Archives (page 21 of 43)

30 June 2011 / 2 Comments

Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference

I've just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today's Social Media Conference. I'm delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here's my presentation.

I know... it'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.

Always ready with a smart answer, he suggests I have two stacks in future... one for the presentation, one for slideshare.

Is there an app for that?

The Business of Influence – Measurement

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

29 June 2011 / 0 Comments

How data is transforming digital marketing

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.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every 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.

Big 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.

What does this mean in everyday terms? Read more

28 June 2011 / 0 Comments

An invitation from Global Dawn

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.

I was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series.

Thanks to Ema Linaker for making this happen.

28 June 2011 / 0 Comments

Profiting from the New Web – the video

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.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I'm sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we'll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space.

17 June 2011 / 0 Comments

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone'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. <sarcasm>Apart from that, it works just fine!</sarcasm>

This summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC'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.

Why? 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:

"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…"

What 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. Read more

3 June 2011 / 0 Comments

Not PR – Friday Roundup

"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 'reputation management' agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings."

So opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can't provide the link to The Times as I'm not a subscriber to its paywall, but it's syndicated here, sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.)

On 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...

"[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."

This 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's code of conduct, specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation. Read more

27 May 2011 / 0 Comments

Truth be told – Friday Roundup

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't aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR's current definition of PR does.

Despite 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 'perception is reality' 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 'reality is perception' more appropriate.

But what is truth? Read more

25 May 2011 / 1 Comment

The Web this decade and what it means for your organisation

I'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?!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, New Web, London, 23rd May 2011 (courtesy Intellect)

I worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week's conference, and we set ourselves this mission:

Discover 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.

Web 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.

A 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. Read more

22 April 2011 / 0 Comments

Neville Hobson’s interview with me at the book launch party

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.

Special thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (@jangles) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven't yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast amongst many other things.

[UPDATE 5pm 25th April: Neville has now published this interview on the FIR podcast.]

And thanks also to everyone tweeting their pics of the book, but I'm afraid Simon Sanders (@simonsanders) takes first prize so far for his tongue-in-cheeking unboxing (what's unboxing?):

Big data

Thinking or just acting?

BT's woeful social inadequacy

Web Innovation