Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 17 of 43)

23 April 2012 / 1 Comment

Daily Telegraph article picked apart by Friends of the Earth in an advert in the FT

I posted "'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations" 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.

And 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.

It's a great ad. But I would have appreciated it more had it been easier to share with you. I can't find it online anywhere, so had to resort to taking a photo and uploading it here. Come on Friends of the Earth! :-)

Advert by Friends of the Earth in the FT, 23rd April 2012

22 April 2012 / 6 Comments

‘Earned media’ is not a synonym for public relations

British Heart Foundation outdoor ad, Leo Reynolds, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/2138006896

"Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos."

That'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.

Names have been changed...

Incident 1

Anne: "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."

Me: "So if we're looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us... the owned stuff that has earned a share – a 'Like', a RT, a +1 for example." Read more

13 April 2012 / 4 Comments

Future Vistas for SEO

Brighton Dome – the front of the queue for Brighton SEOThe Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We're expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I'm up immediately after the "Ask the engines" 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's development might take today's SEO practitioners.

What's the hypothesis for future vistas?

Well without web search there would be no search engine optimisation, right? (You can see why I get invited to speak at such august gatherings ... 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.

SEO can be considered with ill repute when it's perceived to be about gaming (read "fooling") search engine algorithms in order to serve solely the website owner'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!

Moreover, 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.

2 April 2012 / 0 Comments

The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

Here's my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.

I hope it goes without saying that I'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.

Thanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.

PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

 

2 April 2012 / 1 Comment

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

PRSA Digital Impact Conference

I'm in New York today at the PRSA's Digital Impact Conference. In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I'm really looking forward to it.

And the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I've come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts...

First, most organisations don't yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven't yet wholly adapted to today's social media and digital technologies.

Second, we haven'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's what fascinates me and informs my presentation. This is the REALLY BIG digital impact!

When I presented at Dreamforce in San Francisco last year, the dominant phrase amongst delegates was Socialize the Enterprise. It's now time to make that happen, and I'm hoping we'll have a great #PRSADiConf dialogue this afternoon.

30 March 2012 / 0 Comments

Persuasion

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.

Because I have the superior mind of a scientist (that's sarcasm btw), I have an overwhelming natural inclination toward logos. And when it doesn't work, I try it again, despite Einstein's insistence that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

Trundling my way to the office on the number 94 Wednesday I read "Jay Heinrich's Powers of Persuasion" in Business Week magazine in which Mr. Heinrich is described as one of the world’s leading students of Aristotelian rhetoric. This means he's kinda expert at mixing up the ethos, logos and pathos just right. Read more

16 March 2012 / 0 Comments

When is a mobile a tablet? And more useful questions.

[Written originally for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

"When is a mobile a tablet?" was the high level strategic question (that's sarcasm) that I was debating with our CIPR TV guests this week the minute before we went live.

We decided the answer is subjective. It's a tablet at the point you think you look stupid holding it to your ear. (Actually that's not verbatim. We used a more descriptive word than stupid.)

Fortunately, 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's obsession with apps is just a moment in time. Read more

2 March 2012 / 0 Comments

PRSA, defining PR

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

"Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics."

And so concludes the PRSA's Public Relations Defined (#prdefined) initiative. Launched 30th October last year, the initiative has garnered considerable interest, both positive and negative.

On the positive front, I have seen considerable interest from practitioners, predominantly but not exclusively in the US as one might expect given the PRSA'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' perspective turns out to be, well, a little far off the mark. Read more

18 February 2012 / 1 Comment

The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity

[Originally written for The Guardian Media Network.]

Guardian Media Network

If media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn't otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn't otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn't think it now that influence is the hot word.

The 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't be a good use of the communicator's time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.

The focus on making sure you'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.

Influence is complex, and I mean that in the full "complexity science" 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. Read more

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