obscure i.e. More\u0026hellip; The PR Professional of the Future by Trevor Young of One19\nJust latched on to this video (via Shel Holtz), produced by Ogilvy PR Worldwide for PR Week magazine\u0026rsquo;s recent \u0026lsquo;Next\u0026rsquo; conference.Here is a snapshot of what some of America\u0026rsquo;s brightest and best PR exponents had to say when interviewed for the video: \u0026ldquo;What we do for a living is we tell stories that move people,\u0026rdquo; - Christopher Graves, Ogilvy PR. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re going to be what I call direct content creators and have an opportunity to actually tell the story very directly to audiences,\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Email marketing is more art than science by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nStatisticians have been bent double over data about email marketing and have come up with an answer to a question that is pretty pointless. Every year various people try to analyse what is the best day of the week to send out a marketing email. The notion is that if you know which day of the week most people open their emails, then you stand a greater chance of being seen if you hit the inbox on the appropriate day.\nBack in 2005 we were told it\u0026rsquo;s definitely Friday, well by a short margin anyway. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/friday-roundup-16th-january-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOptimists might say the cream rises to the top in a recession. What\u0026rsquo;s definitely clear from this week\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional highlights is that the effective marketing skillset has changed and continues to change apace, and it\u0026rsquo;s not a great leap to conclude that those that \u0026ldquo;get it\u0026rdquo; earlier than others will reap competitive advantage, or indeed simply survive this economic winter.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAndrew Grill, for example, examines an article in the FT painting \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/andrew.grill/not-enough-agencies-are-adjusting-to-the-online-world-warns-ipa\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ea dismal picture for the advertising industry if it fails to adapt to the changes in media\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOr perhaps now\u0026rsquo;s your time to write a book? \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/trevor.young/read-this-get-personality\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTrevor Young brings an absorbing slideshow to our attention\u003c/a\u003e\n portraying Rohit Bhargava\u0026rsquo;s route to book top-sellerdom for \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Personality-Not-Included-Companies-Authenticity/dp/0071545212/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;s=books\u0026amp;qid=1232064747\u0026amp;sr=8-1\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e*Personality Not Included\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLastly, a quick hello to everyone who has joined us here on MarCom Professional in recent weeks, you are most welcome. If you like what you see, please do invite your colleagues with the simple \u0026ldquo;Invite\u0026rdquo; feature at the top of all our webpages.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 16th January 2009"},{"content":"A new year is a time for resolutions, many of which will be focused on personal development and growth. That\u0026rsquo;s a critical kind of resolution for marketers in 2009 as our industry continues to change at unprecedented speed, and if the bag of posts below is anything to go by, MarCom Professional remains a great source of insight and learning.\nAnd the occasional fun too.\nSo despite everything, we hope 2009 turns out to be what you make it.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSteve Jobs Health Debate Reinforces Long Held PR Theory by Trevor Young of One19\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a theory PR practitioners hold true and that is, if a crisis or an issue (or an allegation/rumour with strong substantiation) bubbles to the surface, if the people responsible don\u0026rsquo;t come out and clear the air, then the media will find its own angle, usually by interviewing others.If anything, this theory is more important that ever; thanks to Twitter, the blogosphere and proliferation of online communities, news and opinion travels faster than wildfire. Now, I\u0026rsquo;m a pragmatist at heart and there might be valid reasons why a company or individual are slow to come forward to clear the air on a particular issue, and that\u0026rsquo;s entirely understandable. More\u0026hellip; Persuasive Writing 4 - Structure by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\nIn earlier chapters you identified how to appeal to your target audience and compiled a list of your product’s benefits. Now you need to plan how to structure your writing so it leads your reader along a logical path of thought towards taking action.\nJust like how a seasoned debater or lawyer prepares to argue their case, you need to assess how to communicate your points so they resonate with the reader and seduce them into agreeing to your proposition.\nRemember that people make buying decisions based on logic and emotion, so your writing needs to trigger both if you’re going to persuade the reader to pull out their credit card. More\u0026hellip; The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nSean Percival is a published author, developer, blogger, and an overall online marketing and SEO expert. A short while ago, Sean asked if I would write the foreword for his new book, MySpace Marketing.\nQue, the book\u0026rsquo;s publisher, has graciously granted me permission to share the foreword with you. While the premise encompasses MySpace, as a social marketer, you could theoretically insert any \u0026ldquo;social network name\u0026rdquo; and find that the guiding principles and ideologies are perpetual.\nEnjoy\u0026hellip; More\u0026hellip; In the end, SEO is, in fact, all about the content by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nI was reading a blog post about the next big Google algorithm change on Conversation Marketing which states that searcher behavior is going to drive search rankings beginning in 2009. The post (unusually for an SEO blog) gave some evidence to back up this assertion, but frankly, this is one of the most patently obvious things I\u0026rsquo;ve read since I got started in this industry.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s look at the facts:\nGoogle published a patent in 2005 saying it was working on this Google has started to More\u0026hellip; When lawyers get in the way of PR by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI received a press release via email a few days ago from a well-meaning PR person. Guess what? I can\u0026rsquo;t write about it because at the bottom of the release is this:\nNOTICE: This electronic mail transmission contains confidential information intended only for the person(s) named. Any use, distribution, copying or disclosure by any other person is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and then destroy the message. Opinions, conclusions, and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of AGENCY X shall be understood to be neither given nor endorsed by AGENCY X. More\u0026hellip; 3rd party ad serving on mobile - a good start by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI caught the news over at MobiAd news about MediaCom running a campaign for T-Mobile using the Nokia Media Network, with ad serving from Eyeblaster’s Ad Campaign Manager platform. Quoting from the story:\n\u0026ldquo;Third-party ad serving may become important to the mobile advertising industry, as it allows for more consistent measurement of advertising results across mobile publishers and channels. And as brands consider moving more of their budgets to the mobile channel, a high level of accountability will be important. More\u0026hellip; US Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nSeveral weeks ago in a blog post called The US Air Force: Armed with social media, I wrote about my interview with Capt. David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon. I spoke with Capt. Faggard about what he and his team are doing to get the word out about the Air Force online. I wrote about the detailed Air Force blog assessment flowchart that Capt. Faggard shared with me. It provides, in simple to understand, but in a detailed and specific way, how to react to blog posts. More\u0026hellip; Advertising in the 70s vs now by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI read a really interesting article on the weekend in the Financial Times on the demise of the famous advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce, CDP to the headline writers, “Colletts” to its friends and rivals. This was on the back of a TV show I caught late on Saturday night called 100 greatest TV ads, on channel 4. Being an Australian, I had a bit of catching up to do on some of these famous British TV ads - but I’m with the program now, and have also seen some great ads. More\u0026hellip; Compare the Meerkat by Giles Shorthouse of t\u0026rsquo;Internet PR \u0026amp; Advertising2.0\nVery funny TV advert from Comparethemarket.com , and they have even set up a nice website at Compare The Meerkat dot com!\nWith so many boring TV adverts in the price comparison space this is a clever idea. More at Seventy seven\u0026rsquo;s blog. More\u0026hellip; Newspapers are Old News by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nCredit\nAs a follow up to my post, \u0026ldquo;Extra Extra, Read All About It! Newspapers Respond to the Social Web,\u0026rdquo; new research emerges that documents the looming exit of print newspapers as a primary source of national and international news.\nAccording to the Pew Research Center for the People \u0026amp; the Press, a new survey indicates that 40% of respondents claim the Internet as their primary source for national and international news, versus 24% in 2007. In comparison, 35%, up 1% from 2007, rely on newspapers and 70% count on television as their main source for news, down from 74% in 2007. More\u0026hellip; Marketing Me: How smart digital natives reach potential employers by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nI just love that my book The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR is used in many college and university classes. Frequently I’ll find references to the book on students\u0026rsquo; and professors\u0026rsquo; blogs and I often end up with students as my new Facebook friends or Twitter followers. What a terrific connection to up and coming communicators!\nKyle F. Reinson is professor of Communication at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, requires The New Rules of Marketing \u0026amp; PR for his COMM 376 class. More\u0026hellip; Now, everybody knows you\u0026rsquo;re a dog by Glen Turpin of First Data Corporation (Greenwood Village)\n© 1993 The New Yorker\nYou’ve probably heard the expression, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” That was then. The days of online anonymity are behind us. Hundreds of millions of people routinely share information about themselves online, and public records are online for hundreds of millions more. Now, everybody knows you’re a dog — and they know a lot of other things about you too.\nBut do they know the things you want them to know about you? Do you act the same and share the same information with everyone in your life? Probably not. More\u0026hellip; 2009 PR industry predictions: clients are king by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nHere are my predictions for the PR industry in 2009. None of my analysis or comment is particularly groundbreaking and almost all my predictions have their roots in the current market conditions. 1. Growth\nWe work in a client-led industry that tracks the performance of each of the markets that we serve. The economic outlook for next year is lousy for the most part, with no external impetus to drive additional client demand for our services. The next election or the Olympics may help in the second half, but not much. More\u0026hellip; You Gotta Have Faith: Taming Your Inner Critic by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell\nI came across Tara’s post here about taming her inner critic, where she questions her abilities at live interviews and doubts her own writing skills. I believe we all have moments like this. But some are worse than others…\n[I\u0026rsquo;m about to make a bold generalisation and some will have want my head off for making such a statement, but bear with me.]\nSince I moved from Canada, I have seen too many Brits or Europeans be very sheepish about self-promotion. American sales people are reputed to be bubbly, brash and bigger than life, speaking louder than anyone else in the room and gesticulating endlessly to illustrate what they’re saying. More\u0026hellip; Lose Control of your Marketing! New free ebook by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nLose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure\nPlease download my new ebook Lose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure.\nDo you market like the Grateful Dead? Or like Led Zeppelin? (Find out in the ebook).\nHere are some other things you\u0026rsquo;ll find inside:\n\u0026ldquo;For many executives, an obsession with ROI is just a convenient excuse to shy away from something new and untested. Yet that\u0026rsquo;s exactly what the best ideas for creating a World Wide Rave are—new and untested.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/friday-roundup-9th-january-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA new year is a time for resolutions, many of which will be focused on personal development and growth. That\u0026rsquo;s a critical kind of resolution for marketers in 2009 as our industry continues to change at unprecedented speed, and if the bag of posts below is anything to go by, MarCom Professional remains a great source of insight and learning.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the occasional fun too.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo despite everything, we hope 2009 turns out to be what you make it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 9th January 2009"},{"content":"What a lovely thing to see at the start of the New Year, particularly this one! A photo of a loved tabby cat under the word \u0026ldquo;Found\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo;.\nAnd a thank you message to neighbours for the help they may have given in recovering said cat\u0026hellip; I knew immediately that I\u0026rsquo;d take a picture of it and write a blog post.\nWhy?\nWhy did the cat\u0026rsquo;s owner feel compelled to go back to her PC, bring up the \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo; file, edit to \u0026ldquo;Found\u0026rdquo;, print it, go outside and staple it to the tree? On the face of it, he or she obviously really loves that cat and might not have had anything else to do with her time\u0026hellip; but that\u0026rsquo;s being cynical. Oddly enough, I now feel more compelled to check my garden and outbuildings next time someone posts up a \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo; poster because I\u0026rsquo;ve been thanked in advance. I know someone really cares.\nIt has also made me think about what our company and clients could say to our public, our neighbours, with this unusual case study in mind\u0026hellip; with altruistic intent or more simply for \u0026lsquo;feelgood\u0026rsquo;.\nHow about you and yours?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2009/01/communication-when-you-dont-have-anything-to-flog/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat a lovely thing to see at the start of the New Year, particularly this one! A photo of a loved tabby cat under the word \u0026ldquo;Found\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"cat%20found%20poster%20tree\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/found.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd a thank you message to neighbours for the help they may have given in recovering said cat\u0026hellip; I knew immediately that I\u0026rsquo;d take a picture of it and write a blog post.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy did the cat\u0026rsquo;s owner feel compelled to go back to her PC, bring up the \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo; file, edit to \u0026ldquo;Found\u0026rdquo;, print it, go outside and staple it to the tree? On the face of it, he or she obviously really loves that cat and might not have had anything else to do with her time\u0026hellip; but that\u0026rsquo;s being cynical. Oddly enough, I now feel more compelled to check my garden and outbuildings next time someone posts up a \u0026ldquo;Lost\u0026rdquo; poster because I\u0026rsquo;ve been thanked in advance. I know someone really cares.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Communication when you don\u0026#039;t have anything to flog"},{"content":"The last Roundup of 2008 includes a diverse array of pressies under the MarCom Professional tree.\nBrian Solis and Ben Matthews scrutinise the Techcrunch embargoe kerfuffle (marking the end of an era?), David Knowles chats about how we might all learn from the latest X-factor, and Stephen Waddington uses any excuse to include a picture of Kelly Brooks\u0026hellip; although we agree Quick Response codes might be hot stuff in coming years.\nAnd in amongst the brightly wrapped pressies, one from the US Air Force, courtesy of David Meerman Scott , about their use of social media in their marketing communications. That\u0026rsquo;ll get us flying into 2009.\nMerry Christmas or Happy Holidays, whichever you prefer.\nBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nQR codes and the Kelly Brooks Pepsi campaign by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nWhen Kelly Brooks starts appearing in ads featuring QR codes you know that the 2D dot matrix bar code technology is close to a tipping point. Brooks features in a Pepsi campaign that has gone live this week and images of her clutching a QR code have featured in most of the tabloids.\nQR (short for Quick Response) codes are 2D postage stamp sized barcodes that can pack in up to half a page of data. The technology was originally devised to track goods in a supply chain but has found its way into the consumer mobile sector in tagging application. More\u0026hellip; Success Beckons the Social Media-Driven Enterprise by Trevor Young of One19\nThe advent of blogging and podcasting, social networking and other connective technologies - collectively referred to by most people now as social media - is seen in so many different lights, it\u0026rsquo;s no wonder that companies and organisations are freaking out about it.\nNo doubt the situation was similar when other mediums such as newspapers, radio and television were first unleashed on to an unsuspecting public. The difference, of course, is that social media isn\u0026rsquo;t a \u0026lsquo;medium\u0026rsquo; per se and therefore shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be even remotely compared to, say, television. More\u0026hellip; Fanta fantasy - Brand owners, beware demos on N95s by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nIt was some sadness I saw this week that Fanta have decided to boost their awareness of their brand worldwide through mobile.\nSadness?\nWell… They have eschewed the normal mobile marketing routes, and have gone with a new, and quite lovely concept. It is a game that uses both a mobile app around a real world scenario. In short, it is a tennis game that lets users actually play a game of tennis, using their phones, Wii like, as rackets across a printed out miniature tennis court. Nice huh?\nSo why does it make me sad?\nWell firstly you can get an idea of the scale of the issue when you have a look at the supported phones on the website. More\u0026hellip; What Can Brands Learn from Alexandra Burke? by David Knowles of\nAnd so the marketing machine that is ‘X Factor’ rumbles towards securing Simon Cowell another Christmas # 1 this year. At the time of writing, 150k copies of Alexandra Burke’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ have been downloaded thus far, making it the fastest selling download of all time and virtually guaranteeing it to be the soundtrack to many people’s Christmas.\nWhilst Ms Burke might be a talented singer, nobody can doubt that her song’s popularity has a lot to do with the amount of time, emotion and money people have invested into her over the course of X Factor. More\u0026hellip; Mobile advertising recall and a call to action for Creatives by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nJust what is the effectiveness of mobile advertising? What is the recall? This question was asked of me recently by a well known planner for a big agency in London. It is a good question because this is just what clients will be asking him after a campaign – how was our money spent? Where and when did people experience our brand? Did they have a higher recall of the brand after seeing a targeted and relevant mobile advertisement versus a standard mobile web banner? More\u0026hellip; One rule for them when it comes to paid links and another rule for us? by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International\nI read something on Search Engine Roundtable earlier in the week that got me steaming mad. An industry expert allegedly said the following to a roomful of people at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago:\n\u0026ldquo;Yes; he buys links, but buys them for large .com\u0026rsquo;s with lots of quality incoming links. That\u0026rsquo;s a big difference from the small to medium who are buying those links. If Todd buys 5 links for someone like amazon.com, I call that buying paid advertising. NO risk at all.\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; The End of Embargoes? by Ben Matthews of Pudding Relations\nMichael Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch today that proclaims the \u0026ldquo;Death of the Embargo\u0026rdquo;:\n\u0026ldquo;All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories\u0026hellip; As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs\u0026hellip; More\u0026hellip; Meme: How to keep your PR clients happy by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nGed Carroll set me some more homework in his ‘Low cost ways to keep your clients happy’ meme. He\u0026rsquo;s put together an impressive list of low cost tools that enable PR professionals to do their job better.\nI have a single piece of advice for front line PRs in a challenging economy - and it won\u0026rsquo;t cost you anything. Stick close to your clients. Meet with them. If that’s not possible call them regularly, especially if they are based overseas.\nThe PR industry relies far too much on digital, rather than face to face communication. More\u0026hellip; Making the case for mobile advertising in a down economy by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI came across an excellent summary on Media Post by Michael Weaver titled “Hunker Down Or Double Down? Making The Case for Mobile Advertising In A Down Economy“ Michael makes the point\n“Mobile advertising is comparatively cheap, highly dynamic (with everything from video and display to text and search options), global, easy to produce, and, most of all, more measurable than any other channel. The challenge is simply turning advertisers into believers.”\nHe also talks about the three “issues” More\u0026hellip; Shout! With Brent Arslaner, VP of Marketing at Unisfair by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets\nUnisfair offers virtual events enabling large corporations and mid sized ones as alternative to physical events.\nI came across the organisation following an interview request made by their excellent PR Sarah Tonzi.\nThey have clients across a range of categories - marketing, recuriting and internal collaboration. but mainly focus on two markets - media companies like Economist, Business Week a virtual event is every aspect of a physical event. Main hall, exhibitions and conference, networking lounges all just like a regular conference. More\u0026hellip; TechCrunch Kills The Embargo, But PR Holds the Smoking Gun by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nDisclosure, I am a contributor to TechCrunch and I have had my fair share of embargoes broken by various reporters and bloggers over the years. In some cases, we trusted the wrong people.\nCredit\nIn what is sure to come as an absolute surprise to the tech PR industry, TechCrunch proclaimed that it will no longer honor embargoes, unless they\u0026rsquo;re granted exclusivity. The move was triggered by a growing pattern of underhanded and also irresponsible behavior in the backchannels of PR and blogger relations. More\u0026hellip; Pay per click just doesn\u0026rsquo;t connect with web site users by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nPay per click advertising fails to really connect with people who use the Internet. That\u0026rsquo;s the conclusion from a new study by ClickConsult. The research reveals that if you combine search engine optimisation (SEO) with Pay Per Click, you get a 50% increase in conversions.\nWhat this really tells us is that when people see an advert in isolation they don\u0026rsquo;t trust it. When they see an advert AND they are aware of the company or organisation via natural search, then they increase their trust level with the advertiser. More\u0026hellip; The US Air Force: Armed with social media by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nRecently I was checking out a bunch of people on Twitter who began to follow my updates @dmscott. When I went to @AFPAA I was surprised to see the Twitter ID belonged to the US Air Force. There were less than 200 people following the Air Force, indicating someone new to Twitter. Now this is interesting I thought, the Air Force on Twitter. I sent a DM (direct message) to find out what they are doing and received an immediate answer from Capt. David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon. More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/12/friday-roundup-19th-december-2008/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe last Roundup of 2008 includes a diverse array of pressies under the MarCom Professional tree.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/posts/brian.solis/techcrunch-kills-the-embargo-but-pr-holds-the-smoking-gun\"\u003eBrian Solis\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"/posts/ben.matthews/the-end-of-embargoes\"\u003eBen Matthews\u003c/a\u003e\n scrutinise the Techcrunch embargoe kerfuffle (marking the end of an era?), \u003ca href=\"/posts/david.knowles/what-can-brands-learn-from-alexandra-burke\"\u003eDavid Knowles chats\u003c/a\u003e\n about how we might all learn from the latest X-factor, and \u003ca href=\"/posts/stephen.waddington/qr-codes-and-the-kelly-brooks-pepsi-campaign\"\u003eStephen Waddington\u003c/a\u003e\n uses any excuse to include a picture of Kelly Brooks\u0026hellip; although we agree Quick Response codes might be hot stuff in coming years.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd in amongst the brightly wrapped pressies, one from the \u003ca href=\"/posts/david.meerman.scott/the-us-air-force-armed-with-social-media\"\u003eUS Air Force, courtesy of David Meerman Scott\u003c/a\u003e\n, about their use of social media in their marketing communications. That\u0026rsquo;ll get us flying into 2009.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMerry Christmas or Happy Holidays, whichever you prefer.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBest regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 19th December 2008"},{"content":"Before we dive into this week\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional highlights, we\u0026rsquo;d like you to help us work out what we should be doing for you in the New Year. Here\u0026rsquo;s the shortlist:\nA. An agency time planning, logging and reporting tool. Keep track of projects, people, tasks, time. Work out where you\u0026rsquo;re over- and under-servicing, and opt-in to anonymised benchmarkcomparisons.\nB. Coverage collation, management and measurement. Scan coverage and capture screenshots directly to the browser, generate reports and share with your team and/or clients in your own extranet.\nC. Journalist - PR relations is controversial of late. This service would act as a hub for PR consultants to discover what journalists need, and for journalists to manage stuff thrown at them by PR consultants.\nDo drop us an email , tweet me , post or comment\u0026hellip; we only want to deliver what you can use!\nThanks and best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\nSpinVox delights with Covent Garden Wishing Well by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR\nShout out to experiential firm Freestate that developed and built SpinVox’s Wishing Well installation as part of the Covent Garden Christmas festival. It’s a wonderful, almost magical piece of work that cannot fail to bring a smile to your face.\nAs you call 020 7818 0880 your wish is converted to text and projected onto the walls inside the Wishing Well installation in Covent Garden. It also appears online.\nIt’s rare for a brand to delight its audience – but SpinVox has achieved exactly that with its Wishing Well. More\u0026hellip; World-class, cutting-edge gobbledygook by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nYesterday I sent out a tweet \u0026ldquo;Gobbledygook alert!!\u0026rdquo; pointing to the web site of Ossk Interactive, which has this gem on the homepage.\n\u0026ldquo;We’re dedicated to providing results oriented, cost efficient solutions for customer outreach by employing existing and proprietary technologies that maximize exposure and obtain a leadership position in your market through the use of E-Ossk, our interactive digital outreach system.\u0026rdquo;\nI asked my Twitter followers \u0026ldquo;What does this company do?\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Writing Persuasively 3 - Features Tell, Benefits Sell by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter\u0026rsquo;s Crucible\n“In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope.” - Charles Revson\nWhenever someone reads your website’s landing page or sales letter they’re not thinking about how clever the wordplay is but ‘what’s in it for me?’ They want to know how your product can solve their problem and benefit them personally, not how great your company is or how many speed settings your widget has.\nIf you’ve provided them with the right triggers, their imagination will also be picturing what life would be like if they took advantage of your offer. More\u0026hellip; Business blogging isn\u0026rsquo;t worthwhile says new study by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology\nNew research from Forrester suggests that business blogging could well be a waste of time. It seems that only 16% of Internet users trust what they read on business blogs. And - worse - this is the lowest trust rating for any web content.\nWhat the study reveals is a huge thumbs down for blogging. So should you carry on?\nThere is no doubt that the lack of trust is down to the appalling way in which many businesses have used blogs. Big businesses in particular has a lot to answer for here. They have abused blogging substantially by publishing \u0026ldquo;puffery\u0026rdquo; More\u0026hellip; Saying More with Less: A Directory of Short URL Services by Brian Solis of PR 2.0\nThrough brevity there’s clarity.\nAs marketers and communicators in the era of socialized media, we’re relearning how to summarize and illustrate what we represent so that we might briefly captivate the attention of those we wish to reach.\nTwitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Qik, Seesmic, 12seconds, Facebook News Feeds, and all other forms of micromedia communities prosper through a concise economy of language and forethought. It is the exchange of this richer dialog that flourishes through succinctness. More\u0026hellip; Persona focused Web site leads to 4x conversions for RightNow Technologies by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nIn early 2008, San Mateo, CA based RightNow Technologies kicked off a project to rebuild the company Web site around buyer personas. As you probably know, a buyer persona is distinct group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.\nCreating a site based on buyer personas gets you away from an egotistical site based on your products and services (which nobody really cares about, after all). What people do care about are themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success. More\u0026hellip; Google to allow PC Ads on Mobile by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nGoogle has announced a new feature for its AdWords service today, which will enable ads that were once formatted and restricted to the desktop computer to also appear on mobile phones.\nHistorically, it didn’t make sense to deliver desktop ads to the phone because if a consumer clicked on it, they wouldn’t be able to view the page correctly. But now that some phones have full Internet browsers, this is less of a concern. Google said today in a blog post that advertisers will be able to place the same ads on the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1, as well as other phones with full HTML Internet browsers as they become available. More\u0026hellip; Mobile Industry Thought Leaders New Initiative Launched by Andrew Grill of Gigafone\nI am immensely proud to be associated with this new phase of Jonathan MacDonald’s “yes we can” change program for mobile advertising. Full details below. Mobile Industry Thought Leaders Launch Mobile Advertising Information Resource\nEverySingleOneOfUs unites brands, carriers, publishers, associations and industry experts to identify solutions and best practices that facilitate positive change in the development of the mobile advertising ecosystem\nLondon, UK – December 9th 2008 – More\u0026hellip; May the blessing of mobile … by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile\nThe world’s first voice-to-text Sunday service took place on Sunday 30 November. It was given by the Reverend John Kronenberg, Vicar of Hinchley Wood, Esher, Surrey. Well. Praise be. It’s not the first time that the Church have embraced the power of mobile - the Pope has sent out millions of texts to his faithful and in Africa mobile is used to preach the gospel and reach the masses. The sermon will be delivered by SpinVox and his words will automatically be converted and sent to inboxes - 100 members of his congregation are participating. More\u0026hellip; I didn\u0026rsquo;t think that marketing was like torture by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott\nOK, regular readers of this blog know that I\u0026rsquo;ve offered a bunch of suggestions in the past few months for how to convince your boss to let you reduce the traditional marketing \u0026amp; PR that doesn’t work so well in an online world.\nThe suggestions are ways to get them to allow you to adopt the new rules. - A top ten list for implementing the new rules - The one question to ask new marketing \u0026amp; PR detractors - An answer to the ultimate question (measurement \u0026amp; ROI) - And if all else fails, you can quit your job\nNow from HubSpot comes an incredibly clever music video re-mix. More\u0026hellip; Amazon.com and open source PR (more evidence for Most Frequent Contributor power) by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAccording to Joe Brockmeier at ZDNet, Amazon is taking an open source approach to PR: The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. (They also contribute their recommendations on a page on Amazon’s site.)\nAmazon says that members of the team are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers. They are not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. More\u0026hellip; Why Backtype points to the future of PR by Andrew Smith of escherman\nAccording to Todd Defren: “Excuses for not doing supremely excellent (PR) work are dwindling yet again, thanks to a new service called BackType. BackType lets you “find, follow and share comments from across the web.” Whenever you fill out the “URL” field in a blog’s comment form, BackType tracks it. If you’re pretty prolific online, use BackType to keep tabs on your past conversations. And it goes one better, in terms of Blogger Relations: BackType also allows you to track and subscribe to some of the most influential folks on the Web.” More\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/12/friday-roundup-12th-december-2008/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBefore we dive into this week\u0026rsquo;s MarCom Professional highlights, we\u0026rsquo;d like you to help us work out what we should be doing for you in the New Year. Here\u0026rsquo;s the shortlist:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA\u003c/strong\u003e. An agency time planning, logging and reporting tool. Keep track of projects, people, tasks, time. Work out where you\u0026rsquo;re over- and under-servicing, and opt-in to anonymised benchmarkcomparisons.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eB\u003c/strong\u003e. Coverage collation, management and measurement. Scan coverage and capture screenshots directly to the browser, generate reports and share with your team and/or clients in your own extranet.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eC\u003c/strong\u003e. Journalist - PR relations is \u003ca href=\"https://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/david.meerman.scott/most-pr-people-are-spammers---chris-anderson-now-blocks-you-and-i-may-be-next\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003econtroversial\u003c/a\u003e\n of late. This service would act as a hub for PR consultants to discover what journalists need, and for journalists to manage stuff thrown at them by PR consultants.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDo drop us an \u003ca href=\"mailto:lucy@marcomprofessional.com\"\u003eemail\u003c/a\u003e\n, \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/sheldrake\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etweet me\u003c/a\u003e\n, post or comment\u0026hellip; we only want to deliver what you can use!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks and best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Friday Roundup 12th December 2008"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President Media Tenor , David W Moore, author of The Opinion Makers , and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s my deck if you\u0026rsquo;re interested:\nView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialweb socialmedia )\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/12/the-social-web-and-agenda-setting-a-presentation-to-todays-european-agenda-setting-conference-zurich/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President \u003ca href=\"http://www.mediatenor.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMedia Tenor\u003c/a\u003e\n, David W Moore, author of \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Opinion-Makers-Insider-Exposes-Behind/dp/0807042323\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Opinion Makers\u003c/a\u003e\n, and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s my deck if you\u0026rsquo;re interested:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eView SlideShare \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/social-web-presentation-to-agenda-setting-2008-presentation?type=powerpoint\" title=\"View Social Web Presentation To Agenda Setting 2008 on SlideShare\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003epresentation\u003c/a\u003e\n or \u003ca href=\"http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eUpload\u003c/a\u003e\n your own. (tags: \u003ca href=\"http://slideshare.net/tag/socialweb\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocialweb\u003c/a\u003e\n \u003ca href=\"http://slideshare.net/tag/socialmedia\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esocialmedia\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The social Web and agenda setting: a presentation to today\u0026#039;s European Agenda Setting Conference, Zurich"},{"content":"Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday \u0026ldquo;Where are the PR Numerati? \u0026rdquo; (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he\u0026rsquo;s right and I\u0026rsquo;m numerate and I\u0026rsquo;m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book \u0026ldquo;The Numerati \u0026rdquo; by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.\nPublic 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.\nThat simple world is no more. I don\u0026rsquo;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:\nunderstand that exerting influence is a complex process understand the new channels of influence afforded by the social Web have worked out a way to navigate this incredibly complex mesh of influence, optimising the benefit and the business impact a campaign will deliver have established sound measurement and evaluation to enable continual tweaking of the campaign as the market changes over time. If this stuff rings your bell curve, excites your social graph or just dallies your dataset, I\u0026rsquo;ve picked out some of my past posts on this matter below with a brief précis of each FYI. If it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, have you considered other careers?\n\u0026hellip;\nCan you see it? Making influence visible. This post is my most direct attempt to date at explaining to the less mathematically inclined exactly why the game has changed. Reassuringly, it also covers the ways to wield such analytical techniques with ne\u0026rsquo;er a look at the mathematics itself. Understand charts, graphs and colour keys? That\u0026rsquo;s all the basics you\u0026rsquo;ll need :-)\nThe Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 The post introducing the eBook. Over 10,000 downloads in the first 12 weeks.\nThe Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook A look at other services stuck under my nose following the publishing of The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008.\nEnd-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol OK, this is a bit geeky, but the numbers and their application are fascinating. Honestly!\nThe B2B Social Web - my interview with the Ecommerce Times An introduction to the B2B Social Web. Explains why influence has become complex.\nThe B2B Social Web - B2B video programming The follow up to the first post covering my interview with Ecommerce Times, shining a light on an increasingly fragmented and personalised mediascape.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re in IT Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a marketing communications consultant\u0026rdquo;, you\u0026rsquo;ll also be saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m in IT\u0026rdquo;.\nNot everyone agrees with my assertions in this post. That makes it a good one in my book.\nThe power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today A side look at how the social Web can manifest itself in your company, and therefore how it will be critical to your PR campaigns.\nmyChannel One of my first blog posts under my own name from 2005, \u0026ldquo;myChannel\u0026rdquo; outlines and justifies a future where each and every one of us has our own \u0026lsquo;channel\u0026rsquo;. Now how complex is the task of getting your message on my channel?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/12/influence-its-a-numbers-game/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAndrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://escherman.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/where-are-the-pr-numerati-is-stephen-baker-reading-this/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWhere are the PR Numerati?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; (and \u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.smith/where-are-the-pr-numerati-is-stephen-baker-reading-this\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he\u0026rsquo;s right and I\u0026rsquo;m numerate and I\u0026rsquo;m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://thenumerati.net/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Numerati\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublic 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat simple world is no more. I don\u0026rsquo;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:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence... it\u0026#039;s a numbers game"},{"content":"Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of \u0026rsquo;the balance\u0026rsquo; as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?\nHere\u0026rsquo;s one songster\u0026rsquo;s take:\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/12/youre-no-one-if-youre-not-on-twitter/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBalance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of \u0026rsquo;the balance\u0026rsquo; as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s one songster\u0026rsquo;s take:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"You\u0026#039;re No One If You\u0026#039;re Not On Twitter"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;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.\nI 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.”\nOrganisations’ 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.\nThree amazing things\nI’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.\nYou’re not normal.\nI mean that in the statistical sense of the word of course. My colleague Gemma and I presented the social Web to 250 would-be new PR consultants today at the CIPR Careers Day. Sure, they all use the Web and have a mobile phone. Sure, they all knew what a social network was. But only three had heard of Twitter; that’s about 1%. Many had not even appreciated why they might want to look after their personal brand in the social Webisphere, which was slightly disconcerting given their immediate or imminent priority is securing a job interview.\nSo how will this change? What needs to happen to get more people really connected via the social Web?\nWell first off, it’s worth noting that whilst the first billion people connected to the Internet with their PC (or Mac), the first experience of the next billion will be on their phones, or phone-like devices more precisely. Moreover, small mobile devices are so much more personal and, stating the incredibly obvious, portable.\nLet’s posit that three things must happen then:\nThey must have a cost-effective small device, a smart phone or mobile Internet device or netbook, that will happily go for days without recharge The device’s operating system must be open, as opposed to proprietary, to encourage wide spread innovation, development and localisation (just like the Internet and Web themselves) The device’s window on the world, the browser, must also be open to achieve the same, but also capable of playing the Web’s multimedia content, such a vital component of the social aspects of the Web. And this is happening. Check out the news:\nFirstly, UK company ARM , whose intellectual property is already found in more microchips around the world than any other company’s, will soon be able to run PC-like operating systems such as Ubuntu , a distribution of Linux. Moreover, ARM’s approach to chip architecture means they need less power so batteries last longer.\nSecondly, ARM’s membership of Adobe ’s Open Screen Project means they’ve just announced the capability to run Flash multimedia on ARM powered devices (Flash is the software that underpins much of the Web’s multimedia, such as all the videos on YouTube ).\nThirdly, Mozilla [disclosure… client], the organisation behind the world’s safest and fastest growing Web browser , Firefox , has unveiled the first look at Fennec , their mobile browser. Due for 1.0 launch in 2009, Fennec will bring similar advantages to small mobile devices that Firefox has delivered for bigger screens.\nSo, there we have it. 2009 marks the year that rewarding and engaging interaction with the social Web comes to a battery-sipping, highly capable and open, small form factor device near you. Marketing communicators take note; the ability for your organisation to engage in open, honest and engaging dialogue with more of your stakeholders is nearer than you might think.\nBetter get social.\n___________________\nClick here for more about netbooks and here for a similar look at mobile Internet devices .\nImage courtesy of Daniel F. Pigato .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/11/where-the-social-web-goes-from-here/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/374735869_e788e77aa8.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI stand by the assertion in my ebook on \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSocial Web Analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n: “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.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrganisations’ 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThree amazing things\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n-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 \u003ca href=\"http://www.friendfeed.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eFriendFeed\u003c/a\u003e\n, you’ve already fed it your \u003ca href=\"http://www.backtype.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBackType\u003c/a\u003e\n profile.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou’re not normal.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Where the social Web goes from here"},{"content":"I received three emails on the back of my post last week \u0026ldquo;When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles \u0026rdquo;. I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with \u0026ldquo;ways to get your marketing communications to the gym\u0026rdquo;, and that\u0026rsquo;s the subject here.\nIf 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\u0026rsquo;t waste your time with activity that doesn\u0026rsquo;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.\nIn 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).\nI asked our Managing Director (and CIPR President Elect 2009), Jay O’Connor , to summarise the characteristics of a well toned PR campaign in four bullet points…\nYour consultancy’s approach will have the following characteristics. This may seem obvious stuff, but it is surprising how little rigour there can be in the PR process:\nPR campaign plans are mapped to the business – and reviewed regularly to ensure it is always in line. Plans include the following cascades: 1. Business objectives to PR objectives; 2. Objectives to PR strategy; 3. PR strategy to tactics; 4. Measures to objectives\nThe plan includes tightly focused measurables (business impact measures not just ‘PR stuff’)\nThe approach encompasses all points of influence, including media any other groups that are key to the business and based on a crystal clear understanding of the market and key stakeholders (avoiding any default to one audience group over another)\nProgress against plan is transparent, to the point and reviewed regularly\nThanks Jay.\nWithout such a plan cascade, neither you nor your PR team can be certain that every day, every hour, every minute of effort is ‘value-adding’ as opposed to ‘non-value adding’, as defined in last week’s post . Good practitioners recognise the difference between these two. First class practitioners recognise that any one activity may be categorised either way depending on the campaign in question.\nIf your PR team exhibits the characteristics above, your muscles are ready to be flexed, ready to engage in these difficult times, but as any athlete will tell you (and I’m not an athlete by the way!), performance is as much mental as physical. So that brings me to the cerebral stuff to complete the picture here.\nDelivering effective marketing communications at any point in time demands the following mental attributes:\nThe facility to understand all relevant perceptions and relationships in your marketplace adroitly\nThe breadth and depth of understanding of the wider context of the marketplace, particularly identifying the issues you can latch onto advantageously or those that could become problematic in the longer-term if left unaddressed (foresight in other words)\nRelentless focus on exploiting the opportunities and addressing the challenges\nConstructing and maintaining a mental mind-map of how influence is exerted in your market, the conversations you need to be tuned into, and those in which you need to grow voice.\nThere’s a saying that troubled times present the opportunity for the cream to rise to the top. Maybe it’s something to do with the milk churning round, or maybe the metaphor isn’t that deep and I should recognise that I’m not an expert in all things dairy and give up on it.\nEither way, if you consider yourself to be the cream, if you aspire to rise to the top of your market, if you simply want to do your organisation justice, you should make sure your PR capability is as good, as fit, as mentally capable as your organisation is at its core competence, and do so sooner than later.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/11/giving-your-pr-a-work-out-exercising-your-pr-in-tough-times/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI received three emails on the back of my post last week \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-get-communicating---or-why-the-tough-need-muscles\"\u003eWhen the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;. I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with \u0026ldquo;ways to get your marketing communications to the gym\u0026rdquo;, and that\u0026rsquo;s the subject here.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf 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\u0026rsquo;t waste your time with activity that doesn\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times"},{"content":"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 \u0026ldquo;real economy\u0026rdquo;, 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.\nWhen the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods.\nFirstly, the paragraph above points out that your stakeholders will want to know what you\u0026rsquo;re planning and how you\u0026rsquo;re doing against that plan, so attenuating your organisation\u0026rsquo;s ability to both listen and respond isn\u0026rsquo;t going to help any.\nDuring the down times you may need to call on the goodwill you\u0026rsquo;ve accrued over the good times. In which case, how wise is it to retreat from the public forum? You could think of it in terms of a marriage; when the relationship is under strain which marriage counsellor would advise listening and talking to each other less?!\nYou might have noticed the likes of business authors, designers, architects and engineers resorting to biological metaphors to convey ideas and concepts, and even borrowing directly from nature’s designs. So-called biomimetics or biomimicry . As an engineer and marketer, I love looking to nature for clues simply on the basis that biological processes have been honed over a slightly longer duration than anything man made. And this approach is salient, I believe, to our getting our heads round an organisation’s response to tough times. How does the organism survive exposure to a tough environment?\nSo those business authors refer to “trimming the fat”. In his book Business @ The Speed of Thought , Bill Gates refers extensively to the organisational IT infrastructure as the digital nervous system, analogous to the biological autonomic nervous system. And we’re all familiar with the parallels drawn between capitalism and Darwinian survival of the fittest; indeed it informs the very vocabulary we use to discuss free markets.\nI have introduced this way of looking at things for one reason, and that is to make the assertion that an organisation’s marketing communications is muscle and not fat. Now, that’s not to say it’s the most toned, most athletic muscle, but it isn’t something you can trim in the sense of eliminating fat. It is something to “work out”, to exercise more vigorously in hard times.\nThe biological metaphors keep coming. The so-called “fight or flight response” is the biological response of animals to acute stress. Needless to say, your muscular condition will play its part in determining whether you win the fight or keep yourself out of trouble.\nSo my advice is to re-examine how your marketing communications budget is deployed, but cutting it is folly. I helped take an underperforming production facility from being one of my past employer’s worst performing to winning Management Today magazine’s Best Process Factory in just two years. How? Well one of the most useful approaches I introduced was to classify everything in one of three ways:\nValue-adding: contributes beneficially and directly to the achievement of your business objectives – cutting investment here is counter-productive, but you should work out how to make every pound add even more value Maintenance: this is investment in your ability to keep the value-adding activity in tip-top condition – in our biological language, this is exercising and eating well Non-value-adding: this stuff has no direct contribution to make to the achievement of your business objectives or your ability to do so. Cut it out completely. Being muscle, not fat, places marketing communications in the first category. It is value-adding. If you disagree, it will be because your marketing communications is not in shape and so you’ve started to think of it as fat not unconditioned muscle, and/or you haven’t assigned every single cost in your business to one of the categories above.\nYour PR investment is a measure of how much you value stakeholders, not a measure of your share price or investor sentiment, as the former ultimately informs the latter.\nYou might want to catch my post next week then where I discuss some of the ways to get your marketing communications to the gym.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/10/when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-get-communicating-or-why-the-tough-need-muscles/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTimes 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 \u0026ldquo;real economy\u0026rdquo;, 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles"},{"content":"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!\n________________________________\nLoading... ________________________________\nYou 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?\nEnter Amazon \u0026rsquo;s Mechanical Turk service.\nTheir FAQs describe the service as follows:\nAmazon 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\u0026rsquo;s convenient.\nAmazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.\nI like to think of Mechanical Turk as the community I can turn to when I have a lot of stuff to \u0026ldquo;chunk\u0026rdquo; through that a computer couldn\u0026rsquo;t do for me, and for when I need to elicit responses from a wide range of the public without all the profiling that normally accompanies market research. Or a quick acid test if you like.\nAs marketers mostly deal with things that aren\u0026rsquo;t black or white, ones or zeroes, I thought a quick post about the availability of this service might help you.\nWhich brings me to another incredibly useful service\u0026hellip; Google Docs . You may well know of this collection of applications available through your browser, and have used it for a few documents and spreadsheets in your time, but I want to flag Google Docs Forms specifically.\nThis service allows you to create a Web-based form incredibly easily\u0026hellip; no coding skills required. And even more usefully, you can email the form or embed it in a webpage or blog post and then sit back and watch the results collate in a Google Docs spreadsheet that\u0026rsquo;s automatically created for you.\nYou will have guessed by now that the questionnaire above was created just this way, which brings me to the final triumph for Google in delivering this service\u0026hellip; you can output the results as they happen with a wide variety of widgets as you can see below\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/09/when-amazons-mechanical-turk-could-be-the-marketers-best-friend/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLet 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!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e________________________________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/cardetail.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=0AsB1HagprnxgcE16NHJLLTBiRXNXaFY1RFVfTUNMVFE\" width=\"760\" height=\"698\" frameborder=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\"\u003eLoading...\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e________________________________\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou might have established that I am \u003cem\u003enot\u003c/em\u003e a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer.  But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnter Amazon \u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.mturk.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMechanical Turk\u003c/a\u003e\n service.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.mturk.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/mechanicalturk.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTheir FAQs describe the service as follows:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmazon 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\u0026rsquo;s convenient.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"When Amazon\u0026#039;s Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend"},{"content":"The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I\u0026rsquo;m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!\nI 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\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence. Here\u0026rsquo;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).\nTechrigy Techrigy describes itself as enabling \u0026ldquo;organizations to know what\u0026rsquo;s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy\u0026rsquo;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.\u0026rdquo;\nThe founders have interesting credentials. President and CEO Aaron Newman is also CTO of Application Security , the experts in database security, and co-author of \u0026ldquo;Enterprise 2.0 Implementation \u0026rdquo; (McGraw-Hill September 2008).\nThe service features:\nExpansive and real-time monitoring: over 100 million blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia are all monitored Sentiment analysis: SM2 determines sentiment using natural-language processing and Bayesian analysis, and aggregates these to provide a top-level view of social media Discussion clustering: provides a graphical analysis and classification of all discussions occurring around your products Customized reporting: display recent discussions, as well as analysis and discussion trends that enable evaluation of marketing or public relations effectiveness\u0026hellip; can be scheduled automatically and delivered to anyone Screenshot:\nTechrigy offers a \u0026ldquo;freemium\u0026rdquo; service at no cost which you might like to try.\nCIC CIC claims to be \u0026ldquo;the first Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) research and consulting firm in China\u0026rdquo;. They have offices in Shanghai, but also Birmingham, AL, interestingly.\nCIC describes its framework as L-K-P, namely:\nListen: listening to netizens\u0026rsquo; voices about your brand, product, or service Know: understanding the communities and cultures that provide the context for the talk Participate: meaningfully interact, inspire and/or contribute to netizens’ world. So, to the tech. How do they describe the way in which they gather up everything and analyse it? CIC employs a \u0026ldquo;proprietary natural language text mining technology\u0026rdquo; but doesn\u0026rsquo;t reference its basis. Could be entirely proprietary of course. And I can\u0026rsquo;t really determine much more from the website at the moment, but rest assured I\u0026rsquo;ll be working with CIC to extract the relevant information for the 2009 eBook update.\nIsland Data Island Data takes a different perspective on the source of information to be analysed. Island Data specialises in analysing the communications your stakeholders have with you via emails, comment cards, surveys, blogs, voicemails and call logs. Does this qualify as social media?\nThis emphasises the dialogue between the organisation and stakeholders rather than between the stakeholders / customers themselves. If they extend out to the comments on their clients\u0026rsquo; blogs, and the customer forums they might host, then that gets a bit more social.\nOtherwise, Island Data appears to be at the leading edge of the so-called customer relationship management (CRM) field rather than social Web analytics. Equally valid. Highly pertinent, insightful and valuable. But not quite as \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo;. I\u0026rsquo;ll investigate further and get back to you.\nScreenshot:\nMicrosoft I said I\u0026rsquo;d finish with some lovely data visualisation of the blogosphere (and you might like my post on the impact of data visualisation on public relations ).\nMatthew Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs presented at the Personal Democracy Forum in June this year. Take a look at the work his team has undertaken on visualising the blogosphere and the way memes spread through it. The demo is better than the camera work!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/09/the-buzz-of-social-web-analytics-vendors-reach-out-for-the-2009-ebook/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I\u0026rsquo;m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know about when I published \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe Social Web Analytics eBook 2008\u003c/a\u003e\n on the 1st July.  They\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI 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\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence. Here\u0026rsquo;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).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"techrigy\"\u003eTechrigy\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/techrigy.png\"\u003e\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://techrigy.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTechrigy\u003c/a\u003e\n describes itself as enabling \u0026ldquo;organizations to know what\u0026rsquo;s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy\u0026rsquo;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.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook"},{"content":"\nYou’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 :-)\nNow 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?\nHere’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 .\nQuestions you should prepare for “Tell me about yourself.”\nA 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!\n“What do you know about us?”\nA simple tester to determine if you are really interested in the company rather than just interested in PR per se. A relatively easy one to prepare for… just read the website, subscribe to the blogs, follow the Twitters, and conduct some searches.\n“What makes you stand out from your peers?”\nComing back with one thing here probably doesn’t do you justice. Coming back with six or seven things probably overcooks it. Don’t think you need to stick to work life related stuff either, as you come as one whole person and should be valued as such.\n“How organised are you?” / “Can you multi-task?”\nWhat can I say?\u0026hellip; obvious questions. Can you prove it?\n“What have you learned from part-time jobs / travels / sports / hobbies that you think will be an asset in your PR career?”\nThe interviewer is trying to extrapolate from your non-PR past into your PR future.\n“Tell me why you’re interested in X.”\nWhether it’s consumer PR, corporate, health, technology, youth, or whatever PR, you should be able to explain your interest.\n“Walk me through your use of new technologies / your life online.”\nAs you will know if you’ve just been studying public relations, the profession has changed irrevocably in recent years, driven primarily by the rise of new communication and information technologies (scan the titles of my blog posts for a quick take on this), so the interviewer will want to understand your use of and fluency in social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, mobile phone apps etc.\n\u0026ldquo;So what does your current employer think you\u0026rsquo;re up to today?!\u0026rdquo;\nAssuming you have a current employer, this question tests to see if you\u0026rsquo;re the kind of person who pulls \u0026lsquo;sickies\u0026rsquo;. I\u0026rsquo;ve had plenty of candidates tell me they\u0026rsquo;ve pulled a sickie, and I respect their honesty (at least with me if not their employer), but they really really have to shine in every other respect to make up for this. But saying you\u0026rsquo;ve taken a holiday when you\u0026rsquo;ve pulled a sickie would be a lie, and professional interviewers are adept at spotting the tell-tale signs of lying.\nThe best plan of action then, that also leaves you relaxed and guilt-free to focus on an important interview, is to take a holiday or arrange the interview outside of work hours. As easy as that.\n“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about yourself?”\nA good interviewer will return to this question to make sure they have the best understanding of your character, achievements and personality.\nQuestions you should ask You should already know the basic answers to “When?”, “What?” and “How much?”. That’s part of your pre-qualification process. And everyone knows the last one is rather important indeed, so that also means it needn’t take priority in your list of questions. In fact, as the interviewer will want you to focus on the opportunities the role offers and the future success of the company and your career, it’s advisable to leave confirmation of the package towards the end of the interview. But do confirm if you’re uncertain.\nHere’s some questions we would love to be asked.\n“What makes you different? What sets you apart from the competition?”\nA PR consultancy should know its own positioning and USPs!\n“What are the company’s mission, vision and values? Where are you taking this company?”\nA clear, concise response will indicate sound company direction and management.\n\u0026ldquo;Can I see the full job description / role specification?\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d hope the answer is affirmative.\n“How will I be able to work with my line manager to plan my personal development?”\nThis is essential. Look for detail and proof. A vague response belies a vague future emphasis on your development, and that is not acceptable.\n“Can you tell me about your training, learning and development programme?”\nDig down into the detail. What’s the depth and breadth of the training resources? Is training conducted internally or externally? How many training courses can you expect to go on in your first year?\n“Are you growing? At what rate?”\nObviously, the answer should be yes, and the rate will then vary from 1% upwards. Growth in excess of 10-20% pa indicates a company that’s getting things right, the odd global recession aside. Anything north of 40% and you could be in for a ride!\n“Can you tell me what the last person you recruited like me has been up to? Can I meet him / her?”\nThe interviewer may not be able to answer this themselves, but they should know someone who can, so persist. At the end of the day, your personal determination will prove an asset as an employee, so being determined in an interview situation should be interpreted warmly. And your meeting more people in the business should not be viewed as a hassle at all.\n“Do you have any major plans for the company I should know about?”\nThe company will not be able to disclose things like upcoming mergers and acquisitions, but they could discuss the impending creation of a new youth marketing group for example, or an office relocation.\n“What are you most proud / excited about yourself?”\nIf the interviewer isn’t excited about working there, should you be?\n“What can you tell me about the second interview? Any tips for how I can prepare? Anything you’d like me to bring with me should I be invited back?”\nBeware job offers after first interview. Congratulations on receiving the offer, but you can’t determine after a 45 minute interview if this is the company in which you’d like to invest 2+ years of your life, and if they\u0026rsquo;r e professionals how can they really be sure they want to work with you for that length of time off the back of one interview? If anything, you should thank them for the offer, but then insist on a second interview anyway… which of course will then largely consist of you interviewing the company. That’s a good thing.\nNormally, the second interview may involve a different or multiple interviewers. It will be lengthier, say two hours, and drill down in more detail to determine your fit to the role criteria. It will (or should) offer you more time to quiz the company. It may include a writing test. It will be (or should be) well structured and organised.\nGOOD LUCK!\n______________\nCheck out www.racepointgroup.com/careers if you\u0026rsquo;d like to find out about working at Racepoint. For our London office, you can call me (+44 20 8752 3202) or email me (philip.sheldrake@racepointgroup.com ), and I\u0026rsquo;m also happy to put you in touch with our US offices (Boston, San Francisco, Washington) too of course. Look forward to hearing from you.\n[Photo courtesy of slushpup .]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/08/your-first-job-in-pr-questions-you-should-prepare-for-and-questions-you-should-ask-in-the-job-interview/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"I%20am%20awesome%20%3A%20by%20slushpup\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/iamawesome.JPG\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou’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 :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow 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?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere’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 \u003ca href=\"/people/blaise.hammond\"\u003eBlaise\u003c/a\u003e\n and \u003ca href=\"/people/jay.oconnor\"\u003eJay\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"questions-you-should-prepare-for\"\u003eQuestions you should prepare for\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e“Tell me about yourself.”\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA 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!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Your first job in PR... questions you should prepare for and questions you should ask in the job interview"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a revolution coming in public relations\u0026hellip; visualisation.\n[Courtesy Christopher Baker ]\nPicture 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\u0026rsquo;re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?\nIt turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there\u0026rsquo;s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big \u0026lsquo;World Wide Web\u0026rsquo;, or the even bigger \u0026lsquo;World\u0026rsquo; come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s go a step further. Say that there\u0026rsquo;s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say \u0026ldquo;for\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;against\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;no position\u0026rdquo;, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.\nTo 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?\nWelcome to the world of data visualisation.\nDigesting data Information technology has made the collation and manipulation of masses of data relatively mundane. When you\u0026rsquo;re looking to manipulate data in a specific way, the machine can chunk through it pretty quickly and answer your defined and closed questions:\nWhat were the sales in week 39? How much did we invest in PR last year? In our last market research, how did our perceived value for money rate versus the competition? But what if you don\u0026rsquo;t know what you\u0026rsquo;re looking for? How do you decipher the mass of data? How do you see what\u0026rsquo;s going on so you can learn and respond appropriately? How can you answer undefined and open questions such as:\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the buzz amongst our customers? Who or what is exerting most influence? What trends should we know about? Who\u0026rsquo;s most likely to have started this rumour? Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers? Who and what influenced Charles Arthur today? Data and dimensions Gathering the data is, of course, no mean feat. But the rise of the social Web presents the broadest and deepest pool marketers have ever had to swim in, and I cover this topic in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 (which, to my surprise, is being downloaded over 500 times a week!). Of course, there is also the little issue of who owns this information, which this article about the Social Graph on Read Write Web covers succinctly.\nThe next biggest challenge to spotting patterns and trends is simply that the data has more dimensions than we can cope with. Take your computer screen\u0026hellip; two dimensional. Add some nifty mathematics and you can represent three dimensions. Change it over (compressed) time, and you can \u0026ldquo;see\u0026rdquo; four dimensions\u0026hellip; but that\u0026rsquo;s about the best we can achieve.\nSo now we have two new battles on our hands.\nThe first is presenting data brilliantly in the three or four dimensions we can deal with. And the second is building in some intelligence so that we\u0026rsquo;re more than likely looking at the right combination of three or four dimensions amongst the dozens or hundreds represented in the data set.\nGreat visualisations One of the fascinating outcomes of this new branch of public relations is the value non-geeks can literally \u0026ldquo;see\u0026rdquo; in it. There\u0026rsquo;s a reason someone coined the term \u0026ldquo;a picture paints a thousand words\u0026rdquo;. Perhaps \u0026ldquo;a data visualisation renders a million influences\u0026rdquo; will trip off the tongue in the future?! How cool is it to \u0026lsquo;see\u0026rsquo; a meme ?\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s not coincidental that some visualisations are beautiful; not that I\u0026rsquo;m about to author a treatise on beauty , but heuristically it makes sense that we\u0026rsquo;re more likely to find the interpretation of something that looks good easier than something that looks a mess.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with some visualisations, with hyperlinks to the source should you, like me, become entranced by visualisation.\nMy TwitArc http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitArcs/TwitArcs.html Visualising Flickr contacts Courtesy of Eskimoblood on Flickr .\nTwitter conversations map Courtesy of Walter Rafelsberger on Flickr .\nFacebook Visualiser Courtesy Sebastian Van Sand, Visual Complexity .\nMySpace Type Use Courtesy of Felix Heinen .\nInstant Messenger IRC Who Is Talking To Who? Courtesy of Martin Dittus .\nSocial Circles - Mailing List Social Visualisation Courtesy of Marumushi .\nGenealogy of influence Courtesy of goosebumps4all.net .\nTouch Graph Courtesy of Mike Love .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/08/can-you-see-it-making-influence-visible/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere\u0026rsquo;s a revolution coming in public relations\u0026hellip; visualisation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/christopherbaker_mymap-e1338813654774.png\" title=\"christopherbaker_mymap\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[Courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://christopherbaker.net/projects/mymap/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eChristopher Baker\u003c/a\u003e\n]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"picture-the-scene\"\u003ePicture the scene\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou 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\u0026rsquo;re also aware of a few potential personality clashes.  But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there\u0026rsquo;s 300 relationships in that room!  Wow,  and compared to the big \u0026lsquo;World Wide Web\u0026rsquo;, or the even bigger \u0026lsquo;World\u0026rsquo; come to that, this is a relatively  insignificant number of people.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s go a step further. Say that there\u0026rsquo;s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has  just three positions, say \u0026ldquo;for\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;against\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;no position\u0026rdquo;, then each stakeholder can have one of 243  combinations of points of view.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo 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?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWelcome to the world of data visualisation.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Can you see it? Making influence visible."},{"content":"The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that\u0026rsquo;s almost Google\u0026rsquo;s raison d\u0026rsquo;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 )?\nGoogle\u0026rsquo;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\u0026rsquo;s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.\nThis approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.\nBut when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website?\nThe vast majority of people are not webmasters. Most people do not have content or linking responsibility for their organisation\u0026rsquo;s website. Most people don\u0026rsquo;t blog, and the vast majority that do blog have a PageRank of almost no consequence. So PageRank is most impacted by links from the BIG blogs (Huffington Post , Techcrunch ) and the BIG media websites (BBC , CNN ), which ends up not being quite so \u0026ldquo;democratic\u0026rdquo; then as Google makes out.\n(Note, I don\u0026rsquo;t know for sure how Google et al \u0026lsquo;weight\u0026rsquo; things, but I\u0026rsquo;m not alone in reaching these conclusions).\nEnter social bookmarking Every Web user can use a social bookmarking service. The immediate advantage is the portability of your bookmarks ie, they\u0026rsquo;re not stuck on one PC but available from any Internet connected device. And a bookmark, whilst convenient and directly useful to the person making it, is also a vote for the webpage in question.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not surprising then that one of the big search themes resonating on websites such as SearchEngineWatch is social search. Some social search purists believe social bookmarking is all you need to deliver more relevant search results, and some see this approach augmenting the PageRank-type algorithms of the current dominant search services.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a great post from the CEO of Taptu , a mobile search company, about the history and pros and cons of socially assisted search. And the Wikipedia entry for social bookmarking that also covers a bit about developing a search engine from bookmarks, and the Wikipedia list of social bookmarking services .\nHow can you use socially assisted search in your organisation today? You might not be surprised if I assert that what\u0026rsquo;s relevant for your team mates is probably relevant to you. And what\u0026rsquo;s not, is not! If they bookmark a great online resource, a great restaurant to entertain customers, the website of a supplier or competitor, news articles about your market, then all these things are relevant to you too.\nSo why not get everyone using the same bookmarking service, so long as it\u0026rsquo;s one that allows you to search within your network. I use Yahoo\u0026rsquo;s Delicious (the first and best in my opinion), so let\u0026rsquo;s take a quick look at how it would work for you?\nOnce you\u0026rsquo;ve signed up and installed the Firefox add-on (or Internet Explorer buttons if you don\u0026rsquo;t use the world\u0026rsquo;s best browser!) you can get bookmarking. You can also import all your bookmarks (aka favourites) currently kept by your browser on your computer into the service.\nAdd your team mates to your Delicious network and you can tell your boss that you\u0026rsquo;ve social-search-enabled your business :-)\nAs per the screenshot below, to conduct a social search (1) select People _ My Network, then (2) type in your search query eg, \u0026ldquo;restaurant\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;news\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;customerX\u0026rdquo;.\nImplications for marketers At Racepoint, we recognise that every piece of content we produce for ourselves and for our client campaigns must be written for humans first and search engines a close second. That entails \u0026ldquo;search engine optimisation\u0026rdquo; designed ligitimately to take advantage of the most common approach to search today: PageRank style.\nHowever, marketers must acknowledge the inevitable rise of socially-assisted search too, or \u0026ldquo;human-powered search\u0026rdquo; as some pundits refer to it. Are you making it easy for people to bookmark your content? Are you prompting them? Here for example, the main bookmarking services are just a click away (in the column to the right of this post).\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re not, then you\u0026rsquo;re not building up your position in the social search engine results today and, more importantly, for tomorrow.\n____________\nPhoto by Vitó .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/08/the-power-of-social-bookmarking-and-how-to-use-it-in-your-organisation-today/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time.  Guess that\u0026rsquo;s almost Google\u0026rsquo;s raison d\u0026rsquo;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 (\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSEO\u003c/a\u003e\n)?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"by%20Vit%F3%20http%3A//www.flickr.com/photos/janeladeimagens/166051502/\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/haystack.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGoogle\u0026rsquo;s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called \u003ca href=\"http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePageRank\u003c/a\u003e\n. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website\u0026rsquo;s content.  And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters\u0026rdquo;. So said Tony Benn, Member of Parliament, to constituents in 1968. That same year, the Free Communications Group (FCG) was founded to demand \u0026ldquo;democratic control of all media\u0026rdquo;.\nLets skip the next forty years\u0026rsquo; analysis of broadcasting motives and actions that so preoccupied these politicians, broadcasters and journalists. In 2008, convergence has emerged as a force of nature, irrevocably changing \u0026ldquo;broadcasting\u0026rdquo; globally, and the FCG might just be smiling if it still existed.\nI put \u0026ldquo;broadcasting\u0026rdquo; in quote marks because I decided, as chair, to start last Thursday\u0026rsquo;s Convergence Conversation, titled \u0026ldquo;Is broadcasting dead or merely taking a break? \u0026rdquo;, by seeking to define broadcasting. Not as trivial a task as it sounds, rather a critical task if the 65 conversationists who attended the event hosted by BT Media at BT Tower were going to reach a conclusion.\nThe meaning of broadcast The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb \u0026ldquo;broadcast\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;transmit by radio or television\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;tell to many people\u0026rdquo;. And for American English speakers Merriam-Webster offers \u0026ldquo;to make widely known\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;to transmit or make public by means of radio or television\u0026rdquo;.\nSo the same word applies to both the technology employed and the end result; the \u0026ldquo;radio or television\u0026rdquo; transmission, and the one-to-many communication achieved. I guess this attribution of dual meaning is to be expected given that \u0026ldquo;radio or television\u0026rdquo; technology was the only way to communicate one-to-many for almost the entire twentieth century. This technology consisted RF transmission from the 1920s and cable from the 1940s.\nThe broadcast industry supply chain This isn\u0026rsquo;t an academic paper, so we can simplify the (commercial) broadcast industry supply chain as one that aggregates audiences with content that informs, entertains and educates so that they can also be hit with adverts. The advertising revenue should cover all costs with a bit left over; the profit. So the chain goes something like:\n1. Produce or commission great content 2. Estimate how many people will watch it 3. Sell ads to go alongside the content 4. Transmit the content and ads 5. Grow the audience and repeat\nThe disruption of the broadcast industry Convergence has wrought huge change on the broadcasting industry.\nTraditional broadcasting technologies are no longer the sole means of achieving one-to-many communication, and they struggle with any form of many-to-many communication. Mobile and Internet protocol based technologies are the new contenders.\nThe broadcasters\u0026rsquo; revenues pivot almost entirely on marketing directors\u0026rsquo; willingness to pay to advertise on TV and radio. Yet new technology allows viewers to skip broadcast ads and has created competing new opportunities (eg, the Web and mobile) for marketers to reach out to their target audience. In other words, new channels are purported to offer comparatively more effective and more measurable marketing outreach, so there is fierce competition for the marketing budget that has underpinned the broadcasting industry to date.\nWill broadcasters survive? As for all dynamic systems, the answer to this question hinges on the relative rate of change of the core characteristics and parameters in the mix. To reduce it to the simplest form:\nIf the rate at which advertising spend is diverted away from traditional commercial broadcasting exceeds the rate at which traditional broadcasters can adapt and capture some of the new kinds of marketing spend, they\u0026rsquo;re dead (or require some serious bridging capital).\nThe adaptation required can be considered to fall into two camps. Firstly, there\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;OMG! We better get monetising the new channels quickly!\u0026rdquo;; and secondly, there\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;What can we do the new channels can\u0026rsquo;t do, and how can we leverage this differentiation?\u0026rdquo;\nThe first of these, getting into the new channels quickly, is exemplified by traditional broadcasters\u0026rsquo; uptake of new technology and media. The award winning bbc.co.uk and iPlayer. Time Warner\u0026rsquo;s award winning cnn.com. BSkyB\u0026rsquo;s Sky+ box.\nAnd Jon Mobbs, BT Media Head of Strategy, clearly articulated at our event when traditional broadcasting wins hands down. No other technology is as efficient at reaching hundreds of thousands of people as traditional broadcasting. No other technology is as adept at covering live events. And none of the new technologies can yet warrant the same quality of service.\nFragmentation It appears very unlikely now that any broadcaster from the twentieth century can thrive unevolved. Moreover, no one organisation can own the entire supply chain. They may offer services throughout the supply chain, but the chain fragments, shifts platform, shifts place and gets mashed-up.\nIn my recent ebook, \u0026ldquo;The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 \u0026rdquo;, I refer to a future we labelled in 2005 myChannel\u0026hellip;\nThe user (aka the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor) has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. Video on demand. Personal video recorders (PVR). Newsfeeds (RSS). Alerts. Lifestreaming. Podcasts. Web radio. Mobile TV.\nTo all intents and purposes, we’re just a short hop away from everyone having their own customised channel, a channel tailored uniquely from your own subscriptions, your friends’ subscriptions and recommendations, and automated “if you like that, you’ll like this” discovery.\nGiven that broadcasters\u0026rsquo; revenues lay in the hands of marketing directors, it\u0026rsquo;s worth understanding what myChannel means to them:\nConsiderably more fragmentation of the target audience of communications campaigns Less precise timing of delivery Increased opportunity to provide niche information Less certainty of how each recipient is receiving the information Greater opportunity for innovation in inviting and securing interaction The need for new mechanisms for gauging campaign success.\nThe broadcaster as brand Attempting now to leap swiftly from analysis to synthesis, it appears there may be an ever increasing emphasis on broadcasters\u0026rsquo; abilities to transmute into lifestyle brands.\nThey need to pick their fight (the parts of the supply chain they wish to excel at) and their audience (who\u0026rsquo;s going to buy into their brand). Both the supply chain and the audience are too diverse and too complex for a broadcaster to try to be all things to all people, and too noisy not to aspire to reaping the benefits of lifestyle branding.\nWhat tech? And, if this isn\u0026rsquo;t sitting on the fence, the right broadcasting technology will simply be defined as the right one at the right time.\nLive Earth concert = traditional broadcasting tech. Live Earth\u0026rsquo;s ongoing SOS campaign = Web and mobile.\nFirst airing of Lost = traditional broadcasting tech. Subsequent episode sales and associated community engagement = traditional, Web and mobile.\nDemocratisation According to the Free Communications Group, \u0026ldquo;newspaper, television and radio should be under the control of all people who produce them.\u0026rdquo;\nWhilst this point of view was asserted in the 1960s to eradicate Government politicking of the BBC, the assertion repeated in 2008 takes on new meaning and fresh energy. The viewer has always been able to vote with the off button, or by switching channels. Now they can engage in programming, vote for winners of talent shows, develop and vote for plot ideas, and even create and publish their own content.\nIn conclusion, broadcasters must be adaptable and nimble. They must develop compelling content and services, create enticing opportunties for engagement, and adopt the right channels at the right time. No small task, but as the next Desperate Housewives or X-Factor won\u0026rsquo;t be user-generated content (a small matter of budget), there\u0026rsquo;s plenty of opportunity for today\u0026rsquo;s broadcasters to thrive tomorrow.\nSources History of British Broadcasting , Asa Briggs, Oxford University Press, 1995, p787, ISBN:019215964X\nhttp://www.bennites.com The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, review of Des Freedom\u0026rsquo;s book \u0026ldquo;Labour \u0026amp; Television Policy \u0026rdquo; http://www.cpbf.org.uk/body.php?subject=gov\u0026amp;id=584 \u0026ldquo;News from nowhere? A review of Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom\u0026ndash;Volume Five: Competition 1955-1974 \u0026rdquo;, Issue 68 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Autumn 1995\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television Photograph by Paolo Margari .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/07/the-free-communications-group-and-the-death-of-broadcasting/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters\u0026rdquo;. So said Tony Benn, Member of Parliament, to constituents in 1968. That same year, the Free Communications Group (FCG) was founded to demand \u0026ldquo;democratic control of all media\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BT_tower_in_central_london.jpg\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/320px-BT_tower_in_central_london.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLets skip the next forty years\u0026rsquo; analysis of broadcasting motives and actions that so preoccupied these politicians, broadcasters and journalists. In 2008, convergence has emerged as a force of nature, irrevocably changing \u0026ldquo;broadcasting\u0026rdquo; globally, and the FCG might just be smiling if it still existed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI put \u0026ldquo;broadcasting\u0026rdquo; in quote marks because I decided, as chair, to start last Thursday\u0026rsquo;s Convergence Conversation, titled \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.convergenceconversation.com/posts/sam.ingleby/convergence-conversation-event-at-the-bt-tower---17-july\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eIs broadcasting dead or merely taking a break?\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;, by seeking to define broadcasting.  Not as trivial a task as it sounds, rather a critical task if the 65 conversationists who attended the event hosted by BT Media at BT Tower were going to reach a conclusion.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Free Communications Group and the Death of Broadcasting"},{"content":"For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle . Bringing style to the tag cloud.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.\n\u0026ldquo;Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/07/wordle-extending-the-fascination-of-a-tag-cloud/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFor those obsessed with \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%5c%28metadata%5c%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003etags\u003c/a\u003e\n - and what marketer wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out \u003ca href=\"http://wordle.net\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWordle\u003c/a\u003e\n.  Bringing style to the tag cloud.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or \u003ca href=\"http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/47728/MarCom_Professional\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Wordle - extending the fascination of a tag cloud"},{"content":"Social Web Analytics (SWA) is 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\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence.\nThe advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it\u0026rsquo;s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .\nI do hope the ebook stimulates discussion and debate about this vital and nascent field, and look forward to the ongoing \u0026ldquo;distributed conversation\u0026rdquo;. Love to know what you think.\nThanks to Larry Weber , David Meerman Scott , Brian Solis and the Social Web Analytics vendors for their support and contributions.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/07/the-social-web-analytics-ebook-2008/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSocial Web Analytics (SWA) is 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\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"The%20Social%20Web%20Analytics%20eBook%202008\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/SWA_ebook_2008_med.png\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s just over ten weeks \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/listen.-the-science-of-social\"\u003esince I posted about my intention to write an ebook\u003c/a\u003e\n on social Web analytics, and now it\u0026rsquo;s done. The ebook is hosted at \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.socialwebanalytics.com\u003c/a\u003e\n, or you can simply \u003ca href=\"http://www.socialwebanalytics.com/The_Social_Web_Analytics_eBook_2008.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eclick here to download it\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008"},{"content":"We\u0026rsquo;re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.\nThe way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely\u0026hellip; an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I\u0026rsquo;m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.\nI know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.\nWhilst 4.3 billion addresses sounds a heck of a lot, it\u0026rsquo;s actually less than 1 per person on Earth. For this and other reasons, many devices connect to the Internet through a proxy - a bit like the mailroom at college or at work where the college or workplace has one address known to the postman, but where they\u0026rsquo;ve created another addressing system within the organisation, namely your room number or department. For those interested in the jargon, this is known as network address translation, or NAT for short.\nThis Internet addressing system is known as Internet Protocol version 4 (or IPv4 for short) and harks back to 1981. Back then I guess it was difficult to forsee how big this Internet thing was going to get. There were few computers by today\u0026rsquo;s standards, and the whole idea of a PC (known then as IBM PC Compatible) was just starting the same year. Laptops, palmtops, smartphones, mobile Internet devices, Playstations, IP phones, Internet clocks, ambient devices, IP sensors. Many of these simply weren\u0026rsquo;t envisaged.\nIntroducing Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6 for short (don\u0026rsquo;t ask about IPv5\u0026hellip; that was something else altogether!). Now this new addressing system isn\u0026rsquo;t going to run short of addresses anytime soon, or perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s what they said in 1981?! IPv6 has so many addresses that each of the 6 billion people on the planet could have 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, which is quite a large number.\nIPv6, and a powerful combination of other trends such as low cost computing and miniaturisation, means that everything we interact with could be addressable. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily have to be permanently powered, but may be powered up on an ad hoc basis (like ZigBee - little sensors that mesh together and communicate only when they have something to say), or just when it\u0026rsquo;s in range of an inductive power source (like passive RFID tags - currently being used in supply chains to identify and track pallets and boxes).\nSo enough of the tech, how\u0026rsquo;s this going to impact marketing and customer service? Here\u0026rsquo;s some ideas\u0026hellip;\nYour BMW has 400 sensors, each addressable and communicating back to base. BMW determines that your tyre pressure is a little low for the typical weight you carry and recommends a couple of extra pounds per square inch. Moreover, they can determine from your driving style that the upcoming 25 series is everything you look for in a car, and they can let you know why exactly.\nZara is offering a new service - a personal wardrobe stylist. Buy three items from their Autumn range and receive a Zara branded RFID wand that communicates back to their servers. Simply get dressed and wave the wand to see if the combination you\u0026rsquo;ve gone for is the height of current fashion, or a mishmash you\u0026rsquo;d have beaten simply at random. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be all Zara clothes as everything you\u0026rsquo;ve bought since 2014 has its own unique identifier. Missing that accessory to set off the whole look? Zara same day delivery saves the day.\nLighting can make any room, or break it. The team at mydeco.com knows this. It was back in 2008 that their original 3D room planner went live, a remarkable feat of product cataloguing and on-screen rendering to help assure the successful outcome of any redecoration. Now, ten years later, their service can collect the information from the uniquely addressable sensors integrated into your new furniture, and gain an accurate appreciation of ambient noise levels, temperature, wear and tear, and that all so important lighting. The cushion on the sofa vibrates gently to let you know they\u0026rsquo;ve generated some new ideas for you to take a look at next time you want to drop onto their website.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/06/end-to-end-marketing-the-possibilities-of-a-new-internet-protocol/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely\u0026hellip; an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I\u0026rsquo;m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI know that because I just visited \u003ca href=\"http://www.whatismyip.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.whatismyip.com\u003c/a\u003e\n and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol"},{"content":"Twingly launches today, \u0026ldquo;the next generation blog search engine\u0026rdquo;. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com .\nHi,\nToday we launched www.twingly.com . We are really awed by the response and feedback we\u0026rsquo;ve got since beta launch and it is a very proud moment for us to launch for the public.\nNow when we\u0026rsquo;re finally open, there\u0026rsquo;s something new to try out: the Twingly Widget Platform. Basically you can make any search result into a widget and put on your blog or website. Or use one of the predefined widgets by clicking \u0026ldquo;Profile\u0026rdquo; in the search results. See for example http://www.twingly.com/blogs/profile?url=engadget.com More new stuff available on www.twingly.com :\n- Subscribe to any search result by RSS or monitor by e-mail.\n- Language functionality: translation of search results and filtering based on language.\n- Hot Right Now: locate the hottest topics in the blog world right now.\nPlease continue to give us feedback and give your suggestions or vote on others on http://techplan.twingly.com/ .\nThe development of Twingly has just begun!\nKind regards,\nThe Twingly Team\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/06/twingly-new-blog-search-engine-launches/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTwingly launches today, \u0026ldquo;the next generation blog search engine\u0026rdquo;. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it.  \u003ca href=\"http://www.twingly.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ewww.twingly.com\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Twingly - new blog search engine launches"},{"content":"Just watched Giles Palmer\u0026rsquo;s presentation on search trends here at Being Digital . His company, Magpie , is one of those I\u0026rsquo;m including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life\u0026hellip; yes, I have one).\n[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].\nCurrently Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world\u0026hellip; 3D search if you like. He\u0026rsquo;s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can\u0026rsquo;t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that\u0026rsquo;s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn\u0026rsquo;t know if he\u0026rsquo;s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he\u0026rsquo;s pointed out, we\u0026rsquo;ve had the panel on location today.\nJeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft\u0026rsquo;s cashback search I posted about recently .\nNow we\u0026rsquo;re on to the panel, and our client Taptu is up there, represented by Conor McKenna. If you don\u0026rsquo;t know these guys, bookmark their service next time you\u0026rsquo;re online on your mobile\u0026hellip; critically, it\u0026rsquo;s not just desktop universal search ported onto the mobile\u0026hellip; the Taptu team has worked out what people expect from mobile search, what they\u0026rsquo;re looking for and how the results should be presented. And you should see what they have planned for later this year.\nAs you might expect, social search is a topic of interest, and Conor is on the mic talking about their partnership programme for allying mobile search with other mobile properties; search being the perfect complement to all mobile content. Ariela, from Jumptap (white label mobile search, and a project client of ours for Mobile World Congress back in Jan) describes Jumptap as advertising driven, and that the mobile search user isn\u0026rsquo;t ready for social search this year. Advertising comes first, and even so she says \u0026ldquo;How many people are ready today to utilise these new advertising vehicles?\u0026rdquo;\nIn conclusion, the panel believes that the field of search is wide open, and whilst Google has a lead on the desktop that can\u0026rsquo;t be ignored, and they\u0026rsquo;re pretty good at maps too, the whole bottom up approach to search is going to transition to a top down process of discovery\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;find engines\u0026rdquo;.\nIf you would like to find out more about search, altsearchengines.com is the best place to start.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/06/searching-harder-search-panel-at-being-digital/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eJust watched Giles Palmer\u0026rsquo;s presentation on search trends here at \u003ca href=\"http://www.being-digital.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBeing Digital\u003c/a\u003e\n. His company, \u003ca href=\"http://www.magpie.net\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMagpie\u003c/a\u003e\n, is one of those I\u0026rsquo;m including in my upcoming \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/listen.-the-science-of-social\"\u003eeBook on Social Web Analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life\u0026hellip; yes, I have one).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/beingdigital%20003.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e[Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation].\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCurrently Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO)  is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world\u0026hellip; 3D search if you like. He\u0026rsquo;s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can\u0026rsquo;t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that\u0026rsquo;s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn\u0026rsquo;t know if he\u0026rsquo;s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he\u0026rsquo;s pointed out, we\u0026rsquo;ve had the panel on location today.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJeff has also been keen to big up \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/buying-market-share---when-all-else-fails-get-your-wallet-out\"\u003eMIcrosoft\u0026rsquo;s cashback search I posted about recently\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Searching harder - search panel at Being Digital"},{"content":"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\u0026hellip;\nForget \u0026ldquo;Pop Idol\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;The Apprentice\u0026rdquo;, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We\u0026rsquo;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.\nBut where is this \u0026ldquo;screen near you\u0026rdquo;? What is TV?\nThe concept of broadcast TV is on borrowed time. Video over IP and associated technologies enable time, place and device shifted viewing (video when and where you want it). When married to the dramatic reduction in video production costs of recent years, niche B2B video programming is becoming an economically viable option for the first time. This is narrowcast. This is targeted.\nWe have witnessed B2B publications morphing into B2B websites, and we will now see a transition to delivery of more and more content by video. The publishers\u0026rsquo; need for insightful and compelling content will continue, but they will need different collateral from PRs\u0026hellip; multimedia content ready for easy insertion in the editorial process. Some of this material can be prepared in advance, and some will have to be created quickly and nimbly to convert opportunities; and importantly PRs will need to video media train more spokespeople to make sure an opportunity doesn\u0026rsquo;t pass when the wrong guy is out of town.\nInterestingly, established publishers will face new competition in this new video on demand world\u0026hellip; from their audience. There\u0026rsquo;s no reason why for example our fictional show above, IT Compliance Bulletin, couldn\u0026rsquo;t be produced (or at least commissioned) by IBM as much as by CNET.\nWhen will this happen? Well depending again on your definition of TV, you should check out www.insight24.com today. The resolution of some of these B2B video podcasts and presentations doesn\u0026rsquo;t qualify them as TV in current parlance, but resolution is just a function of production technology and storage, and the bandwidth and latency of your Internet connection.\nThere are many facets to narrowcast B2B video programming impacting your marketing communications, and I\u0026rsquo;ll finish with a couple more: measurement and engagement. Unlike the fuzzy and warped metrics of broadcast television, video content consumed on demand has the perfect back channel courtesy of the Internet connection employed to distribute the content in the first place. This provides a feedback mechanism to register who is watching what, and where and when, but just as critically it facilitates real time interaction between the viewers and the content producer.\nWhilst writing this response, my Twitter community has been watching the UK\u0026rsquo;s version of The Apprentice. Whilst admittedly they are watching it concurrently in a broadcast manner rather than narrowcast, the engagement and context this lends the programme is powerful. Imagine listening to and participating in that conversation the first time you feature in or publish your own B2B TV show.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/06/the-b2b-social-web-b2b-video-programming/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/the-b2b-social-web---my-interview-with-the-ecommerce-times\"\u003elast post\u003c/a\u003e\n 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 \u003ca href=\"http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/63095.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTV Media Relations\u003c/a\u003e\n. B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eForget \u0026ldquo;Pop Idol\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;The Apprentice\u0026rdquo;, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We\u0026rsquo;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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut where is this \u0026ldquo;screen near you\u0026rdquo;? What is TV?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/458px-Braun_HF_1.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming"},{"content":"The B2B Social Web has arrived and it\u0026rsquo;s not going to go away.\nI was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here\u0026rsquo;s the first half of our conversation\u0026hellip;\n1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?\nIf being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others\u0026rsquo; 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.\nMarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.\n2) What major trends should my readers know about?\nThe 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.\nBut, we won\u0026rsquo;t have to establish our profile from scratch on each of these, nor our network of friends, as developments such as OpenSocial allow us to take our profile with us. This interoperability will also permit much easier control over our engagement in each network, possibly centralising each onto one page; \u0026ldquo;MySocialNetworks\u0026rdquo; if you like. Some pundits have started to call this \u0026ldquo;lifestreaming\u0026rdquo;!\n3) What do you think of what has been termed \u0026ldquo;the New PR?\u0026rdquo;\nFor many years, PR has been defined as media relations - a linear relationship between PRs, journalists and the target audience. The industry became increasingly focused on traditional media as the best, if not sole way, to reach the \u0026lsquo;public\u0026rsquo;. Terms such as \u0026ldquo;new PR\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;PR 2.0\u0026rdquo; simply refer to a reversion to the objective of building a dialogue with your influencers and audiences and developing content that helps to earn understanding and support.\nI guess this is called \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;2.0\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;old!\u0026rdquo; because a new and large swathe of those channels are digital. It has taken us back to the true definition of PR.\n4) Do you have any final thoughts on any of the problems facing people seeking authentic connections and truthful information online today or (very generally) what the future holds for the Web as it relates to PR and marketing?\nI\u0026rsquo;m optimistic for the future quality of people\u0026rsquo;s interaction with large organisations; for the potential for more genuine and open dialogue. We have an innate ability to detect inauthenticity, and digital media now eliminates the previous geographic constraints to people sharing concerns about an organisation that isn\u0026rsquo;t open, isn\u0026rsquo;t authentic, isn\u0026rsquo;t human. The challenge for professional marketing communicators is the sheer diversity of channels to listen to, to engage in. I call this problem, or opportunity, myChannel .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/the-b2b-social-web-my-interview-with-the-ecommerce-times/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe B2B Social Web has arrived and it\u0026rsquo;s not going to go away.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here\u0026rsquo;s the first half of our conversation\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others\u0026rsquo; 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMarCom Professional\u003c/a\u003e\n is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include \u003ca href=\"http://sermo.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esermo.com\u003c/a\u003e\n for physicians and \u003ca href=\"http://inmobile.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003einmobile\u003c/a\u003e\n for the wireless industry.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e2) What major trends should my readers know about?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The B2B Social Web - my interview with the Ecommerce Times"},{"content":"Six searches are conducted via Google for every two on Yahoo and one on Microsoft Live . That\u0026rsquo;s not how Microsoft would like it. So the news from Microsoft last night (well, by British Summer Time anyway), CASHBACK!\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;s worked so far. The search engines deliver paid-for results alongside so-called organic (not paid for) search results. When someone clicks on one of these paid-for results / aka \u0026ldquo;sponsored links\u0026rdquo; / aka \u0026ldquo;ads\u0026rdquo;, the search engine charges the advertiser. If these ads were served on an affiliate site, the affiliate site owner gets a share of that revenue.\nSo everyone is a winner. The search engine makes serious revenue (Google made $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion in the last quarter, the majority from search related ads), searchers see ads relevant to their search query, and the advertisers attract relevant visitors to their websites.\nNow Microsoft wants more of those searchers using their Live service than Google, and what better way to achieve that than to make it worth their while. Microsoft has announced a scheme whereby advertisers will offer consumers who click their ads on Microsoft Live a discount, the value of this discount being passed to Microsoft which then passes it to the consumer. The advertisers can afford this as Microsoft won\u0026rsquo;t be charging them to advertise, but will charge them on purchase.\nThis achieves Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s stated intention to move beyond CPC (cost per click) advertising, and into CPA (cost per action or acquisition). Incurring an advertising cost only upon registering a sale has been considered by many to be a holy grail. The maxim \u0026ldquo;Only half of my advertising is effective, if only I knew which half\u0026rdquo; is crushed, and advertising becomes a fixed and known cost of sale.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, this may be described as the first big swing towards the \u0026ldquo;attention economy\u0026rdquo;. That term refers to remuneration of consumers for the dedication of their attention to a certain organisation or brand (here\u0026rsquo;s a post on this topic I wrote last September about the European mobile phone service Blyk doing much the same thing ). And it also helps answer the question I asked in February about how Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Engagement Mapping service might actually work .\nThis may work out to be the biggest \u0026ldquo;bung\u0026rdquo; in Web history, and it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a very interesting battle. On the basis that Google search is more relevant / more accurate (why else have they such a commanding lead?), I wonder whether searchers will continue to look for the best search results, or the best discount. Perhaps they will simply divide their searches up into non-remunerative (Google) and remunerative (Live)?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/buying-market-share-when-all-else-fails-get-your-wallet-out/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSix searches are conducted via \u003ca href=\"http://www.google.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGoogle\u003c/a\u003e\n for every two on \u003ca href=\"http://search.yahoo.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eYahoo\u003c/a\u003e\n and one on \u003ca href=\"http://www.live.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMicrosoft Live\u003c/a\u003e\n. That\u0026rsquo;s not how Microsoft would like it. So the \u003ca href=\"http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21LiveSearchcashbackPR.mspx\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003enews from Microsoft\u003c/a\u003e\n last night (well, by British Summer Time anyway), \u003cstrong\u003eCASHBACK\u003c/strong\u003e!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/800px-United_States_one_dollar_bill%2C_obverse.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;s worked so far.  The search engines deliver paid-for results alongside so-called organic (not paid for) search results.  When someone clicks on one of these paid-for results / aka \u0026ldquo;sponsored links\u0026rdquo; / aka \u0026ldquo;ads\u0026rdquo;, the search engine charges the advertiser.  If these ads were served on an affiliate site, the affiliate site owner gets a share of that revenue.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo everyone is a winner.  The search engine makes serious revenue (Google made $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion in the last quarter, the majority from search related ads), searchers see ads relevant to their search query, and the advertisers attract relevant visitors to their websites.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Buying market share - when all else fails, get your wallet out"},{"content":"Hi,\nReaders of my blog may know I\u0026rsquo;m speaking on one of the panels at the Being Digital conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu\u0026hellip; see their blog post here .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/win-a-free-ticket-to-being-digital-conference-courtesy-of-taptu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHi,\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReaders of my blog may know I\u0026rsquo;m speaking on one of the panels at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.being-digital.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBeing Digital\u003c/a\u003e\n conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu\u0026hellip; \u003ca href=\"http://www.taptu.com/blog/2008/05/20/win-a-free-ticket-to-being-digital/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003esee their blog post here\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Win a free ticket to Being Digital conference courtesy of Taptu"},{"content":"Those of you who follow my blog will know I\u0026rsquo;m currently into Social Web Analytics. Here\u0026rsquo;s my last post on the topic . So some interesting news from Summize\u0026rsquo;s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.\nSimply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you\u0026rsquo;re interested. Here\u0026rsquo;s one I did earlier\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/summize-twitter-sentiment-analytics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThose of you who follow my blog will know I\u0026rsquo;m currently into Social Web Analytics. \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/social-web-analytics---my-upcoming-ebook-and-a-case-of-cobblers-shoes\"\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s my last post on the topic\u003c/a\u003e\n. So some interesting news from Summize\u0026rsquo;s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://labs.summize.com/sentiment\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSimply go here\u003c/a\u003e\n and enter the brand or object name in which you\u0026rsquo;re interested. Here\u0026rsquo;s one I did earlier\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Summize%20labs%20-%20sentiment%20analysis\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/summize.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Summize - Twitter sentiment analytics"},{"content":" Image via Wikipedia I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I\u0026rsquo;m not a \u0026lsquo;celebrity\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t believe it\u0026hellip; is that really you? We\u0026rsquo;re big fans of\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve got all your albums.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t believe it, is it really you?\u0026rdquo; Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.\u0026rdquo; From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.\nWe got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it\u0026rsquo;s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.\nOnce our conversation arrived at the digital age, it turned inevitably to the mobile phone / mobile infotainment device. And Ronnie loves his phone. \u0026ldquo;F***ing brilliant\u0026rdquo; to quote him verbatim. So I thought I\u0026rsquo;d charge his enthusiasm by talking about the latest innovations, and particularly location based services. Interestingly, it had the opposite effect.\nI guess of everyone I\u0026rsquo;ve spoken with about the opportunities, convenience and dangers of location based services, Ronnie Wood is the best placed of them all to understand what personal privacy truly means. He showed his disgust for the ideas I presented by shoving his phone away from him down the bar. Not quite the phone smashing violent remonstration you might stereotypically expect from a rock star, but demonstrable revulsion nevertheless.\nTechnologists, marketers and society in general have some interesting and controversial choices to make right now. Location based services, and other privacy and technically related innovations such as identify cards, face recognition, RFID tagging and extensive customer / citizen profiling, impact the dynamics and may reshape the foundations of our society.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in these aspects of the digital world, and the commercial and fun aspects to, join me at Being Digital in London this June 10th. I\u0026rsquo;ll be speaking on the Location panel.\nWikipedia informs me that The Rolling Stones penned \u0026ldquo;Get off of my cloud\u0026rdquo; as a reaction to their sudden popularity following the success of \u0026ldquo;(I can\u0026rsquo;t get no) Satisfaction\u0026rdquo;. Following Ronnie\u0026rsquo;s dissatisfaction with the possibilities of location based services, could we be listening to \u0026ldquo;Get off of my phone\u0026rdquo; anytime soon?\n_______________\nPhotograph by Mike Johnson , licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/a-rolling-stone-gathers-no-location-based-information/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ronnie_Wood.jpg\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Ron Wood - Guitar Player - The Rolling Stones\u0026hellip;.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Ronnie_Wood.jpg\" title=\"Ron Wood - Guitar Player - The Rolling Stones....\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImage via \u003ca href=\"http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ronnie_Wood.jpg\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eWikipedia\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI met \u003ca href=\"http://www.ronniewood.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRonnie Wood\u003c/a\u003e\n this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I\u0026rsquo;m not a \u0026lsquo;celebrity\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t believe it\u0026hellip; is that really you? We\u0026rsquo;re big fans of\u0026hellip;\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve got all your albums.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t believe it, is it really you?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlthough Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.\u0026rdquo; From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call \u003cem\u003einvading our space\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it\u0026rsquo;s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information"},{"content":"Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I\u0026rsquo;m asked on a regular basis \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s the point of spending so much time online?\u0026rdquo;.\nThe very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into \u0026ldquo;offline\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;online\u0026rdquo; portions. Yet they don\u0026rsquo;t distinguish \u0026ldquo;time eating / not eating\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time talking / listening\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time with new people / with old acquaintances\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time on the phone / not on the phone\u0026rdquo;.\nLike eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn\u0026rsquo;t? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning\u0026hellip; some of which just happens to be online and some offline.\nMaking useful contacts\nNevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to keep a record over the past few months of how I make useful contacts. I define that term simply on a professional basis: will they help me as a director at Racepoint, and my company in general, in achieving our objectives.\nIt turns out I have seven main channels for meeting and making useful contacts: Mashup Event , the IET , Intellect , Intellect\u0026rsquo;s Convergence Conversation, my blog at MarCom Professional , Twitter and directly through inbound enquiries to Racepoint and sister companies. Everything else I\u0026rsquo;ve lumped in to \u0026ldquo;Other offline\u0026rdquo;. Of the 38 useful contacts I\u0026rsquo;ve made during this time, the split looks like this:\nOf these, Mashup, Twitter, Racepoint, MarCom Professional and IET all have online and offline aspects. Each has led to conversations online (on our company blog w.r.t. Racepoint) which have developed into conversations over the phone and over coffee, which have continued online etc. etc.\nYou will note Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn by their absence. Firstly, I have learned what I needed to learn about Facebook and MySpace and whilst I understand their place in marketing communications campaigns, I got fed up with them personally. And my LinkedIn is a great place to record my relationships once they\u0026rsquo;re established, but ultimately LinkedIn pivots around the connections to others rather than around specific content or conversation. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t really engage me therefore. Saying that, whilst I\u0026rsquo;ve not used LinkedIn to establish new contacts through existing contacts, I have been asked to be the man in the middle on a number of occasions.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all in the mix So the question is not whether mine or your time \u0026ldquo;spent online\u0026rdquo; is worthwhile. The question is whether you are engaged in the appropriate channels, the right networks, the interesting and influential conversations. These may be online or offline, up a tree or down a cellar for all I or you should care. Ultimately, if you\u0026rsquo;re still distinguishing between online and offline, I\u0026rsquo;d suggest you\u0026rsquo;re probably not thinking about digital media in quite the right way\u0026hellip; which may also be an indication that you\u0026rsquo;re not yet exploiting its full potential in the mix.\n___________________\nIf you liked this post, you might like this one by Graham Jones .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/online-offline-up-a-tree-down-a-cellar-effective-networking-is-all-in-the-mix/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBeing so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I\u0026rsquo;m asked on a regular basis \u0026ldquo;\u003cstrong\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s the point of spending so much time online?\u003c/strong\u003e\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into \u0026ldquo;offline\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;online\u0026rdquo; portions. Yet they don\u0026rsquo;t distinguish \u0026ldquo;time eating / not eating\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time talking / listening\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time with new people / with old acquaintances\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;time on the phone / not on the phone\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike eating, listening and telephones, digital media \u003cem\u003esimply exists\u003c/em\u003e.  It is part of life.  Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn\u0026rsquo;t?  I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning\u0026hellip; some of which just happens to be online and some offline.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Online, offline, up a tree, down a cellar - effective networking is all in the mix"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m at RIPE56 today and tomorrow. RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond, and RIPE56 is, you\u0026rsquo;ve guess it, the 56th meeting.\nThis week-long event brings together the best minds on IP networks, and I\u0026rsquo;m here working predominantly on the issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake. This is a complex issue requiring some deft communications.\nRight now however, I\u0026rsquo;m in a very interesting presentation by Thomas Billeter and Fredy Kuenzler of Zattoo . From their website:\nZattoo has developed a software program that allows you to watch TV on your computer. All you need is a broadband connection and a current operating system (Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux). The service is legal and free of charge.\nZattoo is a peer-to-peer application. This means that the data is not streamed from one central server to all users watching a certain program, but flows from one user to the next, thus also using the computing power of the users’ computers.\nEmploying a team of 50 and funding of $15m, Zattoo is already live in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. More European countries and the US are planned this year.\nOf course, the business plan is underpinned by advertising revenues, although the possibility of subscription based services isn\u0026rsquo;t dismissed at this stage. The pitch to broadcasters and advertisers: \u0026ldquo;Zattoo attracts fleeing viewers back to broadcast TV\u0026rdquo;.\nThe guys have just shown a matrix with \u0026ldquo;clips\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;full 24/7 programming\u0026rdquo; along one axis, and \u0026ldquo;archive content\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;live content\u0026rdquo; along the other. Here\u0026rsquo;s how they slot themselves and competitive video offerings in that matrix:\nYouTube - clips, archive content MLB - clips, live content Joost - full 24/7 programming, archive content Zattoo - full 24/7 programming, live content Zattoo currently serves two million users with 500 servers in 16 locations. Another 200 servers will be added in a few weeks. Less than half of content delivery is managed peer-to-peer due to the upload bandwidth constraints of typical ADSL broadband connections.\nTheir research has revealed why their current userbase is attracted to Zattoo:\n29% want to watch whilst they do other stuff on their computer 22% don\u0026rsquo;t have a TV 18% use it when they are away from their normal TV 14% use it when their normal TV is being used by someone else ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/zattoo-live-content-tv-broadcast-on-your-pc/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m at RIPE56 today and tomorrow. \u003ca href=\"http://www.ripe.net\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRIPE\u003c/a\u003e\n (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond, and RIPE56 is, you\u0026rsquo;ve guess it, the 56th meeting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis week-long event brings together the best minds on IP networks, and I\u0026rsquo;m here working predominantly on the issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake. This is a complex issue requiring some deft communications.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/zattoo.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight now however, I\u0026rsquo;m in a very interesting presentation by Thomas Billeter and Fredy Kuenzler of \u003ca href=\"http://www.zattoo.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eZattoo\u003c/a\u003e\n. From their website:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Zattoo... live content TV broadcast on your PC"},{"content":"Two weeks ago, I posted about the fast paced field of Social Web Analytics . I presented a definition of these tools, expressed my intent to write an ebook on the technology and the main vendors, and listed the vendors I intend to cover\u0026hellip;\nI also invited anyone with experience of wielding these tools to get in touch so I can include comment and insight from them. This invitation is still open.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s really interesting however is that only two of the vendors have got in touch to volunteer their full cooperation in my analysis. This may be because I had previously sent everyone a 52 question questionnaire and they may have thought I\u0026rsquo;d had my due dose of attention!\u0026hellip; but they didn\u0026rsquo;t know, as I didn\u0026rsquo;t then, of my intention to write up and publish my findings (non-disclosure agreements permitting).\nHave their own systems flagged up my post for their attention? Are they living their own story about brand tracking for influence? Will their tools bring this post to their attention to compel them to get in touch? I\u0026rsquo;ll let you know in my ebook :-)\nwww.Attentio.com www.Biz360.com www.Brandimensions.com www.Buzzlogic.com www.CollectiveIntellect.com www.CyberAlert.com www.Cymfony.com www.factiva.com/factivainsight www.Integrasco.com www.Kaavacorp.com www.Magpie.net www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/Precis www.NielsenBuzzmetrics.com www.Radian6.com www.RelevantNoise.com www.Umbriacorp.com www.VisibleTechnologies.com www.vocus.com/content/pranalytics.asp ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/05/social-web-analytics-my-upcoming-ebook-and-a-case-of-cobblers-shoes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTwo weeks ago, \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/listen.-the-science-of-social\"\u003eI posted about the fast paced field of Social Web Analytics\u003c/a\u003e\n. I presented a definition of these tools, expressed my intent to write an ebook on the technology and the main vendors, and listed the vendors I intend to cover\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/socialwebanalytics_logos.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI also invited anyone with experience of wielding these tools to get in touch so I can include comment and insight from them.  This invitation is still open.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social Web Analytics - my upcoming ebook and a case of cobblers\u0026#039; shoes"},{"content":"I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn\u0026rsquo;t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.\nOne glaring betrayal of the \u0026lsquo;social media practices\u0026rsquo; that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.\nListening to one person isn\u0026rsquo;t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information\u0026hellip; turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.\nSocial Web Analytics This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence.\nWe have subscribed to some of the best third party tools available, and developed some proprietary software ourselves over the years. And I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on a 2008 market review of the companies servicing this space, which will also inform an ebook I\u0026rsquo;m going to write on the subject\u0026hellip; to be published here and on our company blog in June.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve listed the main contenders as I see them below, but please comment below if you think I\u0026rsquo;ve missed any. And any comments about your experiences with any of these services is welcome too\u0026hellip; you\u0026rsquo;ll get full credit in the ebook of course!\nwww.Attentio.com www.Biz360.com www.Brandimensions.com www.Buzzlogic.com www.CollectiveIntellect.com www.CyberAlert.com www.Cymfony.com www.factiva.com/factivainsight www.Integrasco.com www.Kaavacorp.com www.Magpie.net www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/Precis www.NielsenBuzzmetrics.com www.Radian6.com www.RelevantNoise.com www.Umbriacorp.com www.VisibleTechnologies.com www.vocus.com/content/pranalytics.asp ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/04/listen-the-science-of-social/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/200px-Ear.jpg\"\u003eI have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn\u0026rsquo;t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/continuous-engagement...-the-death-of-market-research\"\u003emooted the death of market research in 2006\u003c/a\u003e\n, it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne glaring betrayal of the \u0026lsquo;social media practices\u0026rsquo; that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eListening to one person isn\u0026rsquo;t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information\u0026hellip; turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"social-web-analytics\"\u003eSocial Web Analytics\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation\u0026rsquo;s sentiment and influence.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Listen. The Science of Social."},{"content":"Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.\nThe six award categories for 2008 are:\nBest development project Best security initiative Raising industry standards Personal safety online Internet for all Open Internet If you think your organisation, or your client\u0026rsquo;s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in ! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN\u0026rsquo;s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.\nThe 2007 winners included Computer Aid International , Netcraft , Childnet , mySociety , CEOP and Internet Watch Foundation .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/04/internet-best-practice-challenge-recognition-for-your-internet-leadership/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/480_Logo_New_Nominet_Main.gif\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.nominet.org.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNominet\u003c/a\u003e\n is running their \u003ca href=\"http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/bestpracticechallenge/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBest Practice Challenge\u003c/a\u003e\n for the second year.  The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe six award categories for 2008 are:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBest development project\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBest security initiative\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaising industry standards\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePersonal safety online\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eInternet for all\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOpen Internet\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you think your organisation, or your client\u0026rsquo;s, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, \u003ca href=\"http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/bestpracticechallenge/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eyou have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in\u003c/a\u003e\n!  Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.intgovforum.org/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eInternet Governance Forum\u003c/a\u003e\n (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Internet Best Practice Challenge - recognition for your Internet leadership"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I\u0026rsquo;m allowed in! From their press release today\u0026hellip;\nToday we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?\nSpam free, social search\nTwingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.\nSocial search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.\nPowerful search language and tech plan Digg\nTwingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.\nBut we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!\nUPDATE Well I\u0026rsquo;ve got my invite and I\u0026rsquo;ve logged in to take a look.\nFirst impression = FAST. Particularly compared to Technorati, although that may have more to do with the size of their respective databases and userbases than any technological advantage.\nI love the layout, and the overall design is very pleasing on the eye.\nThe language selection beats current blog search tools. I found 38 blog posts about Yahoo quickly and easily in Albanian (well, Twingly tells me they\u0026rsquo;re written in Albanian!).\nMore generally, setting any of the search filters is intuitive and simple. Listing the inbound links to a specific blog is one obvious click away, and users can vote on posts Digg-stylee to add another dimension to finding relevant and influential content.\nSearch comparison with Technorati I compared the results delivered up by Twingly with those returned by Technorati for the simple search query \u0026ldquo;Taptu\u0026rdquo; (fab mobile search\u0026hellip; check them out at http://www.taptu.com )\u0026hellip;\nFirstly, you can\u0026rsquo;t deny that Twingly is considerably more attractive, and that\u0026rsquo;s no reflection on Gordon Brown appearing on Technorati this morning. Appearance is not a deciding factor I\u0026rsquo;ll grant you, but an essential component of usability nevertheless.\nTwingly returns 51 results, and Technorati 156. The first result for Technorati, \u0026ldquo;Top tech startups in Europe\u0026rdquo; from Techcrunch, appears fourth in Twingly. More interestingly, Twingly\u0026rsquo;s first result relates to Taptu\u0026rsquo;s acclaim in Barcelona (re. Mobile World Congress\u0026hellip; my post on that ) yet any reference from Barcelona is relegated to the third page of results from Technorati.\nAnd therein lies the main difference to date. Twingly, this Swedish company, currently excels at focusing on European blogs. Here\u0026rsquo;s how they put it on their website:\nWhile our eventual goal is nothing short of world dominance, we are currently focusing our efforts on European blogs. Having said this, our index already includes many blogs from all over the world.\nSo in conclusion, Twingly is an additional tool in your digital media relations armoury, and not a substitute; yet.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/04/twingly-in-private-beta-a-next-generation-blog-search-engine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve signed up and will let you know what I find when I\u0026rsquo;m allowed in! From their press release today\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpam free, social search\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePowerful search language and tech plan Digg\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"update\"\u003eUPDATE\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWell I\u0026rsquo;ve got my invite and I\u0026rsquo;ve logged in to take a look.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Twingly in private beta - \u0026quot;a next-generation blog search engine\u0026quot;"},{"content":"We\u0026rsquo;ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries .\nBut what is broadband, and where are we going from here?\nTo quote Connect\u0026rsquo;s excellent report \u0026ldquo;Connecting Britain\u0026rsquo;s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband \u0026rdquo;:\nSo what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:\nnarrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.\nOver sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry\u0026hellip; the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.\nThe Broadband Stakeholder Group CEO, Antony Walker, delivered an insightful analysis of the situation in terms of technology, policy, regulation and business model. If you want to know more, I recommend his report \u0026ldquo;Pipe Dreams? Prospects for next generation access in the UK \u0026rdquo;.\nTo conclude the event, I decided to take a straw poll of how much bandwidth everyone at the event considered they might be consuming in their own household in 2015. The response was quite varied, with 25% saying that the top end of broadband (by Connect\u0026rsquo;s definition above) would suffice.\nOn the basis that streaming HDTV quality video over IP consumes 10-12mbit/s, marketers can only begin to imagine today what will be possible with 200mbit/s. This is much the same leap as trying to envisage back in 1998 how we might use 2mbit/s - bulk standard broadband service by 2008 standards. Influencer dialogue via holographic avatars anyone?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/03/uk-next-generation-access-what-might-we-have-to-play-with/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;ve come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eonline videos seeking to influence the US primaries\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut what is broadband, and where are we going from here?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo quote Connect\u0026rsquo;s excellent report \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.connectuk.org/docimages/8281.pdf\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eConnecting Britain\u0026rsquo;s Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003enarrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ebroadband would mean up to 25mbit/s\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003efast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry\u0026hellip; the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/convergence-conversation-prospects-for-next-generation-access-in-the-uk\"\u003eConvergence Conversation event\u003c/a\u003e\n I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"UK Next Generation Access - what might we have to play with?"},{"content":"The third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK\u0026rsquo;s broadband infrastructure.\nI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be chairing the event, and we\u0026rsquo;ll kick off with the following speakers:\nAngus Flett - BT Wholesale Geoffrey Spencer - Nortel Antony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group Bill Gash - Partners in TV Mike Aigner - Geo Networks Chris Barraclough - STL Partners What\u0026rsquo;s the topic? Recent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;all you can eat\u0026rdquo; business model. The BBC\u0026rsquo;s iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch.\nWhat does this enormous spike in on demand services mean for the UK\u0026rsquo;s broadband infrastructure and its existing average download speed of 2mbps? Can the existing network take the strain and if not, what are the prospects for investment in Next Generation Access networks to deliver high speeds to the home? All of these questions and more will be addressed at this conversation.\nWho should attend? ISP Content providers Network suppliers Business development managers Online advertisers Why should I attend? Within a closed, personal and informal setting, you will gain access to key industry players within a range of industries. With increased critical knowledge you are guaranteed to improve your business performance by taking part in hot debate amongst a dynamic group of people.\nHow much will it cost me? Free to anyone who is interested, this conversation is not to be missed.\nFor further information and booking contact:\nCamilla Young T 020 7331 2028 E camilla.young@intellectuk.org ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/03/convergence-conversation-prospects-for-next-generation-access-in-the-uk/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK\u0026rsquo;s broadband infrastructure.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m delighted to be chairing the event, and we\u0026rsquo;ll kick off with the following speakers:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAngus Flett - BT Wholesale\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGeoffrey Spencer - Nortel\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAntony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBill Gash - Partners in TV\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMike Aigner - Geo Networks\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eChris Barraclough - STL Partners\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"whats-the-topic\"\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s the topic?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRecent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;all you can eat\u0026rdquo; business model. The BBC\u0026rsquo;s iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Convergence Conversation: Prospects for next generation access in the UK"},{"content":"\nDespite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R\u0026rsquo;s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.\n(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.)\nReading 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.\nThe 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. \u0026ldquo;Radio\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;TV\u0026rdquo; over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing\u0026hellip;\nThe future has arrived, and it’s audio visual Everyone now carries an audio visual device they can wield quickly and easily to interact synchronously or non-synchronously, with audio or with audio and video, at any time, in any place, what they want and with whom they want. Marketing communicators must adapt to a world in which reading and writing takes a back row seat.\nWhichever way you look at it, the three R’s are dead. Long live the three M’s:\nMobility – fluency in using mobile Internet devices pervasively\nMashing – searching, filtering, collating, combining and interpreting information, to inform yourself and your reaction to and interaction with the world\nMathematics – simply universal, everlasting and sacred :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/03/write-off-reading-and-writing-the-three-rs-are-dead-long-live-the-three-ms/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/visualworld.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R\u0026rsquo;s are far from sacrosanct: \u003cstrong\u003er\u003c/strong\u003eeading, w\u003cstrong\u003er\u003c/strong\u003eiting and a\u003cstrong\u003er\u003c/strong\u003eithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(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.)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say \u003cem\u003ethe\u003c/em\u003e 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.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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. \u0026ldquo;Radio\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;TV\u0026rdquo; over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Write-off reading and writing. The three R\u0026#039;s are dead; long live the three M\u0026#039;s"},{"content":" When does advertising pay? Apparently, we\u0026rsquo;re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.\nThe advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA.\nNow if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.\nBut that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then.\nBut is a sale directly related to the very last advert the customer saw? Of course not. Your decision to buy Vaio not Lenovo, Nokia not Blackberry, Diesel not Levis, is the summation of many independent “touch points” over the minutes / hours / days you’re considering the purchase, and indeed over the many years running up to that point.\nHow do you measure that?! Well Microsoft has the answer apparently, Engagement Mapping :\na new approach to managing and measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns that goes beyond the current “last ad clicked” standard. For the last decade, virtually all ad campaign reporting methodologies associate sales, leads and Web traffic simply to the last click or ad exposure. Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale.\nAnd there’s more:\nBased on the Engagement Mapping concept, Microsoft announced the beta of Engagement ROI, an online campaign reporting and optimization solution that will undergo testing by national advertising clients and agencies, including Agência Click + UNICA, Best Western International Inc., BKV, Citi Cards, GSD\u0026amp;M Idea City, Ingenuity Media of The Martin Agency, Initiative, McKinney, MEC Interaction, Mindshare Interaction, Monster Worldwide Inc., Neo@Ogilvy, Sprint and World Vision. Engagement ROI evaluates and assigns measurable value to a consumer’s interaction with ads, giving advertisers and publishers a more complete picture of online behavior.\nWow. But call me a doubting geek, I need to see more details on the ‘how’ not the ‘what’. I’ll see what I can find and report back.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/engagement-mapping-the-what-but-not-the-how/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.atlassolutions.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Home_FindYourSolution.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nWhen does advertising pay? Apparently, we\u0026rsquo;re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraudhttp:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eclick-fraud\u003c/a\u003e\n and CPA.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Engagement Mapping: the what but not the how"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?\nFuture mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?\nNokia and the University of Cambridge have been collaborating on a concept they call Morph. This video accompanies this week\u0026rsquo;s press release and should get us all thinking. I get the feeling we don\u0026rsquo;t have to rush though :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/morph/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFuture mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like \u003ca href=\"http://mobileacuity.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMobile Acuity\u003c/a\u003e\n interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Morph"},{"content":"The second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s being talked about?\nJim Knight, the schools\u0026rsquo; minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access \u0026lsquo;frequently-updated information on children\u0026rsquo;s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems\u0026rsquo;.\nHere then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education.\nWhat will the effect be of the endless possibilities of technology in the classroom, from distance education, elearning, and even learning delivered via the TV? Attendant on this is the potential impact of convergence on the curriculum:\nwhat do young people need to know about digital convergence?\nhow can we best equip them with the skills required in the modern world?\nAll of these questions and more will be addressed at this conversation.\nWho\u0026rsquo;s talking?\nThe conversation will be chaired by Philip Sheldrake and will begin with an expert\u0026rsquo;s take on the market before the debate is opened out.\nWho should attend?\nExperts in the field of digital education and those interested in it.\nWhy should I attend?\nWithin a closed, personal and informal setting, you will gain access to key industry players within a range of industries. With increased critical knowledge you are guaranteed to improve your business performance by taking part in hot debate amongst a dynamic group of people.\nHow much will it cost me?\nFree to anyone who is interested, this conversation is not to be missed.\nPlease remember that the Intellect Conference Suite is wireless enabled so you can network, catch-up on emails and do your \u0026rsquo;last minute\u0026rsquo; calls from Russell Square House, with full access to printing and refreshments before the meeting.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/convergence-conversation-the-21st-century-classroom-opportunities-for-digital-education/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe second convergence conversation of 2008 will be on the potential impact of converging technologies on education.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat\u0026rsquo;s being talked about?\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJim Knight, the schools\u0026rsquo; minister, recently announced that he wanted to allow parents to access \u0026lsquo;frequently-updated information on children\u0026rsquo;s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever parents want, using password-protected, secure, online systems\u0026rsquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere then is the potential impact of convergence on the delivery of education.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Convergence Conversation: The 21st century classroom - opportunities for digital education"},{"content":"As promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day:\nThe new rules of engagement - video by The Joined Up Company The Best of Broadband Advertising Awards, including RayBan … NOTE: this is the “no-man’s land”… when is simply influential content “advertising” and when is it stuff we do? The conflict I referred to between the wires and us going forward A good intro to Social Media Releases Abuse of Wikipedia by H\u0026amp;K subsidiary eBooks\nThe Art and Science of Blogger Relations The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations The New Rules of Viral Marketing Wikipedia\nFAQs ! Conflict of interest ! ___________________ And as a reward for getting this far (on the basis that you followed all the links above)… The truth in ad sales … these guys shouldn’t be too difficult to trounce!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/links-from-feb-away-day/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs promised, here’s the links relevant to all the stuff we discussed on Friday at the Away Day:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Links from Feb Away Day"},{"content":" Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress , another gadget update\u0026hellip;\nPhilips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year\u0026rsquo;s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a \u0026ldquo;mid-08\u0026rdquo; launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.\nIs it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon\u0026rsquo;s Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony .\nThe Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag\u0026rsquo;s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It\u0026rsquo;s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.\nIf this device succeeds, if this new gadget format lifts off, how will it change people\u0026rsquo;s media consumption habits? It definitely lends itself to longer text than you normally associate with consuming on a mobile phone. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t, for example, want to read anything much longer than 400-500 words on a phone of any variety currently on the market, but I can see I\u0026rsquo;d be happy to peruse essays and white papers running to 4000-5000 words on the Readius. Not quite books though.\nIn a world of increasingly short and fragmented info bits and bytes (SMS, micro-blogging a la Twitter et al, RSS headlines), perhaps the Readius will lead the recovery of more deliberate and deep information communication and absorption.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/readius-at-mobile-world-congress/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/?attachment_id=27200\"\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/readius.png\" title=\"readius\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\nFollowing \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/mobile-world-congress-tech-news-and-the-implications-for-marketers\"\u003emy earlier post from the Mobile World Congress\u003c/a\u003e\n, another gadget update\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePhilips spun off \u003ca href=\"http://www.polymervision.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ePolymer Vision\u003c/a\u003e\n in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year\u0026rsquo;s show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a \u0026ldquo;mid-08\u0026rdquo; launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eAmazon\u0026rsquo;s Kindle\u003c/a\u003e\n or the \u003ca href=\"http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551\u0026amp;storeId=10151\u0026amp;langId=-1\u0026amp;identifier=S_BrandShowcase_Reader\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eReader Digital Book from Sony\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag\u0026rsquo;s phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It\u0026rsquo;s pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Readius at Mobile World Congress"},{"content":"There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.\nThe 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that\u0026rsquo;s not even here. Apple.\nWhilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson\u0026rsquo;s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung\u0026rsquo;s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia\u0026rsquo;s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.\nThe mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people\u0026rsquo;s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.\nMobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.\nThe vast majority of Internet access in Japan and other leading Asian markets is already via mobile devices rather than traditional computers, and whilst the first one billion people got online with PCs, the next billion will skip straight to the phone.\nHere’s a few highlights for me from the event so far; unfortunately the one I was hoping for, the rumoured Nokia E71 , hasn’t materialised just yet.\nThe NEC femtocell – “The mobile Channel to the Home” Fed up with UK ADSL broadband providers advertising “up to 8Mbs” and then getting 4 or 5 if you’re lucky? Well Telefonica O2 and NEC have just announced a joint venture trialing 3G femtocells in the home . Here’s some extracts from their collateral:\n\u0026ldquo;Demand for 3G mobile voice and data services is accelerating. A large proportion, up to 70-80%, of these services are used indoors. However, there remain issues with 3G radio pentrating buildings.\n…Femtocells offer a cost-effective alternative. A femtocell is a 3G access point which has been developed as a consumer electronic device for use in buildings. Femtocells provide low-cost dedicated 3G coverage and capacity indoors, enabling a user with an existing mobile phone to access high-quality voice and high-speed mobile data services.”\nThe race to provide high bandwidth, high quality, always-on connectivity, any place any time, is heating up, and reassuringly there are competing, or perhaps I should say complementary, technologies to provide this service: 3G HSPA, fibre, DSL (broadband over telephone wires), metropolitan Wi-Fi meshes, and WiMAX.\nIf you are interested in convergence in general, you should keep an eye on Intellect’s regular reports this year in response to BERR’s newly formed convergence think tank .\nForm factors Everyone has an opinion on brick versus clamshell. Touch screens (newly in vogue thanks to the iPhone despite the unavoidable fingerprint smudging problems). Keyboard design. Thumbwheels. Screensize. Device dimensions and weight.\nIt becomes rapidly obvious that, as claimed above, one size will never fit all.\nKeyboards are the thing for me. Having been born early enough to have worn brown flares and cheese cloth shirts as a child, I have never been a speedy txt’er with a numeric keypad, and I’ve bloated my suit pockets with a Nokia E61 for the last 18 months just to have that qwerty convenience.\nA qwerty is a must-have as far as I’m concerned if I’m going to engage in non-voice dialogue with my phone. But with the E61 and E90 too big for the pocket by 2008 standards, and no sign of the E71 yet, I’ve been scouting round for something new. The best form factor in Barcelona today for me then comes in the form of two new i-mates… the 8502 and it’s bigger brother the 9502 with slide out keyboard .\nSaying that, the HTC TyTN II is pretty slick too.\nSo big tick-in-the-box for keyboard and form factor, but I won’t be placing an order any time soon. No-one can ever find their perfect phone, and these models are ruled out for me as I can’t get on with Windows Mobile. It just doesn’t have that Symbian quality.\nUltra-wide band (UWB) I’m increasingly impressed with the promise of UWB. Not that this is likely to be the acronym consumers will come to know, as it looks like, for good marketing reasons, a couple of existing brands will be hijacked for the introduction of UWB enabled capability. We’re likely to see “High speed Bluetooth” even though UWB shares little in common with common-all-garden Bluetooth. And “Wireless USB”, with UWB providing the wireless bit and not the USB bit.\nArtimi is the one to watch. They have earned a reputation for delivering without having over-promised. Imagine downloading a full-HD movie to your mobile device in 10 seconds for playback on a 1080p TV. Phone memory permitting, we’ll get this capability this decade. By the way, that’s my claim not necessarily Artimi’s.\nAlthough Blu-ray appears to have won over the competing HD-DVD standard, it will be interesting to see how long we actually need physical disks with high bandwidth wireless streaming in the home.\nOne-to-one The digital future is replete with convergent and divergent possibilities, acronyms, hyperbole, big hitters and sore losers. However things pan out, it’s clear that each and every year to come will provide new and exciting opportunities to those marketers with sufficient insight into the rapidly evolving digital world, the creativity and adaptability to develop new approaches and fresh formats to keep their campaign effectiveness ahead of the pack.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/mobile-world-congress-tech-news-and-the-implications-for-marketers/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that\u0026rsquo;s not even here. Apple.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Mobile%20World%20Congress%202008\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/MWC2008.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson\u0026rsquo;s 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung\u0026rsquo;s 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia\u0026rsquo;s 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people\u0026rsquo;s most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers"},{"content":"\nThe evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you\u0026rsquo;re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.\nReturn on investment The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia\u0026rsquo;s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia\u0026rsquo;s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client\u0026rsquo;s bottom line. \u0026ldquo;Creative\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;ROI\u0026rdquo; are not synonymous.\nThere are best practice evaluation guidelines. Our own approach for example combines the CIPR best practice recommendations with elements of Kaplan and Norton\u0026rsquo;s Balanced Scorecard. It secured full marks from the PRCA\u0026rsquo;s auditor, but a consistent return on investment calculation remains as stubborn a problem for us as the rest of the industry.\nLook to search We review and hone our measurement approach regularly, and our latest review is throwing up some interesting perspectives. Here\u0026rsquo;s one; a polemic more than a guiding principle at the moment…\nIf our campaigns strive to exert influence, isn\u0026rsquo;t Google search the ultimate measure of the influence achieved, and the change in that influence over time?\nA corollary to this is that the ultimate role of a marketing consultancy is SEO.\nBefore we identify the weaknesses in this claim, here are some supporting points of view:\nWith Google spidering most of the offline world (as that content is put online too), all online publications, forums, chat rooms, blogs and social networks, only a search engine can add up the cumulative effect of brand and product mentions and their association with key words, key phrases. The search engines strive to deliver the most relevant search results to users. Their algorithmic methods make this measure of relevance more or less equivalent to brand influence and brand momentum. The primary objective of PR, of all marketing disciplines, is to inculcate brand loyalty with current customers and attract new customers. If the Web is the most important channel to these targets forming an opinion of your brand and products, and if search is the way they get around the Web, then QED search is the ultimate measure of marketing campaign effectiveness. Not quite perfect Now for the flaws in the argument. We’ve identified a few, but here are the two primary objections.\nThe first is that today\u0026rsquo;s search engines ignore sentiment. Northern Rock currently comes pretty high in search engine results for some of its associated key words and phrases, but not for good reasons. Search engines today do not have well developed semantic analysis capability. In other words, they can’t distinguish between “Tell me about building societies with a good reputation” and “Tell me about building societies”.\nOur second objection is connected to my mantra that goes\u0026hellip;\nThe discontented spread their discontent. The neutral say nothing. The content say nothing. The delighted spread their delight.\nMany brands and products spend most of their time in the middle of this spectrum. Consider your own bank for example, or broadband provider, or mobile phone operator. Customers and prospects are either neutral or content and contribute nothing audible and nothing visible for any search engine to stuff into their mathematics. Yet the opinions residing unexpressed in the minds of customers and prospects will exert an influence next time they need to reach a buying decision.\nWe can\u0026rsquo;t envisage a future where our second objection to our argument here is shot down, but the potential of the Semantic Web, semantic analysis and interpretation, will have interesting ramifications for the measurement of marketing campaign effectiveness. Perhaps, even, helping build up that illusive ROI formula.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/02/does-your-campaign-measure-up-to-search/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"How%20influential%20is%20my%20campaign%3F\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/search.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you\u0026rsquo;re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"return-on-investment\"\u003eReturn on investment\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the \u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/onmedia-best-of-broadband-advertising-awards-2007\"\u003ewinners of OnMedia\u0026rsquo;s Best of Broadband Advertising awards\u003c/a\u003e\n, yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia\u0026rsquo;s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client\u0026rsquo;s bottom line. \u0026ldquo;Creative\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;ROI\u0026rdquo; are not synonymous.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Does your campaign measure up to search?"},{"content":"The OnMedia event this week in New York included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I\u0026rsquo;ve included my favourite of the bunch below. You can see all the winners here .\nProduced by Omnicon\u0026rsquo;s Cutwater (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that \u0026ldquo;goes viral\u0026rdquo;, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting content. This time the interesting comes in the form of \u0026ldquo;how did they do that?\u0026rdquo;, so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.\nCombine this with some Google SEO on the phrase \u0026ldquo;Never hide\u0026rdquo; scrawled in the dust of the car at the end of the video to point you to Ray-Ban, and you have entertainment combined with self-congratulations that you worked it out :-)\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/onmedia-best-of-broadband-advertising-awards-2007/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://alwayson.goingon.com/ecom/productview/20031\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOnMedia event this week in New York\u003c/a\u003e\n included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007.  I\u0026rsquo;ve seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I\u0026rsquo;ve included my favourite of the bunch below.  \u003ca href=\"http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/23421\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eYou can see all the winners here\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProduced by \u003ca href=\"http://www.cutwatersf.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOmnicon\u0026rsquo;s Cutwater\u003c/a\u003e\n (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that \u0026ldquo;goes viral\u0026rdquo;, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting content.  This time the interesting comes in the form of \u0026ldquo;how did they do that?\u0026rdquo;, so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007"},{"content":"The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - \u0026ldquo;Business urged to woo social network figures \u0026rdquo; - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be \u0026ldquo;Influential people are influential people, online or off\u0026rdquo;.\nBut it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though. I quote\u0026hellip;.\nGated Communities in Cyberspace The report on the future impact of social networking identifies another new direction that the phenomenon is taking – the “gated community”, where like-minded people engage in well-informed contact about very specialised subjects, but exclude others, writes Ben Fenton.\nNiche social networking sites, although not necessarily “gated”, include:\nMeshtennis.com – a site that sets people up with playing partners for tennis matches; Tripmate.com – a site that allows serious travellers to swap tips and link up to find someone to share journeys; Sneakerplay.com – an invitation-only site for people with a fascination for athletic footwear; PPrune.org – one of the earliest big forums, a get-together address for professional pilots and others in the aviation industry to exchange gossip and practical information; Electricians’ Talk – part of Screwfix.com, a DIY forum that at the last count had more than 300,000 messages on it ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/ft-writes-about-gated-communities-in-cyberspace/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c208f300-c2f5-11dc-b617-0000779fd2ac.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBusiness urged to woo social network figures\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be \u0026ldquo;Influential people are influential people, online or off\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though.  I quote\u0026hellip;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"FT writes about \u0026quot;Gated Communities in Cyberspace\u0026quot;"},{"content":"Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)\nDaylife \u0026ldquo;Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.\nDesigned to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:\nDiscover news and related perspectives from across the world\nExplore connections between stories and topics\nDive into stories from photos and quotes in the news\nTrack the coverage of virtually any topic\nThe pages are highly visual, easy to read, continuously updated, and endlessly clickable. Start from a story on the home page, or enter a search term.\u0026rdquo;\nParticls \u0026ldquo;Particls helps you track your favourite sites, topics and apps by displaying desktop alerts for important changes.\nThe web is just too big. No one has time to keep track of all the sites and topics that interest them. We all have real work to do and lives to live!\nSo what if you could subscribe to the sites and topics you like best and be notified when there is new information. Particls even works out how important the new information is to you and displays a proportional alert.\nFor example, general information can be displayed on a great looking desktop sidebar, important stuff might appear on a popup alert and urgent information coul d be SMS\u0026rsquo;d to your phone.\nThink of it like a highly advanced widget or filtered feed reader.\u0026rdquo;\noutside.in \u0026ldquo;Outside.in is the best way to discover the people, places and conversations in your community [US only].\nEnter your city, neighborhood, or zip code in the field below the map (on the home page), and start exploring your community. We\u0026rsquo;ve designed outside.in to be the best resource online for:\nKeeping up with news and opinions in your neighborhood Finding out the inside scoop on local places or events: schools, new real estate developments, playgrounds, bars Meeting interesting new neighbors, and sharing your local knowledge with them.\u0026rdquo; Bloxorz Thanks to my niece for introducing me to Bloxorz . 33 levels. They get harder.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/interesting-stuff-for-a-friday/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThree great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"daylife\"\u003eDaylife\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.daylife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/daylife.gif\"\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.daylife.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDaylife\u003c/a\u003e\n is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDesigned to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Interesting stuff for a Friday"},{"content":"\nThere are degrees of \u0026rsquo;local-ness\u0026rsquo;; after all, Paris is local to London relative to San Francisco. But if, as Graham Jones asserts , the Internet will have an equal if not greater impact \u0026rsquo;locally\u0026rsquo; than globally, what are the ramifications for content?\n\u0026lsquo;Local\u0026rsquo; is a hot topic,and last week\u0026rsquo;s Mashup Event was dedicated to the topic. IT enables personalisation of applications and services, and one\u0026rsquo;s locality must rank up there with all things personal.\nNow marry this with the increasing availability of high quality video content, and I\u0026rsquo;ve become fascinated by the opportunities and benefits of repurposing video content on the fly to match the viewer\u0026rsquo;s needs precisely.\nI\u0026rsquo;m compelled to make this post having watched last night\u0026rsquo;s first show of the new series of Ramsay\u0026rsquo;s Kitchen Nightmares . Always a f***ing entertaining show, I was gobsmacked by the revised editing style. I know. This series is Ramsay\u0026rsquo;s first in the US and comes out of Fox. I know. I\u0026rsquo;ve been to the US and witnessed US TV many times, although Fox is \u0026rsquo;exceptional\u0026rsquo;. Acknowledging that I\u0026rsquo;m making a sweeping generality, US editing is simply unpleasant viewing for a Norfolk boy with traditional British expectations and sensibilities\u0026hellip;\nWeird camera panning and zooming. Camera flash stylee transitions. Whooshing sound effects. Endless in-programme repeats of the best bits in case I\u0026rsquo;d been filling up my Coke glass whilst the maitre d\u0026rsquo; was tearing Ramsay\u0026rsquo;s face off. All in all, dreadful production values by the subjective standards of the UK.\nInnovative companies like Real Time Content have developed automated tools to compile a personalised \u0026ldquo;media experience\u0026rdquo; on the fly to adapt to the personal profile of each individual consumer. I wonder, can we adapt video content on the fly to cope with local needs, at all levels of \u0026rsquo;local\u0026rsquo;?\nIf technologies like Real Time Content\u0026rsquo;s can dedicate more time to the menu construction and recipes on Kitchen Nightmares for foodies, and emphasise the front-of-house shenanigans for reality TV junkies, could last night\u0026rsquo;s show also have been broadcast in the UK to match the editorial style of the previous UK series, automatically?\nAnd if video personalisation, including localisation, is a future reality, what will it mean for marketing communicators in designing and commissioning content?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/local-content-for-local-people/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/kitchen.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere are degrees of \u0026rsquo;local-ness\u0026rsquo;; after all, Paris is local to London relative to San Francisco. But if, as \u003ca href=\"http://www.marcomprofessional.com/posts/graham.jones/theinternet-isnt-global---its-local\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eGraham Jones asserts\u003c/a\u003e\n, the Internet will have an equal if not greater impact \u0026rsquo;locally\u0026rsquo; than globally, what are the ramifications for content?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026lsquo;Local\u0026rsquo; is a hot topic,and last week\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.mashupevent.com/event/local\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashup Event\u003c/a\u003e\n was dedicated to the topic. IT enables personalisation of applications and services, and one\u0026rsquo;s locality must rank up there with all things personal.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow marry this with the increasing availability of high quality video content, and I\u0026rsquo;ve become fascinated by the opportunities and benefits of repurposing video content on the fly to match the viewer\u0026rsquo;s needs precisely.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m compelled to make this post having watched last night\u0026rsquo;s first show of the new series of \u003ca href=\"http://www.fox.com/kitchennightmares\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRamsay\u0026rsquo;s Kitchen Nightmares\u003c/a\u003e\n. Always a f***ing entertaining show, I was gobsmacked by the revised editing style. I know. This series is Ramsay\u0026rsquo;s first in the US and comes out of Fox. I know. I\u0026rsquo;ve been to the US and witnessed US TV many times, although Fox is \u0026rsquo;exceptional\u0026rsquo;. Acknowledging that I\u0026rsquo;m making a sweeping generality, US editing is simply unpleasant viewing for a Norfolk boy with traditional British expectations and sensibilities\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Local Content For Local People"},{"content":"Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a marketing communications consultant\u0026rdquo;, you\u0026rsquo;ll also be saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m in IT\u0026rdquo;.\nComputers \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; numbers, and they can \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today\u0026rsquo;s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT.\nIn the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of Zara \u0026rsquo;s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT.\nThese professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it\u0026rsquo;s time for marketing communications. Let\u0026rsquo;s look at some numbers.\nMarketing communications last century Here\u0026rsquo;s a 20th Century PR campaign:\nYour campaign execution demands that you reach out to twenty journalists across your target publications and broadcast media; your tier 1. You might want to \u0026ldquo;spray\u0026rdquo; the rest too with a wire distribution. In effect then, you have 21 points of focus. A few target journalists are freelance and write for two or three key publications, so you have, say, three dozen media to track. The immediate campaign outcome consists of possible coverage across this media, and assessment of sentiment (good / neutral / bad) and readership. A clippings agency sweeps up the tertiary coverage for you, which you\u0026rsquo;ll treat as tier 2 and weight accordingly. A share of voice analysis reviews all coverage in your thirty odd tier 1 media, and teases out the mentions of your brand, your product, and those of your nearest competitors. How do you compare? You commission a research company to interview 1000 householders and ajudge their perceptions of your brand. The products of the variables here are in double and triple figures. Even though the market research breaks sweat at 1000 respondents, there\u0026rsquo;s no mathematical product here, just some some simple high school maths based on averages and spread.\nThis is low order complexity and manageable without IT.\nMarketing communications now Let\u0026rsquo;s look at a marketing communications dialogue in 2008. Technology has changed your landscape.\nCommunication / media technologies proliferate: email, chatrooms, forums, blogs, UGC sites, social networks, newsfeeds, mobile messaging, PVRs, gaming, etc. Media consumption is unrecognisable from 10 years ago Company-to-customer communication now competes for attention with customer-to-customer communication Not one newspaper can now command a readership over two million, yet many blogs do Active and passive customer-to-company communication is multi-channel and in the public domain The format of communication has expanded massively beyond the press release to include the social media release, blog posts, podcasts, video, virals etc. Ultimately, this means you now have many different ways and channels to engage with customers and prospects. They have many ways to engage with each other. Traditional market research is supplanted by continuous, active listening . You\u0026rsquo;re involved in thousands, possibly millions of relationships.\nWhen you multiply these numbers together it becomes immediately clear that you have incredibly massive complexity, at least relative to our industry\u0026rsquo;s history. We have way more permutations than a human can juggle. You\u0026rsquo;re in IT.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/youre-in-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMarketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. \u003cstrong\u003eFrom now on, when you say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a marketing communications consultant\u0026rdquo;, you\u0026rsquo;ll also be saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m in IT\u0026rdquo;\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eComputers \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; numbers, and they can \u0026lsquo;do\u0026rsquo; numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today\u0026rsquo;s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of \u003ca href=\"http://zara.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eZara\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rsquo;s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it\u0026rsquo;s time for marketing communications. Let\u0026rsquo;s look at some numbers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"You\u0026#039;re in IT"},{"content":"As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I\u0026rsquo;m used to analysing the difference between \u0026ldquo;winners\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;qualifiers\u0026rdquo;, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I\u0026rsquo;d forgotten about the donkeys.\nI was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc ’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.\nNevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn\u0026rsquo;t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all.\nOur plane didn\u0026rsquo;t arrive. It\u0026rsquo;s not that our plane was stuck in Birmingham rather than sweeping down to Gatwick to collect us. That was caused by fog. We understand that. Air Maroc has no influence over the weather. So on the basis that I\u0026rsquo;m starting off neutral towards Air Maroc here and my group of 4 adults and a baby is relatively philosophical about the weather, the ball is in Air Maroc\u0026rsquo;s court to simply keep 206 passengers warm, watered and informed.\nI won\u0026rsquo;t catalogue the comedy of communication errors in their entirety, but needless to say we\u0026rsquo;d have been relatively pleased in hindsight just to be warm. We were left for hours with no information (literally in the cold), which generated a rather interesting rumour mill amongst passengers. I\u0026rsquo;m sure no other profession could have derived an inkling of interest out of this, but watching how conjecture turned into fact in minutes almost made up for losing the feeling in our feet.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s worse. When staff did deign to tell us some \u0026ldquo;news\u0026rdquo;, they lied! In 2008. Face-to-face lies. Unbelievable.\nWe did make it to Marrakesh in the end - a tantalising city - and I now have a new \u0026ldquo;what not to do\u0026rdquo; study. Digital media relations is the most powerful channel marketing communicators have ever had to establish true two-way communication, and symmetrically. The ability to listen and engage rather than preach is unparalleled. An organisation can sensitise itself to customers\u0026rsquo; and prospects\u0026rsquo; needs, and direct this new sensing towards improved customer relations, improved pre- and post-sales support, improved new product development.\nAir Maroc could have had 206 returning customers, with a sprinkling of advocates amongst them for their adept communication skills. Instead, I have no doubt whatsoever that they now have 206 people convincing others not to fly Air Maroc.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2008/01/foggy-communications/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I\u0026rsquo;m used to analysing the difference between \u0026ldquo;winners\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;qualifiers\u0026rdquo;, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I\u0026rsquo;d forgotten about the donkeys.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Air%20Maroc%20logo\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Royal_Air_Maroc_Logo.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of \u003ca href=\"http://www.royalairmaroc.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRoyal Air Maroc\u003c/a\u003e\n’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn\u0026rsquo;t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Foggy communications"},{"content":"Hi,\nI thought I\u0026rsquo;d post up the occasional video from some of our industry\u0026rsquo;s thought leaders, particularly ones that have influenced me over the years.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also an opportunity for me to use MarCom Professional\u0026rsquo;s new feature\u0026hellip; private social networks.\nWhat better chap to start with than Seth Godin . Here he is on form at TED in 2003. Yes, I know that\u0026rsquo;s relatively old, but it\u0026rsquo;s only now that we\u0026rsquo;re seeing the realisation of his vision, and it still looks very new to many people.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/12/industry-thought-leaders-video-series/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHi,\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI thought I\u0026rsquo;d post up the occasional video from some of our industry\u0026rsquo;s thought leaders, particularly ones that have influenced me over the years.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s also an opportunity for me to use MarCom Professional\u0026rsquo;s new feature\u0026hellip; private social networks.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat better chap to start with than \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Godin\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eSeth Godin\u003c/a\u003e\n. Here he is on form at \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTED\u003c/a\u003e\n in 2003. Yes, I know that\u0026rsquo;s relatively old, but it\u0026rsquo;s only now that we\u0026rsquo;re seeing the realisation of his vision, and it still looks very new to many people.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Industry thought leaders... video series"},{"content":"Brilliant. I have never seen such a collection of awesome and influencing advertising in one place. What\u0026rsquo;s more, you don\u0026rsquo;t even realise you\u0026rsquo;re watching an advert!\nA must watch.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/12/the-new-rules-of-engagement/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBrilliant. I have never seen such a collection of awesome and influencing advertising in one place. What\u0026rsquo;s more, you don\u0026rsquo;t even realise you\u0026rsquo;re watching an advert!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA must watch.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The New Rules of Engagement"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year.\nThe biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see.\nThis has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it.\n\u0026ldquo;Marketing to the Social Web \u0026rdquo; is the perfect introduction to what\u0026rsquo;s changed and what\u0026rsquo;s to come. Larry did a podcast with On The Record if you need something fresh for your iPod.\nA post by Graham Jones (Internet Psychologist) on MarCom Professional raises a new perspective… Social Networks aren’t just a new way to engage with stakeholders, they actually represent a new person-to-person communication media that replaces more traditional methods such as email.\nThe first prediction for 2007 we made back in January , under the heading “Web 2.0”, was massive growth in social networks. We thought Myspace growth would level off (that’s active users not the irrelevant “accounts”), but that the action would move to the next big thing.\nWhilst stats for Myspace are too few and far between to confirm numbers precisely, the consensus appears to be that it has grown this year, but Facebook has grown considerably faster. If Friendster lost its way to Myspace, and Myspace risks losing its way to Facebook (and Bebo), what exactly does Facebook need to do to lock its value in? “Facebook is a Beacon for Bad PR ” highlights what they shouldn’t be doing!\nWe also anticipated 2007 being the year for mobile VoIP. Last week’s Economist has a super article giving a run down on everything that’s happened this year, not least of which is the partnership of Skype and 3, and the big noise about Google’s Android.\nWe got some things wrong, but we did anticipate the poor reception of Vista, the continued rise of Firefox, the bumper year for BI (business intelligence) and the struggles for Digg .\nDid I say we got some things wrong? Surely what I meant was that we were just a little early in our predictions :-). Watch this space for our foolhardy stab at predicting 2008.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/12/2007-the-year-of-social-networking/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/Christmas%20Snow%20preview.jpg\"\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"2007 - The Year of Social Networking"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;If Facebook is the Cathedral, who owns the bazaar?\u0026rdquo;\nThis evening\u0026rsquo;s Mashup Event , hosted this time at Merrill Lynch\u0026rsquo;s London HQ, focused on Social Networks. It was the busiest of the series to date; at over 200 attendees it was twice the size of the one I chaired earlier this year. So congratulations to Simon and Tony on making it happen.\nSocial networking has arrived. I can say this on the sole basis that we were in less-than-5-star hotel venues not long ago, and now we\u0026rsquo;re hosted by one of the world\u0026rsquo;s biggest investment banks! Moreover, the breadth of attendees is growing as more and more employers and leaders become interested in how Mashups affect their business, affect their markets, affect their lives.\nThis is beneficial as the event inculcates interactions, questions and comment from a wider cross-section. But this can also frustrate the process when varying levels of insight come together and talk at different levels. Take the first sentence of this post for example; a quote taken from tonight\u0026rsquo;s event which obviously comes from someone confusing open and proprietary approaches to social networking with Eric Raymond \u0026rsquo;s distinctions between different software engineering models.\nNow I don\u0026rsquo;t want to sound like a geek, because I have gaps in my knowledge too. (For example, I learned things tonight from Chris Seth, the UK MD for Piczo , about creating social networks for kids.) Rather, what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to say is that I think I learned something this evening about social networking that wasn\u0026rsquo;t even discussed\u0026hellip;\nEfficient social networks should allow you to find your level for any given topic.\nSo, for example, as a social professional network like MarCom Professional attracts thousands of members and tens of thousands of posts, each and every member should help rate content; not just for quality, news worthiness or entertainment value, but also for the level it\u0026rsquo;s pitched at. Or perhaps this is implicit to the links to it and from it, and the kind of members who\u0026rsquo;ve read it, linked to it and commented on it? Not just a pagerank in Googlespeak, but a \u0026ldquo;memberrank\u0026rdquo;.\nEither way, this convergence of social networking and knowledge management approaches is going to be valuable in so-called Enterprise 2.0, and for consumer facing sites too. It will start to make simply sending virtual fish, vampire bites and buckets of cold sick to each other appear very 2007.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/11/social-network-levelling/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;If Facebook is the Cathedral, who owns the bazaar?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis evening\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.mashupevent.com/event/social-networking-primary-research-results\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashup Event\u003c/a\u003e\n, hosted this time at Merrill Lynch\u0026rsquo;s London HQ, focused on Social Networks. It was the busiest of the series to date; at over 200 attendees it was twice the size of the one I chaired earlier this year. So congratulations to Simon and Tony on making it happen.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSocial networking has arrived. I can say this on the sole basis that we were in less-than-5-star hotel venues not long ago, and now we\u0026rsquo;re hosted by one of the world\u0026rsquo;s biggest investment banks! Moreover, the breadth of attendees is growing as more and more employers and leaders become interested in how \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashups\u003c/a\u003e\n affect their business, affect their markets, affect their lives.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Social Network Levelling"},{"content":"What better way to communicate the DOs and DON\u0026rsquo;Ts in a media training class than by example. Here\u0026rsquo;s one for your training collateral. It is an extreme case; I mean how dare anyone mention Apple iTunes and monopolistic behaviour in the same question?!\nPhilip Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing is featured being interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK.\nThe interview is brought to a rapid close when the interviewer asks \u0026ldquo;Are you acting in a sort of monopoly way?\u0026quot;. Schiller can\u0026rsquo;t cope with this (whoops, poor media preparation) and looks to his PRs to intercept and take him away from this bad man.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/11/apple-provides-media-training-collateral/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat better way to communicate the DOs and DON\u0026rsquo;Ts in a media training class than by example. Here\u0026rsquo;s one for your training collateral. It is an extreme case; I mean how dare anyone mention Apple iTunes and monopolistic behaviour in the same question?!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePhilip Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing is featured being interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe interview is brought to a rapid close when the interviewer asks \u0026ldquo;Are you acting in a sort of monopoly way?\u0026quot;.  Schiller can\u0026rsquo;t cope with this (whoops, poor media preparation) and looks to his PRs to intercept and take him away from this bad man.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Apple provides media training collateral"},{"content":"I want to sound you out about time. More specifically, billing, prompted by a recent article in the current edition of Business Week.\nAnd what\u0026rsquo;s happened to Business Week? I was so confused by the format changes that I decided to Google the reason for it, and we\u0026rsquo;re told the redesign is inspired by the design imperatives of the Web.\nBut, not being funny or anything, if I wanted Web I\u0026rsquo;d go to businessweek.com . Surely, if print is threatened by the big WWW, then differentiation is the key to success, not assimilation?\nAnyway\u0026hellip; time.\nThe article \u0026ldquo;Shirking Working: The War on Hooky \u0026rdquo; focuses, as the title suggests, predominantly on dealing with the relatively modern (as in decades) phenomena of so-called sickies. But there\u0026rsquo;s a quote towards the end from IBM\u0026rsquo;s Dan Pelino on the wider issue of judging-by-results and not the ticking of the minute hand: \u0026ldquo;Tracking time is passé; we could never go back.\u0026rdquo; Even Best Buy has adopted an approach whereby \u0026ldquo;employees are evaluated on their output, not their hours.\u0026rdquo;\nHow does this translate to marketing communications consultancies? Whilst I might find a few minutes in the month to chew this over, I was reminded of a blog I stumbled across a few weeks ago by a lady called Sam Ladner who has dedicated years to the subject. She is undertaking a PhD in \u0026ldquo;Work, Time and Interactive Agencies \u0026rdquo;, with this preface:\n\u0026ldquo;The notion of \u0026ldquo;billable hours\u0026rdquo; makes interactive agencies intriguing places to study work and time. Like law firms, interactive agencies rely on billing their clients for the work their workers complete. This practice \u0026ndash; which requires detailed tracking of hours, projects, and budgets of time \u0026ndash; conflicts with what we know about creative work.\nCreative work typically requires focused, intensive, and often undirected time. Where might this fit with the model of billable hours?\u0026rdquo;\nIf you have the time, no pun intended, then this post on her blog is a good place to begin to understand her rationale and conclusions . In short, she feels that \u0026ldquo;billable hours\u0026rdquo; are history (oooh, another pun).\nIf I can try to condense her PhD into a couple of sentences:\n1. Time and results aren\u0026rsquo;t linked in creative agency, so the only reason to log time is to demonstrate effort to the client\n2. However, all time sheets are inaccurate without exception, and everyone knows it, so time sheets serve to teach workers to internalize billable time, whereby billable is good and non-billable is bad.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to discuss this with my colleagues and industry contacts and come back with a follow-up post. Love your input if you have any thoughts\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/11/time/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI want to sound you out about time. More specifically, billing, prompted by a recent article in the current edition of Business Week.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd what\u0026rsquo;s happened to Business Week?  I was so confused by the format changes that I decided to Google the reason for it, and we\u0026rsquo;re told the redesign is inspired by the design imperatives of the Web.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/businessweek2008.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut, not being funny or anything, if I wanted Web I\u0026rsquo;d go to \u003ca href=\"http://www.businessweek.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ebusinessweek.com\u003c/a\u003e\n. Surely, if print is threatened by the big WWW, then differentiation is the key to success, not assimilation?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Time"},{"content":"Here at Racepoint we\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the ramifications of one of my previous posts, \u0026ldquo;Continuous engagement\u0026hellip; the death of market research \u0026rdquo;. A particular area of interest is the way in which we might help companies interact with stakeholders other than via text-based media.\nYes, I know there\u0026rsquo;s the telephone too, but following the tenet that restricting the channel can only restrict the quantity and quality of interaction, how else can we reach out and engage?\nWe have no definite answers yet, but I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share some of the visual / graphic tools we have taken a look at. In particular, I\u0026rsquo;d love to know if anyone out there has any experience of or perspectives on this genre of tools.\nSketchcast The first up is Sketchcast . A simple but unexpectedly enticing (or is that just me?) concept. Here\u0026rsquo;s a sketch demonstrating my artistic capabilities\u0026hellip;\nImagination Cubed An experiment from GE, Imagination Cubed is a simple and compelling service that permits up to three people to collaborate on a diagram.\nGliffy Adopting a more formal approach than Sketchcast and Imagination Cubed, Gliffy is more of the ilk of productivity software ported to the Web. In this vein, perhaps we can expect similar innovation from ThinkFree , Zoho and Google Docs in the future?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/11/graphic-engagement/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHere at \u003ca href=\"http://www.racepointgroup.com/\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eRacepoint\u003c/a\u003e\n we\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the ramifications of one of my previous posts, \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/philip.sheldrake/continuous-engagement...-the-death-of-market-research\"\u003eContinuous engagement\u0026hellip; the death of market research\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo;. A particular area of interest is the way in which we might help companies interact with stakeholders other than via text-based media.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYes, I know there\u0026rsquo;s the telephone too, but following the tenet that restricting the channel can only restrict the quantity and quality of interaction, how else can we reach out and engage?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Graphic engagement"},{"content":"When historians write up 2007, they will surely highlight three things. Of course there\u0026rsquo;s the subprime mortgage disaster and the reunion of the Spice Girls (a subprime pop group?), but my topic here is the mega marketing clash of the huge tech titans.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been in tech for some years now, but unless it\u0026rsquo;s a case of the nearer the clearer, I can\u0026rsquo;t recall such furiously fought marketing battles.\nThe last big battles, by popular concensus, were won by Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Internet Explorer and Google\u0026rsquo;s search. They appeared to trounce the competition, the first by anticompetitive practices according to the European Union, and the second by peer-beating capability. Do you recall an advert for IE or Google?\nBut now, possibly as the functional differentiation narrows between competing products and services, the marketing strategy becomes more important than ever. There\u0026rsquo;s increasing emphasis on depositioning, the skill with which one organisation can take the wind out of the competitor\u0026rsquo;s sails.\nAnd that takes me to this afternoon\u0026rsquo;s anticipated Google announcement. Just days before the iPhone is due to debut in markets outside the US, just weeks before consumers consider their Christmas mobile phone options, Google calls a press conference. The message (I think!)\u0026hellip; Google owns mobile too.\nNow I might be putting my neck on the line here, and we\u0026rsquo;ll know within hours, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the launch of a much-rumoured GPhone, but the official announcement of the very fact that a GPhone project exists and what they\u0026rsquo;re planning. And why? Just to keep the Google momentum going.\nWith no real success since search (1998) and maps (2005), Google has had to rely on simple World dominance to sustain share of voice; no small thing of course! But, as 9 years have passed since the last major search engine innovation (Google\u0026rsquo;s pagerank algorithm) and as Google makes 80 per cent of its profits from ads served on its search page, they must be nervous that someone could sweep their lead away. Remember Alta Vista? (See Newsweek\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Searching for a better search engine\u0026rdquo; for an incisive summary of the search market.)\nAnd Google isn\u0026rsquo;t the only example I could have taken here. Microsoft finds itself in a similar position, as do Dell and Yahoo!\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot riding on tech marketing in 2008. Long regarded part of the armoury for attacking a market, it\u0026rsquo;s now needed as much for defence as offence in tech markets.\n______________________\nUpdate 18:03 GMT\nYep, Google has announced their new wireless initiative, due second half of 2008.\n\u0026ldquo;SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 — Google took its long-awaited plunge into the wireless world today, announcing that it is leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers that could accelerate the convergence of computing and communications.\nMobile phones based on Google’s software are not expected to be available until the second half of next year\u0026hellip;.\u0026rdquo;\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/technology/05cnd-gphone.html ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/11/on-the-defensive-with-tech-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen historians write up 2007, they will surely highlight three things. Of course there\u0026rsquo;s the subprime mortgage disaster and the reunion of the Spice Girls (a subprime pop group?), but my topic here is the mega marketing clash of the huge tech titans.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been in tech for some years now, but unless it\u0026rsquo;s a case of the nearer the clearer, I can\u0026rsquo;t recall such furiously fought marketing battles.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe last big battles, by popular concensus, were won by Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Internet Explorer and Google\u0026rsquo;s search. They appeared to trounce the competition, the first by anticompetitive practices according to the European Union, and the second by peer-beating capability. Do you recall an advert for IE or Google?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On the defensive with tech marketing"},{"content":"FEMA External Communications\u0026hellip; information for job applicants. Please check your answers to the following questions:\nQuestion 1. On calling a press conference, should you give the press\u0026hellip;?\nA. at least one hour\u0026rsquo;s notice\nB. 17 minutes\u0026rsquo; notice\nQuestion 2. If no press turn up, should you\u0026hellip; ?\nA. postpone the conference;\nB. get your co-workers to stand in as journalists in front of the nation\u0026rsquo;s live broadcasting cameras.\nHow did you do? If you answered \u0026ldquo;B\u0026rdquo; to all questions, please send your CV to the Office of the Communications Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 20472.\nIf invited to interview, you will want to study the following video to see how it\u0026rsquo;s done. You will be tested on this subject matter.\n[Guardian coverage ]\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/a-press-conference-with-one-thing-missing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFEMA External Communications\u0026hellip; information for job applicants. Please check your answers to the following questions:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"question-1\"\u003eQuestion 1.\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn calling a press conference, should you give the press\u0026hellip;?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA. at least one hour\u0026rsquo;s notice\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB. 17 minutes\u0026rsquo; notice\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"question-2\"\u003eQuestion 2.\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf no press turn up, should you\u0026hellip; ?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA. postpone the conference;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eB. get your co-workers to stand in as journalists in front of the nation\u0026rsquo;s live broadcasting cameras.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"how-did-you-do\"\u003eHow did you do?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you answered \u0026ldquo;B\u0026rdquo; to all questions, please send your CV to the Office of the Communications Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 20472.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A press conference with one thing missing"},{"content":"ESPN pulled the plug on their cell-phone product after investing $150m including $40m in advertising. This is precisely the failure market research is intended to prevent. How can business harness customers and prospective customers to improve their hit rate and time to market?\nThe following simple figures demonstrate the difference between traditional market research and continuous engagement.\nThere are dozens of differences between the two approaches. Research is ad-hoc or at regular intervals whereas continuous engagement is, well, continuous. Research is one-way, and engagement is two-way. Research is devoid of any direct brand benefit (and research purists will claim this is beneficial) whereas continuous engagement inculcates brand loyalty. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of the primary differences:\nResearch is ad hoc or regular interval; engagement is continuous Research is one-way (+ prize or payment!); engagement is two-way (mutually rewarding) Research is unemotional; engagement is emotional Research is independent of loyalty; engagement inculcates brand loyalty Research has a tight focus; engagement has a wide focus Research deals with sequential parameters; engagement is multi-parametric Research is designed to achieve statistical confidence; engagement is designed to detect weak signals. The disadvantages of traditional market research Ad hoc or regular intervals Your last data set getting on a bit? Trying to read between the lines because the last survey didn’t ask exactly the question you now need answering? Is your market speeding up relative to your research frequency? Do you need to ask new questions, but want to continue trending previous survey data? One-way What’s in it for your respondents? Ever wondered if they’re answering your questions conscientiously? Are they likely to benefit or suffer as a consequence of the information they share with you? Unemotional Quite simply, do they care? Independent of loyalty Ad hoc, one-way, unemotional interaction does not drive brand loyalty. Tight focus How long can you keep them interested for the remote chance of winning an iPod? Once you’ve collected the demographics, how long remains to get to the crux? By what degree can you change the subject? How many times can you change the subject before their brain starts hurting? Confidence After all that, it’s no wonder you need some mathematics to determine the statistical confidence.\nSocial media The best way to understand your customers, is to have a relationship with them. Online. On the mobile. In store.\nSocial media is defined on Wikipedia today as:\n“the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how they share and create content for others to participate. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format between authors and people\u0026quot;.\nMore simply, we define social media in the context here as:\n“all integrated channels through which you can get people discussing you and your market, with each other and with you\u0026quot;.\nWide focus Anything and everything is discussed by your customers in social forums. For each topic, you can choose to interact or just listen.\nYou can also seed the forums with topics relevant to your business tomorrow, not just today. Test their reaction. Harvest value-added feedback; qualitative and quantitative.\nMulti-parametric Traditional research addresses a limited sequence of parameters, whereas social media can embrace multiple parameters.\nNevertheless, your product roadmap may encompass hundreds of parametric permutations. In this instance, you could chose to present ideas based on “runs\u0026quot; (parameter groupings based on Taguchi orthogonal arrays) to your most loyal and valued social media participants.\nDetect weak signals Weak signals are easily overlooked in traditional research. But understanding how to identify the most authoritative members in your social media, and learning to listen to them, can place you weeks if not months ahead of your competition in timely new product launches.\nNew skills Supplanting or supplementing market research with continuous engagement requires:\nA new strategy An implementation framework New analyses methods Sound corporate performance measurement to close the loop For and against Unsurprisingly, there are advocates and detractors from this point of view. Take an interview with Bill Neal of SDR Consulting for example:\n\u0026ldquo;..But I have some real problems with consumer generated media as a source of credible and reliable information. In many ways it combines the worst elements of non-scientific research – self selection and advocacy – both positive and negative.\nThe information they generate may be true, or not true – there is no way to discern which. Therefore, the information generated by those folks is neither credible nor reliable.\u0026rdquo;\nHowever, this perspective could not be more strongly countered by the assertions made in the Cluetrain manifesto :\n\u0026ldquo;A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter - and getting smarter faster than most companies.\nThese markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can\u0026rsquo;t be faked.\u0026rdquo;\nOK, continuous engagement may not signal the death of traditional market research, but it marks a distinct and influential turning point; a turning point leading companies are adopting today for competitive advantage.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/continuous-engagement-the-death-of-market-research/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_44/b4007026.htm\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eESPN pulled the plug on their cell-phone product\u003c/a\u003e\n after investing $150m including $40m in advertising. This is precisely the failure market research is intended to prevent. How can business harness customers and prospective customers to improve their hit rate and time to market?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe following simple figures demonstrate the difference between traditional market research and continuous engagement.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/traditionalmarketresearch.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/continuousengagementloop.png\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere are dozens of differences between the two approaches. Research is ad-hoc or at regular intervals whereas continuous engagement is, well, continuous. Research is one-way, and engagement is two-way. Research is devoid of any direct brand benefit (and research purists will claim this is beneficial) whereas continuous engagement inculcates brand loyalty. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of the primary differences:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Continuous engagement... the death of market research"},{"content":"There are people who claim to be natural communicators and there are those who struggle to get their point across. Most client teams have a mixture of the gifted and the frustrated – the natural order of things some might say. But this mix of skills in the workplace can lead to basic communication problems that disrupt progress. What we need is a framework to help train teams to communicate effectively.\nAt work, we have a chocolate box paradox of communications – so many choices but not enough guidance or understanding of how to select. Is it the orange crème or the caramel? Face-to-face conversation or email? The wrong choice can lead to difficulties – lukewarm relationships, misunderstandings, an inability to communicate bad news properly..\nHow do we get to grips with these choices? We should start with the dimensions of communication:\nCommunities and organisations have long grappled with finding the best combination of dimension variables. The (relatively) recent proliferation of communication media has not only increased the choice, but upset previously understood frameworks for effective and successful communication. How many of us complain about not getting enough email? How has Instant Messenger impacted your culture? How many orders have you given via text message?\nTraining to choose We have a myriad of choices – but we must understand how to choose the communication medium that best suits our objectives and the objectives of the business. And on to the useful bit: here’s a guide to structuring the core of a training course in selecting the right communication medium for the task at hand. Many of the world\u0026rsquo;s most successful companies run these courses for their employees – so its not puffery – it sits at the heart of their commitment to quality:\nAsk your team to identify all the communication media available to them – the variety may well surprise once they are written down Ask them to identify what factors influence their choice of media – they know when they think about it! Ask them to work out how each factor influences their choice – a good topic for a lively debate, especially for email addicts Split them into groups and ask each group to produce a list of half a dozen different reasons to communicate at work. Swap group lists and ask each group to propose a suitable communication medium for each instance – especially interesting when groups coincide with the internal customer - supplier functions, or reporting lines Ask them to record their findings and formalise recommendations. Photocopy the result, staple or bind, and distribute as the basis for their take home training notes – more relevant to them than some prescribed infliction! If you are the training owner or facilitator, you can use the following diagram, “The way to say what you have to say”, as a guide or prompt.\nNo more hiding behind email.. For people afraid to pick up the \u0026lsquo;phone, for those who are blunt on email and blunt their relationships as a result. For those of us who are confrontational or passive, those with confidence and without. Don\u0026rsquo;t underestimate the importance of communication – set guidelines, train your people and measure the results.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/the-chocolate-box-paradox/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere are people who claim to be natural communicators and there are those who struggle to get their point across. Most client teams have a mixture of the gifted and the frustrated – the natural order of things some might say. But this mix of skills in the workplace can lead to basic communication problems that disrupt progress. What we need is a framework to help train teams to communicate effectively.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Chocolate Box Paradox"},{"content":"Part of Intellect\u0026rsquo;s Convergence Conversation series, the next one is on the 25th October 2007 - \u0026ldquo;Advertising in the age of convergence\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip;\nWhat is the conversation about? Advertising in the age of convergence will look at how new technologies are affecting the advertising industry. At a time where internet advertising spend is now twice the size of outdoor advertising and consumer magazines, and three times the size of radio advertising, how will advertisers adapt their strategies and business models to ensure revenue?\nWhat solutions can new technologies provide? How should companies get their message across, now that people consume across platforms, away from broadcast schedules and on the move? All of these questions and more will be addressed by our panel of experts and our interested conversationalists.\nWho is leading the conversation? The conversation will be chaired by Ved Sen and will begin with an experts\u0026rsquo; take on the market before the debate is opened out. The experts are:\nJohn Woodget - UK MD of Intel Jonathon Collett - Director of Communications - The Advertising Association Charlie Horrell - CEO - Packetvision Dean Donaldson - Business Development Manager - eyeblaster Adrian Swift - Director of Television - etv Nicolas Roope - Co Founder - Poke London Who can attend? The experts and the interested.\nWhen and where? Thursday 25 October 2007, 5.30pm drinks, 6.00pm start, 8pm finish. From there on, the last Thursday of every month.\nIntellect, Russell Square House, 10-12 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5EE .\nHow do I register? To register for this event reply to sam.ingleby@intellectuk.org or call 02073312161. To read more about the convergence conversations visit:\nhttp://www.intellectuk.org/policy/committees/cc/default.asp Sam Ingleby\nDigital Communications Programme Manager\nIntellect\nRussell Square House 10-12\nRussell Square\nLondon\nWC1B 5EE\nT: +44 (0) 20 7331 2000\nF: +44 (0) 20 7331 2040\nDD: + 44 (0) 20 7331 2161\nE: sam.ingleby@intellectuk.org ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/advertising-in-the-age-of-convergence-25th-oct-2007/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePart of Intellect\u0026rsquo;s Convergence Conversation series, the next one is on the 25th October 2007 - \u0026ldquo;Advertising in the age of convergence\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-is-the-conversation-about\"\u003eWhat is the conversation about?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAdvertising in the age of convergence will look at how new technologies are affecting the advertising industry. At a time where internet advertising spend is now twice the size of outdoor advertising and consumer magazines, and three times the size of radio advertising, how will advertisers adapt their strategies and business models to ensure revenue?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Advertising in the Age of Convergence 25th Oct 2007"},{"content":"I have always admired the UK\u0026rsquo;s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century\u0026rsquo;s rules to this one. Now I know rules don\u0026rsquo;t just expire, but equally, they don\u0026rsquo;t just stay relevant untouched, and the legal underpin for the NLA\u0026rsquo;s stance surely demands review. If 2007 marks the year music companies reviewed their attitude toward digital rights management, then it\u0026rsquo;s time the NLA got real too.\nBut whilst we have been a NLA license holder for many years, it was only from reading a recent email sent by the NLA to a client that I was shocked to see the NLA want their cake and eat it.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the scenario.\nAgency X collects the opinions expressed by others about client Y; as any self-respecting PR consultancy would. They scan them for display on an extranet; as any self-respecting PR consultancy would. The client reads them on the extranet; as any self-respecting client would.\nNow to many people, this is not a copyright issue. This is not copying original work for the sake of republishing it to the republisher\u0026rsquo;s profit\u0026hellip; this is simply logging a public voice contributing to an organisation\u0026rsquo;s public reputation. However, I feel this point is too far removed from the accepted norm to spur support, so you should know this is not the point I\u0026rsquo;m making. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling only sufficiently brave to question the NLA\u0026rsquo;s desire to tax us twice. Here\u0026rsquo;s how\u0026hellip;\nThe process described above requires both the agency and the client to have a license.\nNow there may be associated activity for which this dual licensing could be justified, but my assertion here is that it appears dual licenses are required for the restricted practice described above alone. Can this be right? Isn\u0026rsquo;t it all just slightly anachronistic? Or, more simply, just a bit nutty!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/nla-agency-or-anachronism/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have always admired the UK\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.nla.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNewspaper Licensing Agency\u003c/a\u003e\n for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century\u0026rsquo;s rules to this one. Now I know rules don\u0026rsquo;t just expire, but equally, they don\u0026rsquo;t just stay relevant untouched, and the legal underpin for the NLA\u0026rsquo;s stance surely demands review. If 2007 marks the year music companies reviewed their attitude toward digital rights management, then it\u0026rsquo;s time the NLA got real too.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"NLA, Agency or Anachronism?"},{"content":"This conference looks interesting. Can\u0026rsquo;t make it myself, but it would be good to hear if anyone else is down to go, and then to get your post-event report.\nhttp://www.resultsinternationalgroup.com/events/global_dynamics.html Marcoms businesses are looking constantly for new ways to serve their clients, and to grow and develop. The Results International 2007 Global conference explores the latest trends and practices in successfully achieving, funding and managing emerging growth opportunities. Some businesses have chosen the route of international expansion into new or high growth emerging markets; others are targeting new and emerging technologies in the digital space.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/global-dynamics-event-2nd-nov-2007/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis conference looks interesting.  Can\u0026rsquo;t make it myself, but it would be good to hear if anyone else is down to go, and then to get your post-event report.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.resultsinternationalgroup.com/events/global_dynamics.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003ehttp://www.resultsinternationalgroup.com/events/global_dynamics.html\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarcoms businesses are looking constantly for new ways to serve their clients, and to grow and develop. The Results International 2007 Global conference explores the latest trends and practices in successfully achieving, funding and managing emerging growth opportunities. Some businesses have chosen the route of international expansion into new or high growth emerging markets; others are targeting new and emerging technologies in the digital space.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Global Dynamics event 2nd Nov 2007"},{"content":"According to Mark Imrie, formerly Head of Products for O2 and now Head of CRM and online capability, \u0026ldquo;MMS was a technology-led service that was rushed to market\u0026rdquo;. Quoted in Billing World last month, Mark succinctly explains the lacklustre performance of MMS to date. But where next? What\u0026rsquo;s required for MMS to take off in 2008?\nI\u0026rsquo;d say it boils down to phone design, pricing and applications, and these three are coming together nicely to form the perfect storm next year.\nThe clumsiness of early camera phones is history, and user interfaces (with the potential exception of Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s) have evolved to make MMS a joy. Coupled with improved optics and resolution, the modern mobile phone simply teases marketers.\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s the cost. As operators seek to monetise MMS indirectly, via us marketers no doubt, and as they get more efficient at shifting data round their infrastructure, flat rate data tarrifs are accompanied by flat rate messaging.\nLastly, the applications. Web 2.0 has spawned new opportunities and new applications of MMS. Moblogging, photo websites, social networking, all tempt the mobile phone customer to keep in touch; and a picture paints a thousand words. And marketers aren\u0026rsquo;t hanging back. My favourite stories of recent weeks capitalise on similar technology.\nUniversal ran a promotion for the launch of \u0026ldquo;The Bourne Ultimatum\u0026rdquo; in August tempting fans to take a photo of the ad and send it in, receiving free mobile content in return. And Craze Production, the urban music specialist, is inviting consumers to send in pictures of a CD or gig poster which, with the magic of image recognition, rewards the consumer with relevant links to ringtones, video clips, concert tickets and other information.\nIf MMS features in your marketing programme, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you\u0026rsquo;re doing.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/mms-the-perfect-storm/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAccording to Mark Imrie, formerly Head of Products for O2 and now Head of CRM and online capability, \u0026ldquo;MMS was a technology-led service that was rushed to market\u0026rdquo;.  Quoted in Billing World last month, Mark succinctly explains the lacklustre performance of MMS to date.  But where next? What\u0026rsquo;s required for MMS to take off in 2008?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d say it boils down to phone design, pricing and applications, and these three are coming together nicely to form the perfect storm next year.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"MMS - the perfect storm"},{"content":"Wonder if this might prove useful? Here\u0026rsquo;s some fun to start with, with your next holiday in mind\u0026hellip;\nVideoJug : How To Fold A T-Shirt In 2 Seconds - Explained ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/the-first-post-to-the-racepoint-intranet/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWonder if this might prove useful?  Here\u0026rsquo;s some fun to start with, with your next holiday in mind\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"http://www.videojug.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eVideoJug\u003c/a\u003e\n: \u003ca href=\"http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-fold-a-t-shirt-in-2-seconds-explained\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eHow To Fold A T-Shirt In 2 Seconds - Explained\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The first post to the Racepoint intranet!"},{"content":"Just had a look on the members page and found that the Marketing Director of The First Post , Mario Tilney Bassett, has joined the network. From their website:\nThe First Post is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.\nI wanted to post about The First Post simply because I\u0026rsquo;m a fan. I think it has achieved one of the best online magazine formats I\u0026rsquo;ve seen to date.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/10/the-first-post/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eJust had a look on the members page and found that the Marketing Director of \u003ca href=\"http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe First Post\u003c/a\u003e\n, Mario Tilney Bassett, has joined the network. From their website:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe First Post\u003c/em\u003e is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI wanted to post about The First Post simply because I\u0026rsquo;m a fan. I think it has achieved one of the best online magazine formats I\u0026rsquo;ve seen to date.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The first post"},{"content":"The attention economy is alive. Interruption marketing is dead. But are we getting permission marketing?\nTony Fish (the Mobile 2.0 man) and I debated the impact of mobile technologies on the attention economy at last week’s Mashup Event . We are particularly intrigued, although not entirely convinced, by the Blyk business model. Having been started by the former president of Nokia, Blyk could not have much better credentials for a new UK mobile phone service, but what are its prospects beyond the initial novelty value?\nThe concept of the attention economy is that human attention is a scarce commodity and therefore the approach to getting information in front of them is subject to economic theory. This scarcity is amplified by the increasing control we have over the media we consume. For example, simply interrupting the transmission of TV and radio programming with advertising is increasingly frustrated by the features designed in to consumer electronics allowing us to skip the ads.\nThe cure for this apoplexy of the advertising industry has consisted of product placement, procured content and permission marketing - a term defined by Seth Godin in his 1999 book of the same name. In simple terms, permission marketing seeks the target’s permission to advertise to them. Obviously, the advert has to have real value to the recipient for them to give their permission.\nSo back to Blyk. The idea… give free SIM cards to 16-24 year olds with which they can make free calls. In return, the Blyk customer must complete a personal profile questionnaire which is used to determine exactly what products and services he or she might like to know about. Blyk then sells this channel to advertisers and forwards the adverts to their customers’ phones.\nIs this permission marketing? Godin talks about developing a relationship with customers, “turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers”. To me, Blyk is not primarily about adding value through the content and information, but fundamentally about buying airtime. It may not be paying cash, choosing instead to make a payment-in-kind, but ultimately it is just buying a new kind of media space. I’m into digital photography, but with the day I’ve just had if you sent me an ad for the latest camera it would simply have got in my way.\nAdvertisers must ask themselves whether this is simply hyper-targeted advertising (of no insignificant value of course), or permission marketing. Isn’t it just simply that young adults want free calls? That’s where the primary value lies, not in the ads.\nInterestingly, Blyk may have some big competition soon. Whilst Google has not publicly disclosed any intention to launch a mobile phone service, the fact that their job boards advertise for mobile engineers might betray their ambitions. Could a GPhone follow the same business model?\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/permission-marketing/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe attention economy is alive. Interruption marketing is dead. But are we getting permission marketing?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTony Fish (the \u003ca href=\"http://www.mobileweb20.futuretext.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMobile 2.0\u003c/a\u003e\n man) and I debated the impact of mobile technologies on the attention economy at last week’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.mashupevent.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMashup Event\u003c/a\u003e\n. We are particularly intrigued, although not entirely convinced, by the \u003ca href=\"http://www.blyk.co.uk\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eBlyk\u003c/a\u003e\n business model. Having been started by the former president of Nokia, Blyk could not have much better credentials for a new UK mobile phone service, but what are its prospects beyond the initial novelty value?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Permission marketing?"},{"content":"Having had my third client meal here recently, thought I\u0026rsquo;d add it as the first restaurant review on MarCom Professional :-)\nFundamentally, I find Shepherds to be a perfect restaurant for client entertaining. Attentive staff. Good location. And the good spacing between tables provides for relative privacy. There is also a private room at the back for larger groups, which from memory seats up to 20.\nI particularly like Shepherds for US clients looking to eat English\u0026hellip; fabulous sausage and mash!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/shepherds-london/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHaving had my third client meal here recently, thought I\u0026rsquo;d add it as the first restaurant review on MarCom Professional :-)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFundamentally, I find Shepherds to be a perfect restaurant for client entertaining. Attentive staff. Good location. And the good spacing between tables provides for relative privacy. There is also a private room at the back for larger groups, which from memory seats up to 20.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI particularly like Shepherds for US clients looking to eat English\u0026hellip; fabulous sausage and mash!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Shepherds London"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me\u0026hellip; How do they disambiguate brand names?\nIn other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap?\nAnd if anyone has tried Magpie Brandwatch, it\u0026rsquo;d be good to hear what it\u0026rsquo;s like.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/magpie-brandwatch/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve just stumbled upon this service, \u003ca href=\"http://magpie.net/brandwatch.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eMagpie Brandwatch\u003c/a\u003e\n. As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me\u0026hellip; How do they disambiguate brand names?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat?  What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative.  Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate.  Virgin? Next?  Palm?  Shell?  Gap?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Magpie Brandwatch"},{"content":"Attended the Mashup* event last night on \u0026ldquo;media and advertising agencies in a digital world\u0026rdquo;. It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA\u0026rsquo;s head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA.\nUnfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish\u0026rsquo;s question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about Openads for the first time. Very interesting.\nCoincidentally, I also met Giles Palmer for the first time, of Magpie Brandwatch fame that I posted about yesterday .\nAnd lastly, here\u0026rsquo;s a diary date for you. Mashup is running an event 26th November on Social Networking .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/mashup-events/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAttended the Mashup* event last night on \u0026ldquo;media and advertising agencies in a digital world\u0026rdquo;. It was a wide ranging discussion, featuring Rod Banner from Banner Corporation, a presentation from AKQA\u0026rsquo;s head of mobile, and moderated by Hamish Pringle, DG of the IPA.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnfortunately, the questions from the audience were so diverse that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite the usual cohesion found at a Mashup event, but nevertheless there were some real gems in there. Tony Fish\u0026rsquo;s question on the attention economy put most people on the back foot, and I learned about \u003ca href=\"http://www.openads.org\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eOpenads\u003c/a\u003e\n for the first time. Very interesting.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mashup events"},{"content":"So Ofcom has given the BBC the go ahead to start a high definition channel later this year. Whilst I recognise that anything the BBC does these days has to be scrutinised for \u0026ldquo;public value\u0026rdquo; by the BBC trust, but this decision also had to be reviewed by Ofcom with the purpose of assessing the marketing impact.\nOfcom has concluded that the launch of the free-to-air channel is \u0026ldquo;unlikely to have significant negative market impacts\u0026rdquo;.\nAs we embark on the digital switchover between now and 2012, I remain flabberghasted that we didn\u0026rsquo;t seize the opportunity to transition to HD digital rather than just plain old standard-definition digital. If there\u0026rsquo;s one thing this country still leads the world on, it\u0026rsquo;s telly; and we missed a prime opportunity here. So I\u0026rsquo;m delighted that Ofcom has reached the right decision here.\nNow all we need them to do is dedicate the spectrum freed up when the analogue TV signal is switched off to Freeview high-definition broadcasting. Let\u0026rsquo;s not get proprietary about this. Let\u0026rsquo;s not fall behind the rest of Europe. As it is, we run the risk of being the least HD-ready nation in Western Europe when we host the Olympics in 2012, which is just slightly embarrassing.\nWhy not extend the pink tick accreditation , currently awarded to digital TV devices, so that they have to be digital HD devices?\nAnd in case you were wondering, I believe the BBC is brilliant; one I\u0026rsquo;d pay my licence fee for if only for the Today programme.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/bbc-hi-def-common-sense-prevails/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo Ofcom has given the BBC the go ahead to start a high definition channel later this year.  Whilst I recognise that anything the BBC does these days has to be scrutinised for \u0026ldquo;public value\u0026rdquo; by the BBC trust, but this decision also had to be reviewed by Ofcom with the purpose of assessing the marketing impact.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOfcom has concluded that the launch of the free-to-air channel is \u0026ldquo;unlikely to have significant negative market impacts\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"BBC hi-def: common sense prevails"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of things MarCom Professional could do next, in no fixed order.\nReview list and status of invited colleagues Create personal message boards on your own page where other members can leave notes and messages\u0026hellip; these are fully public Include comments in RSS feeds Create the ability to post easily from mobile phones Create virtual acquariums (only kidding) Make it even easier to browse the whole membership The options to be notified by email or IM or RSS when someone comments on my posts What about integrating Twitter ?! When there\u0026rsquo;s hundreds of posts a day, it would be great to have a more personalised homepage prioritising the posts from friends / colleagues In the \u0026ldquo;New features in store \u0026rdquo; post, I like the addition of blogrolls and event posts. Guess the latter will help members set-up events and manage attendance From that same post, I love the member-moderation idea; thumbs up / down voting on posts. What do you think to rationing the number of times members can give a thumbs up or down to try and stop the kind of fixing some people believe blights Digg ? ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/feature-list/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHere\u0026rsquo;s a list of things MarCom Professional could do next, in no fixed order.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eReview list and status of invited colleagues\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCreate personal message boards on your own page where other members can leave notes and messages\u0026hellip; these are fully public\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eInclude comments in RSS feeds\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCreate the ability to post easily from mobile phones\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCreate virtual acquariums (only kidding)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMake it even easier to browse the whole membership\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe options to be notified by email or IM or RSS when someone comments on my posts\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat about integrating \u003ca href=\"http://www.twitter.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eTwitter\u003c/a\u003e\n?!\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhen there\u0026rsquo;s hundreds of posts a day, it would be great to have a more personalised homepage prioritising the posts from friends / colleagues\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIn the \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"/posts/andrew.betts/new-features-in-store\"\u003eNew features in store\u003c/a\u003e\n\u0026rdquo; post, I like the addition of blogrolls and event posts. Guess the latter will help members set-up events and manage attendance\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFrom that same post, I love the member-moderation idea; thumbs up / down voting on posts. What do you think to rationing the number of times members can give a thumbs up or down to try and stop the kind of fixing some people believe blights \u003ca href=\"http://www.digg.com\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eDigg\u003c/a\u003e\n?\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e","title":"Feature list"},{"content":"Just found a press release from Google launching their market-leading Adsense service for the mobile device.\n\u0026ldquo;AdSense for Mobile is intended for AdSense partners who have created websites specifically for mobile browsers, and who want to monetize their mobile content via contextual advertising.\u0026rdquo;\nThe full release is available here .\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/mobile-adsense/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eJust found a press release from Google launching their market-leading Adsense service for the mobile device.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;AdSense for Mobile is intended for AdSense partners who have created websites specifically for mobile browsers, and who want to monetize their mobile content via contextual advertising.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20070917_mobileads.html\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eThe full release is available here\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Mobile Adsense"},{"content":"So O2 has won the exclusive right to iPhone in the UK; but what a price! With the battle heating up between operators, device manufacturers and content providers to divide the spoils of user revenue, this seems to be a massive concession for a UK operator.\n[gratuitous picture of an iPhone\u0026hellip; in case you can\u0026rsquo;t recall how attractive it is]\nCapitulating 40% of iPhone associated revenues can\u0026rsquo;t make sense to anyone vaguely familiar with thin operator margins. Vodafone definitely wasn\u0026rsquo;t having any of it. But maybe this is just a big step along the ultimately inevitable path to complete commoditisation of mobile operations. The time has come for the rise of the device and equally the content now reachable following the relatively recent collapse of the walled gardens. This shift in the landscape also represents exciting opportunities to the marketing communicator looking to extend brand presence into consumers\u0026rsquo; mobile life.\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/09/the-new-mobile-revenue-split/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo O2 has won the exclusive right to iPhone in the UK; but what a price! With the battle heating up between operators, device manufacturers and content providers to divide the spoils of user revenue, this seems to be a \u003cem\u003emassive\u003c/em\u003e concession for a UK operator.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[gratuitous picture of an iPhone\u0026hellip; in case you can\u0026rsquo;t recall how attractive it is]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"iPhone\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/iphone.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCapitulating 40% of iPhone associated revenues can\u0026rsquo;t make sense to anyone vaguely familiar with thin operator margins. Vodafone definitely wasn\u0026rsquo;t having any of it. But maybe this is just a big step along the ultimately inevitable path to complete commoditisation of mobile operations. The time has come for the rise of the device and equally the content now reachable following the relatively recent collapse of the walled gardens. This shift in the landscape also represents exciting opportunities to the marketing communicator looking to extend brand presence into consumers\u0026rsquo; mobile life.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The new mobile revenue split"},{"content":"Niels Bohr said \u0026ldquo;It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.\u0026rdquo;\nAs we ruminate on our 2007 predictions we also consider another of his insights\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Your theory is crazy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not crazy enough to be true.\u0026rdquo; Only time will tell!\nEvery year we take stock of the trends of the past twelve months, and take time out to map ahead.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve distilled some of our favourites here for your consideration today and possible derision twelve months from now\u0026hellip;\nInternet connectivity and mobile There’s considerable consolidation of ISPs as few but the big boys can afford to deliver triple-play. Today, thinkbroadband.com lists 68 UK ISPs, and this list will whittle down towards 50 by the end of the year 2007 will mark the genuine start of the mobile Web (ie, browser based), a critical part of what has been coined Mobile 2.0 . Security concerns will come to the fore as uptake drives through the early-majority phase Nokia will pass Apple as number one for mobile music devices, by number of devices and usage. iTunes sales will decline versus 2006 (although Apple maintains its refusal to break out the numbers) as the market grows more granular, driven by copyright owners\u0026rsquo; acceptance of less heavily restrictive digital rights management The long-anticipated Apple phone (aka iPhone) will emerge in 2007, but they will need to lean heavily on Motorola, and will it be ready for next week\u0026rsquo;s Macworld expo? A second commercial WiMax service will launch in the UK (although Now continues to struggle to get the formula right) Mobile VoIP gains traction with Nokia’s Gizmo initiative, mobile Skype and Barablu 2007 is the year of IPTV in the UK (as opposed to TV on your phone, for which we wonder if there will ever be a year). Web 2.0 + The rise and rise of social networks continues, but Myspace \u0026rsquo;s userbase peaks mid-year at 65 million (note: that\u0026rsquo;s users, not the more often quoted but irrelevant accounts) as it becomes apparent such services don\u0026rsquo;t benefit from the same network effect underpinning eBay \u0026rsquo;s continuing success. Indeed, the next generation needs to find \u0026ldquo;its own cool\u0026rdquo;; perhaps 2007 is the year of Wallop RSS / newsreaders will go mainstream end-07 as its use is simplified and integrated into the general Web experience and browsers Digg peaks in Spring and then experiences a decline as it becomes apparent the democracy isn’t working (unless they take some good advice ) Increasing interest is placed on tapping collective human intelligence to complement machine processing. Compare Digg and RedDit to Google News (whoops !), watch out for Search Wikia , and you\u0026rsquo;ll love this game and why it\u0026rsquo;s very interesting indeed The semantic Web gets closer (ie, starts to be applied in earnest) and the pundits argue the merits of top-down text analytics versus bottom-up tagging More pundits will try and use the term “Web 3.0″ without knowing why. Software Vista \u0026rsquo;s launch to small business and home users is delayed. Then take up is slower than anticipated as it becomes apparent the OS really needs 2GB RAM not 512MB (alright, maybe 1GB will suffice) Microsoft \u0026rsquo;s core business will continue to come under attack. Business will question the need for Office 2007 when most of their \u0026ldquo;power users\u0026rdquo; acquire the moniker just because they can create tables of content in Word automatically; Firefox will continue to take market share from IE ; and Google will continue its recent trend of cross-selling its web-based applications at the cost of clientside software SaaS will rise meteorically. Companies to watch include salesforce.com (of course, and companies building on their Apex platform such as DreamFactory ), 37signals and Taleo . Related trends include equipping organisations\u0026rsquo; non-expert staff with the tools to mashup enterprise data and services, enabled by companies such as Teqlo , and the rise of \u0026ldquo;serviced clients\u0026rdquo; to enable offline working and clientside maintenance for user-driven data composition 2007 will be the biggest year yet for CRM and Business Intelligence investment as return on investment becomes increasingly tangible. Hardware The 2006 trend for enterprise storage consolidation will gather pace in 2007 as organisations seek to unify storage, reduce operational costs, instigate server virtualisation and reduce space requirements and heat generation. They\u0026rsquo;ll also continue migration from fibre channel to IP for all but the very highest performance applications. The ROI for such consolidation should be a no-brainer for many Saying that, could 2007 be the year of the storage service provider? Intel may just make it this year with a WiMax integrated system-on-chip Centrino A no-name 32″ HD LCD will cost less than £400 (incl. VAT) by the end of the year, despite a mid-year hike in the cost of LCD panels as demand exceeds supply HP will extend its lead as the number one manufacturer of desktop and mobile PCs Having been announced in May 2005, Sony’s PS3 finally launches in the UK, and rapidly accrues a fabulous reputation despite the high cost. It becomes a must-have sensation, and the pivot in the Blu-ray .v. HD-DVD war, which will be concluded sometime in 2009! But more about that this time next year. ","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2007/01/2007-the-info-tech-year-ahead/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr\" class=\"external-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eNiels Bohr\u003c/a\u003e\n said \u0026ldquo;It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs we ruminate on our 2007 predictions we also consider another of his insights\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Your theory is crazy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not crazy enough to be true.\u0026rdquo;  Only time will tell!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery year we take stock of the trends of the past twelve months, and take time out to map ahead.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe\u0026rsquo;ve distilled some of our favourites here for your consideration today and possible derision twelve months from now\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"2007: The Info Tech Year Ahead"},{"content":"It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting.\nThe choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel.\nThis article isn’t just some futuristic dreamscape – there are innovative and concrete services today that don’t just hint at the future, they belie it with an uncanny accuracy. They work. Adoption is widespread and fast. They change the rules.\nAs communication consultants, we anticipate these developments and adapt our methods and consultancy to our clients accordingly. If Fuse adapts faster than our competitors then our clients prosper, and so do we.\nLet’s look at some of the characteristics of the latest communication innovations. It turns out, there are some common threads.\nRSS A recent report from Jupiter Research (“Addressing Market Opportunities with an Innovative News Medium ”, 11th March 2005) quantifies RSS penetration by consumers at home at 12%. The primary advantages RSS delivers the users are:\nChoice – the user can pick and choose specific newsfeeds one at a time, and subscription to lists of feeds with a common theme (eg, technology news, health, education) is increasingly popular. With the advent of endeavours such as attention.xml , consumers may associate themselves with peers whose opinion they value to allow news of potentially higher interest bubble to the top Collation – multiple sources are centralised for the user’s convenience In your own time – the sources can be examined at any time Filtering – the sources can be examined in any way. Pod-casting As with all successful mass-market electronic devices, the ways in which the Apple iPod is put to use has extended beyond the original vision of its creators. Pod-casting is one such application of the iPod.\nQuite simply, pod-casting is the downloading of often transient audio material from the Internet and transferral to the iPod for listening to later. The material can be specifically sought, or a regular source can be downloaded and transferred automatically as it becomes available – general news, specialist news, and audio magazines. Of course, pod-casting can be defined as “audio RSS”, and this will develop to “audio-visual RSS” as more mobile devices permit video storage and play.\nThe primary advantages to the user:\nChoice – the user chooses what to listen to and when, rather than being dictated to by broadcast schedules and reception (London Underground doesn’t offer ideal radio reception, nor is Radio 4’s Today programme easily picked up in New York) Collation – multiple sources are centralised for the user’s convenience In your own time – the sources can be listened to at any time Filtering – only download what you want, and skip through that too (watch out for audio-visual search technologies such as Blinkx ) On-demand digital radio Digital radio is offering greater choice and clearer reception, and innovative services enabled by companies such as Otodio will soon tempt listeners with a diverse selection of on-demand programming. Listeners have choice in their own time.\nOn-demand platform-agnostic video A new era of video distribution is being chimed in with the increasing success of super-fast consumer broadband, such as the 8Mb service from UK Online , the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) as pioneered by TiVo , and Video on Demand (VoD) services, such as from Video Networks . The term IPTV is being bandied around (TV over IP) to describe what would otherwise be labelled television on demand.\nThe primary advantages to the user: choice, in your own time with filtering.\nmyThis and myThat Websites are becoming increasingly flexible in enabling visitors to customise their content preferences and in anticipating user needs intelligently (see Touch Clarity ). This trend is compounded as users’ expectations grow to the extent where mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering.\nOne channel, or infinite? So there’s a common theme here. The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel (at least they will have when future technology converges the channels described here) and they own it. It is myChannel.\nBut what are the ramifications for those trying to get their news or their clients’ news on to myChannel? The impacts will be manifold and include:\nConsiderably more fragmentation of the target audience of communications campaigns Less precise timing of delivery Increased opportunity to provide niche information Less certainty of how each recipient is receiving the information Greater opportunity for innovation in inviting and securing interaction The need for new mechanisms for gauging campaign success. The word “broadcast” is being resigned to history – there just won’t be a communication medium that has the breadth to be described as “broad”. Intelligent and insightful PR consultancy has never been so critical to organisations striving to communicate effectively to a mass audience seeking to exert selectivity in the face of too much information, too much choice!\n","permalink":"https://philipsheldrake.com/2005/04/mychannel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"myChannel"}]