Philip Sheldrake

Archives (page 33 of 43)

10 April 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – hackneyed copy

"Innovate". "Pleased to". "Unique". "Focused on". And of course, "Leading Provider".

Keeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and engaging isn't always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that's the job, that it's the way, is an easy trap to fall into.

Which is why I like David Meerman Scott's Gobbledygook analysis. Now in its second year, it does what David wants it to do... makes you think about everything you write.

See, now I'm wondering about my use of the word "engaging" before. Is that hackneyed? Is that a marketer talking to marketers leaning lazily on an industry-word-of-the-decade? Hey, just doing a quick check on dictionary.com tells me it doesn't even mean what I thought it did; apparently it means attractive, charming, winning, and not, as I'd assumed, the potential to compel someone to engage with whatever.  Read more

3 April 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup 3rd April 2009

How are you feeling today?

Jolly? Then you'll thank Trevor Young of the newly launched ParkYoung for drawing our attention to this comedic video on the perils of design by consensus... a lesson in when less is more.

Thoughtful? Then you'll want to drop in on Brian Solis' updated Conversation Prism.

Poor? Then you might wish to review your investment in online advertising courtesy of Graham Jones. It is, he says, a waste of money.

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

3 April 2009 / 2 Comments

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile

corporate%20twitter

I'm amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology... we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.

Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.

The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.

The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.

There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter's sake and not for business success. Read more

27 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – Brian Solis' new book is out

It's always difficult to pick out the highlights of the highlights from a week of MarCom Professional posts, but here goes...

If social media thought leader Brian Solis didn't occasionally blog from face-to-face events I'd swear he eats and sleeps solely on the big old WWW. I've yet to join a service, pre-beta, pre-alpha, or whatever, where Mr. Solis isn't already embedded! Well his new book is out, as you will see from his post this week, "Putting the Public Back in Public Relations".

Haven't got hold of it yet... but half way through David Meerman Scott's World Wide Rave.

And for pure poetry, you must check out the presentation brought to our attention by Trevor Young. Intriguing and powerful copy. Read more

27 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Visualising content to improve your understanding of the conversation

Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.

IBM's awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text ("unstructured data" in the words of the experts). An analysis they've called "Phrase Net". The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.

So I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto...

marcomprofessional phrase net

Read more

27 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

This slideshow made me laugh.

View more presentations from The Kaiser.

I've been a Twitter user now for two years, and I'm intrigued by its success.

You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and 'clients' that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.

You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.

You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious... with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more 'many-to-many'. Read more

22 March 2009 / 2 Comments

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way – Part 3

yawn

YAWN!

A yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2).

I've not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.

Just needed to find one I really liked.

Fortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media's guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don't need to look any further. Read more

15 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Conversations start with something interesting to say delivered in an interesting way – Part 2

I posted a few weeks back about how organisations must engage stakeholders in dialogue, and how this conversation starts by not just having something interesting to say, but delivering it in an interesting way.

After all, whilst marketers consider the 30 second ad to be on its last legs because it tries to wallop all and sundry, you can take longer to get your point over if you're talking to those whose interest is already sparked and who want to find out more.

My last post featured a video and an animation, and I promised to come back with some more formats for starting a conversation in an interesting way. For topical reasons I have another animation for your interest, but the main feature in this post is a call-to-action-microsite. Read more

13 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – humans first, machines a close second

An indulgent post bag this week. So many fascinating posts, I couldn't keep the short-list all that short.

Take the debate about search engine optimisation (SEO) amongst various pockets of the digital marketing profession. My approach to SEO has always been to develop content for humans first and search engines a close second. But definitely second.

And where does SEO stand when future 'votes for' a webpage, as interwoven into the search engines' algorithms, come not solely from links from other websites but from more inclusive sources such as social bookmarking services like Delicious and Stumbleupon, and Twittered links?

David Meerman Scott hints this week at his view of SEO... "SEO and your crap filled site"! And in case you remain uncertain, click over to Graham Jones' "Search is on its deathbed...bye, bye SEO".

And if you fancy getting into this sort of stuff more deeply, Brian Solis struts his visionary stuff again this week with "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?"

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

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