Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 19 of 43)

14 November 2011 / 9 Comments

The Influence View of Content – seeking something more useful than ‘paid, owned, earned’

[Version 0.1 << work in progress needing your critical feedback. Also available as a PDF if that suits you better.]

Précis

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

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework.

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy: Read more

11 November 2011 / 0 Comments

Your vital role in the economic recovery

[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup]

There will be an economic recovery and best practice public relations will play its part.

Economists 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.

An organisation that better understands all stakeholders will be more sensitive to its market and more agile and appropriate in its response.

Last week, the UK government announced an initiative with twenty six major organisations "working together to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment". The programme, midata, "will give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format."

This is a world first as far as I know, although the prospect has been discussed for several years. It's often referred to as vendor relationship management (VRM), the other side of the CRM coin if you like.

Will your organisation join this revolution in customer data? Will you play your part in the economic recovery?

Best regards, Philip and The Conversation team. Read more

8 November 2011 / 1 Comment

The CIPR Presidential Debate

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

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

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

6 November 2011 / 1 Comment

The UK takes a step closer to Streams Banks – your personal data nirvana

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:

I 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.

Should 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.

To 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:

It’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.

A 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.

What on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..

Imagine 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.

Well, it seems this day is dawning. Read more

28 October 2011 / 0 Comments

What our publics are telling us

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

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

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

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

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

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

27 October 2011 / 0 Comments

ESOMAR 3D Presentation – The Business of Influence

I'm in Miami today at the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference. For those of you unfamiliar with ESOMAR, it's "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."

The Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011

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I'm kicking off the conference despite probably being the least expert in market research in the room! But that's not why I was invited. Rather, I'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.

Regular 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's recent CMO report.

25 October 2011 / 0 Comments

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

An interesting start to the day today... over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&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't come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

I can't tell you what they are (well, without being retained by you anyway!)

Thanks to Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit) for being in the chair, and for Andrew Ross (@AJMRoss) for putting the session together.

CIPR Freshly Squeezed 25th Oct 2011

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.
6 October 2011 / 6 Comments

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

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

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

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

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

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

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

4 October 2011 / 0 Comments

Communication Director Magazine book review – The Business of Influence

Communication Director MagazineMy book, The Business of Influence, has just been reviewed in Communication Director.

The 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.

The review

Page 90, Communication Director Magazine, September 2011

"If you're in business, you're in the business of influence". 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. Read more

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