Archives (page 36 of 43)

12 December 2008 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup 12th December 2008

Before we dive into this week's MarCom Professional highlights, we'd like you to help us work out what we should be doing for you in the New Year. Here's the shortlist:

A. An agency time planning, logging and reporting tool. Keep track of projects, people, tasks, time. Work out where you're over- and under-servicing, and opt-in to anonymised benchmarkcomparisons.

B. Coverage collation, management and measurement. Scan coverage and capture screenshots directly to the browser, generate reports and share with your team and/or clients in your own extranet.

C. Journalist - PR relations is controversial of late. This service would act as a hub for PR consultants to discover what journalists need, and for journalists to manage stuff thrown at them by PR consultants.

Do drop us an email, tweet me, post or comment... we only want to deliver what you can use!

Thanks and best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Read more

4 December 2008 / 0 Comments

The social Web and agenda setting: a presentation to today's European Agenda Setting Conference, Zurich

I'm presenting in one hour to the European Agenda Setting Conference on the impact of the social Web. Great presentations this morning from Roland Schatz, President Media Tenor, David W Moore, author of The Opinion Makers, and Ramu Damudaran, Director Civil Society at the United Nations.

Here's my deck if you're interested:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialweb socialmedia)

2 December 2008 / 0 Comments

You're No One If You're Not On Twitter

Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of 'the balance' as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?

Here's one songster's take:

2 December 2008 / 4 Comments

Influence… it's a numbers game

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday "Where are the PR Numerati?" (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he's right and I'm numerate and I'm in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book "The Numerati" by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don't mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will: Read more

28 November 2008 / 0 Comments

Where the social Web goes from here

It's good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics: “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter-fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed, you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal. Read more

7 November 2008 / 1 Comment

Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times

I received three emails on the back of my post last week "When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles". I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with "ways to get your marketing communications to the gym", and that's the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don't waste your time with activity that doesn't contribute to hitting those targets. They keep track of progress and get to know your strengths and weaknesses, literally, and often better than you.

In many ways, this is analogous to your public relations consultancy. As I said in my last post, your marketing communications is muscle and not fat. If you work with a great consultancy, this muscle will be toned and responsive to current market conditions and challenges (if it’s not, change it today). Read more

31 October 2008 / 0 Comments

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating – or why the tough need muscles

Times are hard. It appears that the people running our financial systems lost control. And whilst the pundits argue the difference between high finance and the so-called "real economy", your investors, your shareholders, will be demanding to know how your board is going to respond to scenarios including zero revenue growth and revenue decline in 2009.

When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating.

Here's a few thoughts regarding the criticality of public relations in recessionary periods. Read more

19 September 2008 / 0 Comments

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

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You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon 's Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient. Read more

5 September 2008 / 0 Comments

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics – vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I'm being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn't know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They're keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I'm sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence. Here's a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling "organizations to know what's being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy's SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time." Read more

29 August 2008 / 0 Comments

Your first job in PR… questions you should prepare for and questions you should ask in the job interview

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You’ve just graduated and you’re looking for your first job in public relations. Your first interview is approaching, and you want to make the second interview stage, of course! You visit the company’s website, polish your shoes and get to their offices half an hour too early :-)

Now what? Can you talk about your approach to press releases? No. Can you discuss case studies? No. Can you describe the work environment in which you’ll thrive? Not articulately, without work experience. Should the interviewer really ask you any of these? No. So what goes on beyond the “Tell me about yourself” opener? How should you prepare?

Here’s my list of questions you should be prepared for, and the kind of questions you should consider asking. Actually, I’ve just made my co-directors a nice cup of tea to persuade them to contribute to this list too, so thanks to Blaise and Jay.

Questions you should prepare for

“Tell me about yourself.”

A gift. A lovely open question inviting you to present your best facets. If you can’t represent yourself in response to a question like this, then the interviewer will really wonder how you can represent their clients! Read more