Archives (page 23 of 43)

4 March 2011 / 0 Comments

In conversation about the BP Deepwater crisis with Neil Chapman

Neil recently left BP after 14 years where his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the US, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Neil has more than 25 years' managing public affairs issues and crises that have grabbed the headlines in different parts of the world, helping scores of executives to help them communicate more effectively in support of their businesses.

Neil now runs Alpha Voice Communications.

I'm increasingly pleased with the live CIPR TV format and the questions submitted via the streaming video player, Twitter and Facebook. Without such participation we wouldn't have thought to ask Neil about the internal communications aspects of the BP crisis, for example, although the question about Neil's regard for the controversial (ex-)CEO, Tony Hayward, was to be expected!

Neil's responses are compulsory watching for every PR practitioner imho.

28 February 2011 / 8 Comments

Real-time PR demands rigorous strategic alignment

Real-time PR is a hot topic.

This is nothing to do with fashion, but the unavoidable pressures of modern PR. David Meerman Scott's November 2010 book, "Real-time Marketing and PR" is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and with Twitter responses frequently meaningless after an hour's delay, if not minutes, and many conversations requiring a response within the hour or two, awaiting the Monday meeting to debate possible responses is now simply unrealistic.

I presented at Social PR 2011 today on just this topic. The main take home... it isn't easy.

How to plan & execute real-time PR that delivers for your organisation

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

Being the eyes, ears and mouth of an organisation to the drumbeat of the daily news was never easy. Being the eyes, ears and mouth, with heightened sensitivity to influence and be influenced in real-time, requires enhanced levels of strategic diligence, meticulous planning, training, constant attention to detail and rigorous measurement.

Reality is perception.

It’s impossible to fake it.

Real-time PR must, by nature, be authentic.

Real-time PR marks the death of the persuasion / ‘spin’ school.

Long live two-way, symmetric PR fostering mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics.

23 February 2011 / 2 Comments

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

You can now get your hands on The Marketing Century – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book's introduction.

I'm delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.

Buy at Amazon / CIM / The Book Depository / Blackwell's / Waterstone's. And more info at Google Books.

1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, Peppers & Rogers Group)

The Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company's long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer. Read more

18 February 2011 / 0 Comments

Do Not Track

Today, I’m in Paris. I’m working with the Mozilla Europe team to prepare for the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and Firefox Mobile. And this prompts me to write here on the subject of privacy – a hot topic and one on which your organisation can lead, to your customers’ advantage and yours.

Mozilla is a global, non-profit organisation dedicated to making the Web better. It emphasises principle over profit, and believes that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.

This means that whilst Internet Explorer must justify its existence to Microsoft, Safari to Apple, and Chrome to Google, Firefox is only answerable to you. Many consider Mozilla to be the sole reason we’ve all moved on from the terrible browsing experience Internet Explorer 6 gave over 90% of Web users back in 2003. And now Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe.

Back to privacy. Do you know what information your browser is reporting about your browsing habits? Do you know that some high profile websites add as many as 100 tracking devices to your computer?

Now, lest you think this is some kind of hippy essay, I’m a capitalist. I believe the for-profit motive is the best mechanism we’ve found to date to improve life. But we’ve also seen in recent times that some free markets require a bit of intervention now and then; a spot of regulation. Indeed, a recent Business Week article identified how free-marketers are as fond of regulation as they are more widely reported to dislike it. Read more

16 February 2011 / 5 Comments

Meanwhile, a new approach to marketing and PR consultancy

I've teamed up with some very useful chaps to form Meanwhile. We're defining venture marketing. Before I explain that further, I'll elaborate on the main trends that make me think Meanwhile is precisely the right approach at the right time.

In short:

Previously distinct disciplines are converging
There is a renewed focus on measurement and evaluation of marketing and PR related programmes with boards demanding an unprecedented level of accountability
A new framework must emerge placing influence at the heart of business strategy.

Here's how I present the situation in my upcoming book, The Business of Influence (Wiley, April 2011): Read more

15 February 2011 / 8 Comments

Hi, do you know Beeta Vahdat?

I need your help.

My book, The Business of Influence, comes out with Wiley in April. That means the proofs go to press 24th February, and the URL to the book's accompanying website will be writ therein. And what better URL could one have than thebusinessofinfluence.com?

The problem is, this domain is registered. According to a whois lookup, the name of the owner is Beeta Vahdat, a "principal of IMANI Communication Design" living in the Melbourne, Australia area. Ms. Vahdat does not appear to be using the domain name, so I'd like to see if I can buy it from her... if only I could get in touch.

I wonder, do you know anyone in Melbourne you might ask? Perhaps you live in Melbourne. Perhaps you live in Melbourne and work in the same line of business (note to self to email Trevor Young immediately after this post). If so, I'd love you to ping your network and point them here to explain my predicament. There's a free book in it! :-)

Thanks in advance, Philip.

4 February 2011 / 0 Comments

Thank you

Just over two years ago I posted about a 'lost cat' poster stapled to trees in my neighbourhood, but a poster with a difference... this was a 'cat found' poster saying thank you to everyone who had helped recover the treasured pet.

Sometimes in business it's too easy to think that the value exchange, where I give you what you want in exchange for what I want, is the be all and end all... the customer has the product or service they were looking for, and we get money (or other currency, like attention).

But every business must strive for a relational rather than transactional customer, moving the focus from the once-off purchase to the lifetime value of the customer and the network of friends and family he / she might bring with them; so emotion comes into it, not just economic arithmetic.

Moreover, perhaps the transaction doesn't complete. I always check my shed to make sure I haven't locked the latest lost cat in there – and whilst I wasn't directly responsible for returning the cat in question above, I was thanked anyway.

Do you say "thank you"? If you do, do you do so in a way that's believable? Authentic? Or in a "have a nice day" automated sort of fashion that communicates no emotion whatsoever and just constitutes pollution?

I have a hypothesis that only those that are passionate about what they do and what they sell can find genuine feeling when conveying their thanks. And I look for this enthusiasm when considering my lifetime patronage of a cafe, bank, web host and, well, everything.

Thank you.

Thank you for your attention, to this Friday Roundup and the previous 160 or so!

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Read more

25 January 2011 / 81 Comments

Content – an illustrated history

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired, Mashable, @dmscott, @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format.

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish. Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC.

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu's brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare's homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don't know why we didn't think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what's taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it. Read more

21 January 2011 / 0 Comments

The new governance of lobbying – in conversation with Elizabeth France and Keith Johnston

This week's CIPR TV focused on the formation of the Public Affairs Council in response to the Public Administration Select Committee's recommendations in its December 2008 report, Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall. We're delighted that Elizabeth France, UKPAC's chair, and Keith Johnston, CIPR and UKPAC board member, could join us to explain what's going on, who it affects and how.

15 January 2011 / 3 Comments

A non-techie explanation of how web pages are secured

I first published this overview back in 2004. I'm prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it's interesting. No seriously, it is.

When is a web page secure?

Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts "https://" rather than "http://". Saying that, this doesn't mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you're on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design.

If you'd like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here: Read more