Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 32 of 43)

22 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup 22nd May 2009

A brief Roundup this week. Firstly, we had dozens more members join this week, so "welcome" to everyone who has joined since we last said "welcome"!

Secondly, good to see everyone at the Dog and Duck in Soho, London, on Wednesday, including Ted Shelton and Marissa Root of The Conversation Group over from San Francisco, courtesy of Mark Adams.

And lastly, a quick heads up re. another London event, this time hosted by Deloitte on the impact of convergence on advertising, 4th June, chaired by yours truly. See you there?  And if you're running a meetup, let us know and we'll plug it here in the Friday Roundup.

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

15 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – Blyk

Well I don't know about you, but I'm totally confused. What is happening at Blyk?

For those beyond the UK's shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer's completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing.

But on comparing this claim to Seth Godin's articulate definition of permission marketing, I posted at the time that this wasn't the game Blyk was playing. The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA's Alex Farber:

"Blyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships" and "Blyk's MVNO shift causes industry stir".

Now if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex's articles means, it's Bena Roberts of GoMo News. Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise... "Is anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me?" Read more

11 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Blinkx and you won't miss it – myChannel comes a step closer

I've just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian's article "Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal".

Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy), and Miniweb is into "next generation TV" with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.

Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.

But that's not the point.

Just over four years ago I posted a blog about "myChannel" which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there's 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels.  Everyone has their own.

myChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources... Read more

8 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup 8th May 2009

Time for a change. Having sold Fuse PR to Racepoint Group in 2006, and as much as I will miss everyone, it's time for me to leave the business in very fine hands and, well, do something else instead.

One thing I'm really looking forward to is developing and growing MarCom Professional. We've got some cool ideas, as you'd expect I hope, and we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas too. So, fancy a pint? If you are in London on the 20th May, I invite you to join us at the Dog and Duck in Soho. Read more

1 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – night clubs and social media

Those of you with whom I've discussed social Web strategy, or even helped define and execute it, will know my analogy of the social Web with the social life of a typical city. For example, the Facebooks, MySpaces and Bebo's are the mega night clubs on the ring road. The blogs and small forums are the pubs and bars on the high street. The likes of Ning are the market stalls or local fair rides. The tweeting of Twitter is the chitter chatter in passing and over the garden fence.

And this isn't analogy for analogy's sake, this is a great way to orientate social Web newbies to the norms and expectations of social media, applications and services.

Take the example of participating for the first time in a Facebook group, or a business forum, or blog meme. Enough to make the most confident of net newbies hesitate.  Yet no-one enters a room buzzing with people they don't know and starts gobbing off immediately before assessing the etiquette and the tone of the conversation, so why do that online? Social media newbies just need to look out for the analogous sort of things to which they are so naturally accustomed offline.

Offline - is drinking from the bottle acceptable? Online - is proper punctuation and spelling expected?

Offline - who's got gravitas, attracting people around them? Online - whose point of view is attracting the most comment, the most feedback and interaction? Read more

24 April 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – teamwork

The likelihood of outstanding business success is greater with great teamwork. I'd say that was an obvious and uncontroversial thing to say!

For the Friday Roundup, I'd condense the management texts I've read and the experiences I've had to date into five teamwork must-haves:

  • a shared and clearly articulated vision;
  • mutuality (individual success is team success, and vice versa);
  • honesty;
  • clearly defined roles and responsibilities; and
  • a self-sustaining determination and hunger for success.

These qualities are being put to the most extreme of tests in current times. The economic climate today requires great teams to tend to these must-haves like never before, to keep them resilient and vibrant. But the ultimate test is for those teams that observers within or without rate as sub-par today. Read more

21 April 2009 / 0 Comments

Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office

The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater's entry into the 'traditional' media monitoring six years back... and they've done pretty darn well in that regard.

For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy's rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman), and I understand this will form a 'base' or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.

I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and 'prettiness' of charts, and pricing.

We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.

Data visualisation

Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently. Read more

17 April 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – AVE v SWA

AVE. Three little letters I thought had been dragged and dropped into the PR waste basket some years back. Right next to "column inches", you know what I mean. Yet I have come across Advertising Value Equivalent no fewer than four times this week, coincidentally and oddly.

The first definition returned by a Google search is provided courtesy of SourceWatch: "...to 'measure' the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign". The description goes on to describe how you ask yourself the question "Mmmm, how much would this space have cost me to buy advertising stylee?" and then you multiply that by, oooh I don't know, 3, or 4, or 10?

Public Relations is about exerting influence and being influenced. We do this by sparking debate. Creating stimulating content, and demonstrating insight, passion and leadership by finding and starting conversations about the issues that matter to the marketplace, to our customers and prospects, and to our customers' customers.

What's the AVE of that conversation exactly? Read more

14 April 2009 / 0 Comments

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy – supporting perspective in Ad Age post

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled "There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile", B.L. Ochman posted "Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn't Tweet" on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.

Right up there at number 1:

You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It's a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.

Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake) questioning my definition of the word "strategy". So for clarity... your social Web strategy is the long-term "how" that follows the "what" of your social Web objectives.

I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post... if "every tweet has to be approved by legal" then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I'd also argue that your business most likely isn't ready to do business in 2009!) Read more

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