Philip Sheldrake

8 July 2010 / 0 Comments

One Web. Many social networks. Facebook’s Achille’s heel.

Facebook will die.

When it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook's prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually!

But social networks aren't subject to the same dynamics as the 'irrational exuberance' that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of 'softer' issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and 'harder' issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network.

Economics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called 'network effect' eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market's network effect first. But that's more ecommerce than social networking. Read more

2 July 2010 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup 2nd July 2010

Continuous professional development. Bloody important. Guess that's why the CIPR just moved its whole system online. Brilliant.

I mention it because I need some. Professional development that is. Look at the state of this Friday Roundup: it lists 16 great posts for goodness sake! Far too many! But they're all so interesting (if I can say that about a list that includes one of my own).

I need a course in editing to get the list down to, say, 10. I could propose some personalisation technology to the MarCom Professional team so you only get posts you're really interested in. But then my post this week is about a new breed of consultant, an Influence Professional, who has to be savvy about everything going on out there in the world of exerting influence, and being influenced. So perhaps that wouldn't work. Mmmm.

Perhaps then I can just help to keep this Roundup shorter than otherwise by just stopping this intro. Here.

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

2 July 2010 / 1 Comment

Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?

Do you 'do' search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who 'get' SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that's how it should be.

Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening's conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid. Read more

25 June 2010 / 3 Comments

Friday Roundup – AMEC and the value of PR

The PR measurement and evaluation community came together in Barcelona 16th-18th June for the AMEC 2nd European Summit. AMEC is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and they played host to organisations such as the IPR, the PRSA, the ICCO,the CIPR and the PR Global Alliance.

I was there representing the CIPR in my capacity as chair of its measurement group.

AMEC equipped all delegates with some nifty electronic voting gadgets with which votes were cast on seven foundation principles. The headline principles were approved, and AMEC has now taken the action to tweak the detail in line with delegate feedback before publishing in full.

I won't duplicate the contents of a post on the seven principles by CIPR President Jay O'Connor, but I will convey here how delighted I am that one of the principles states simply:

Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of PR Read more

11 June 2010 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – social media is a total waste of time

Friday Roundup 11th June 2010

Seriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one.

But you only have to read the 22 I've selected for the Friday Roundup! :-)

Seriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme... Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media.

On the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying "Social media is a waste of time", but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with: Read more

11 June 2010 / 0 Comments

CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn't until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won't be verbatim as I wasn't party to it, but it's a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:

_________

Marketer: We need an iPhone app?

Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why's that?

Marketer: Because they're really cool and cool's where it's at for our target demographic.

Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who's the target?

Marketer: Teenagers.

Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that's only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?

Marketer: Oh :-(

_________

The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and 'other', making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones. Read more

8 June 2010 / 0 Comments

Making sense of social analytics

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.

And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are: Read more

4 June 2010 / 1 Comment

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

There's a bit of a 'first' going on at the CIPR... yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.

So I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life's hard. Read more

28 May 2010 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – discontent content management

Content management has come a long way since the turn of the century. Back then, web design and content management systems (CMS) typically set anyone back five to seven figures of whatever currency they had to hand. And then some bright sparks developed the idea of blogging.

Blogging helped many non-technical web users start publishing for the first time by stripping CMS back to its bare bones, and I remember hosting a contingent from MIT in London in 2001 at the Work Foundation where we worked ourselves up into a frenzy about how big blogging was going to be! Read more

26 May 2010 / 2 Comments

CIPR Digital Impact Conference

The CIPR hosted a smashing event on Monday focusing on the impact of digital and attracting delegates from all sectors as well as a mix of in-house and agency.

I was given a half hour slot to throw my perspectives into the mix, and I decided I'd focus in on the following assertion:

It's my opinion that the things people think have change haven't, but some things have changed that aren't yet widely understood.

Here's my slidestack and I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if Amanda Brown, Head of PR at First Direct is picking up references to her name and company name in the big ol' Wide Web, I'd love to be able to point people to your presentation... loved it :-)

How digital changes everything and nothing

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

P.S. If you like this, and you're in London on Thursdays over the Summer, you might like this.