Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 20 of 43)

3 October 2011 / 1 Comment

Social Media Analytics

Are you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you're a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.

Marshall 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: "Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market."

Social Media Analytics, Marshall SponderThere 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.

Marshall 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't attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review. Read more

21 September 2011 / 1 Comment

How many Tweets make a Like?

If you'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:

How much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?

If this is the kind of question they're asking then, in my opinion, they simply don't yet 'get it'. If you're feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:

  • $0.23 per hundred
  • A 'like' 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 'friend'
  • If you'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'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 "Maturity of influence approach". Read more

16 September 2011 / 0 Comments

Click and type or touch and swipe

Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:

Regular readers will know I've argued for some time that we've really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it'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.

And yet in 2011 it's probably still pertinent to make the distinction between 'being online' versus 'offline'. 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's just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you'll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.

However, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we're well down the line in moving from so-called 'click and type' interfaces to 'touch and swipe'. Think about someone just like you living a century ago... the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural. Read more

2 September 2011 / 0 Comments

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I'm doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I'm attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce 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 "awesome" by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order: Read more

1 September 2011 / 1 Comment

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week'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!)

The theme for this year'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.]

Dreamforce 2011 presentation – 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.

When 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't appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking. Read more

12 August 2011 / 0 Comments

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media... the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.

First up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: "... 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." Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don't use.

I think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form... Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren't. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased... How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?

The primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can't blame social media or society'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 "Twitter riot", but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots. Read more

30 July 2011 / 0 Comments

Don’t forward. That could be illegal.

Here's how The Independent reports on this week's Appeal Court decision to uphold the High Court'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.

And 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'm afraid you'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).

[Note to non-UK resident readers: This situation is acutely embarrassing for us Brits and I'd appreciate it if you kept this quiet. After all, our current coalition government really wants the rest of the world to think we 'get' digital.]

You see the trouble is the Court'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'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. Read more

29 July 2011 / 0 Comments

Meanwhile in Mumbai

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.)

The 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: Read more

9 July 2011 / 0 Comments

Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín gets a free copy of The Business of Influence

Ana Patricia Botín, Member of the Board, Grupo...

Image via Wikipedia

In 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.

Actually, "to improve customer service" is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it's actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction.

Call centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004).

Interestingly, the FT reports that Santander UK's move follows a diktat by the UK'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. Read more

1 July 2011 / 0 Comments

Guilty – The CIPR Friday Roundup

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.

I 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's found guilty, then you might say all's well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where's the "all's well and good" in that?

This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals.

And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I've been saying recently that 'reality is perception'. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, 'perception is reality'. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here? Read more

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