The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme's guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer.
I think you'll agree the audience's questions and the guests' responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I'll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.
The idea of a brand goes back to ancient times when ownership of livestock was asserted by burning one's mark onto the animal. This post is about a book called Brand Anarchy, so I thought I'd set the scene.
The 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.
I've known Stephen Waddington and Steve Earl from about the time we both started competing PR consultancies back in the day, and there'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't had the opportunity to work with them, you can at least now read the book.
The 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'll appreciate the candour with which the authors describe how organisations must respond.
In fact, perhaps 'respond' 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.
It does feel like anarchy out there, at least for those weaned on the 20th Century simple life. Actually, it's just complex. The authors strongly suggest you deal with it.
[Disclosure: the book references my work – the Six Influence Flows and the Influence Scorecard.]
A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning ... both an advantage and disadvantage.
So, we've been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we've been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.
Well I for one consider social business to be quite distinct from social media. Others use the terms synonymously. The lexicon battle is underway and it will be some years hence before the dictionaries document the victory. For now then, allow me the airtime to support the assertion ... social media are the eggs in the social business cake.
The video here is my take on social business.
It's September already. How did that happen?!
As 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.
But while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.
First 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?
Who knows! Let's face it, we live in uncertain times.
So 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?
When George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in January 2005, no one uploaded a video to YouTube.
When 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.
Social media have progressed incredibly quickly and organizations have had to grapple with the challenges and identify and pursue the opportunities.
But 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.
By 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.
Here’s some rather good news to lift some of that post-Olympic blues. The BRANDiD team has won gold, literally.
Hundreds 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.
It’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.
[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]
The headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid 'ghost town' claims.
For 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.
My schedule hasn't changed. I'm jumping on the 94 from West London to Oxford Street every morning, and the return journey every evening, and it's been fantastic. The bus is half empty, the roads are half empty, and the journey time is the quickest I've ever known. But what's good for me hasn't been good for central London restaurants, theatre and other consumer serving business.
So 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.
From 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.
Despite this hiccup, it's been a fantastic games so far, excepting that badminton match, and I'm looking forward to the second week and a couple of dinners in town.
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's best new business book releases, it now resides at number 13 in the Sales & Marketing category.
Wiley, the publisher, has taken more than a handful of bulk orders directly from PR agencies, which of course don't then register on the Amazon charts else I'm sure the book would be Amazon's number 1 of course!
Neville Hobson, of the massively successful FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast, invited Stephen Waddington and me to discuss the book's content, audience, and the panel's future plans. Follow the link to listen now.
FYI, you may recall Neville interviewed me once before at my book launch party last year.
(Photo credit: Neville Hobson presenting at SMPR2012 by Coopr PR Bureau.)
(Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.)
You'll congratulate me for noticing there's a sporting event starting today in London town. Too obvious then not to interweave some Olympic statistics into today's Roundup.
It'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're looking at somewhere north or south of 10,000,000,000 sterling; four times the original estimate.
The 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.
This exemplifies what organisations invest most of their information systems managing – the flows of time, money and materials. Managing these flows is business critical. Obviously.
The 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'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'll put themselves in a gold medal position.
Happy Olympics.
[Photo credit: Nick J Webb]
After three months of social collaboration involving two dozen authors, we'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.
Incredibly, Lord Sugar provides the endorsement for the front cover :-)
I'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.
Here's the introductory video featuring CIPR CEO Jane Wilson, and then the Table of Contents. Read the CIPR's press release here. Pre-order your copy today!