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According to the renowned Excellence study, public relations is a management function that focuses on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. One might argue that one can’t aim to please (benefit) everyone, so it might be more appropriate to emphasise mutual understanding rather than mutual benefit, as indeed the CIPR’s current definition of PR does. Despite the common association of PR with spin (spin a yarn, make up a story), the PR professional focuses on symmetrical communication based on truths and understanding. Indeed, I like to say that whilst ‘perception is reality’ may have been a dominant axiom for 20th Century practice, the 21st Century professional acknowledges that changes to media, communications technology and societal expectations now renders ‘reality is perception’ more appropriate. But what is truth? ...

I’m a fortunate geek. I got to chair the 6UK launch back in November, with keynote by Vint Cerf – fondly referred to as one of the fathers of the Internet. And on Monday this week, I chaired Profiting From The New Web at the Royal Society with keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web. How cool is that?! I worked with the Web Science Trust and Intellect to design this week’s conference, and we set ourselves this mission: Discover new and better ways to do business, run our countries, and lead fulfilling and sustainable lives via the intelligent, innovative and diligent development of the New Web, and to make progress faster than otherwise. Web Innovation The term Web 1.0 is applied retrospectively to a Web of documents and ecommerce. The term Web 2.0 has come to describe social community and user-generated content. The New Web – the Web of Data or the Semantic Web, and sometimes Web 3.0 – entails the Web itself understanding the meaning of that participation and content. A component of the Web of Data, known as Open Data , encompasses the idea of freeing data so that others may query it, check and challenge it, augment it, and mash it up with other sources. Sir Tim is particularly motivated by this vision given its potential to drive scientific breakthrough, enhance delivery of public services and open up new frontiers for competitive advantage. ...

A big thank you to everyone who joined me last night in central London for the launch party for The Business of Influence . And for those who were still around between midnight and 2am, I can only say that I rarely get the opportunity to cut those dance moves these days; so apologies. Special thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (@jangles ) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast amongst many other things . ...

Today’s the day! It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience. What’s it about? The Business of Influence is a rethink. It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them. The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy. The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy. ...

With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I’ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations. ...

Regular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation’s tool selection and procurement. ...

I’m in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I’ve enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman’s David Armano, Dell’s Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt. Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform , and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it. Here’s how Radian6 describes it: Insights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout , OpenAmplify and OpenCalais . The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you. How does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff. ...

The CIPR has just announced that it will be launching The Conversation this coming Monday, during its social media conference . The Conversation provides the facility to aggregate the best PR related blogs from members and non-members, in the UK and further afield. And it goes live under a full head of steam because The Conversation is the new face of MarCom Professional, the network I’ve been running for the past four years. Here’s what the CIPR has to say: ...

According to BusinessWeek, Groupon could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It’s now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business. My sister-in-law recently bought a £300 spa package for £100 via Groupon. Haircut, massage, manicure and pedicure. She’s delighted. “Would you go back to the spa?” I ask. “Definitely” she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: “When they run another Groupon deal.” In other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles). ...

The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong. It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find. Measurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner. ...