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UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-) UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format . UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy. UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC . UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu’s brand communications going forward. Cool. UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare’s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours. UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! Embedded below. No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what’s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented. Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically? Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices? Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content? Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it. ...

This week’s CIPR TV focused on the formation of the Public Affairs Council in response to the Public Administration Select Committee’s recommendations in its December 2008 report, Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall . We’re delighted that Elizabeth France, UKPAC’s chair, and Keith Johnston, CIPR and UKPAC board member, could join us to explain what’s going on, who it affects and how.

I first published this overview back in 2004. I’m prompted to update and repost it here because the original website is no longer live (it was the website for Fuse PR back in the day), because I was talking about it with some Meanwhile colleagues this week, and because it’s interesting. No seriously, it is. When is a web page secure? Content on a web page is secured when the URL starts “https://” rather than “http://”. Saying that, this doesn’t mean that all content on a page marked as such is secured, but if you’re on a website of a trusted source, like Amazon, you may be happy to assume that the parts that need to be are, by design. If you’d like to find out what other information your browser gives you about the level of security for a particular web page, check out the relevant link here: ...

The CIPR ’s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group’s chair, I’d better get my skates on. Here’s a quick look at the main thrust of our report. Social media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what’s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn’t it, except that the view of what’s important and what’s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience. Take the announcement this week from Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s top supermarkets: ...

Let’s talk strategy. Without thorough strategy, one is resigned to contribute nothing to living up to your organisation’s mission and pursuing its vision. Thoroughly resigned. And the turn of the year is an apt time to take the strategic long view. But let’s begin with the shortest view. David Meerman Scott’s latest book ‘Real-time Marketing and PR’ (book review ) emphasises that being attuned to the second by second deliberations, assertions and flippancy of the social Web is nothing short of imperative for many organisations. Nevertheless, he also points out that we need our approach to be informed by the organisation’s over-arching needs and guided by sound and consistent policy. The title of a post by Brian Solis this week articulates the challenge succinctly, “failing to plan is planning to fail ” and Vanessa DiMauro also calls for proper diligence in her post, “not so fast! ” So how do you know if you’re doing OK, or going hand to mouth? Why do too many of the leaders I work with consider they have this licked and yet discover otherwise? Here’s an acid test. Grab a handful of colleagues in your marketing and PR teams this afternoon for fifteen minutes and ask the following four questions: ...

In a fast changing marketplace with fast changing technologies and consumer behaviours we have no option but to work hard keeping ourselves up to speed, week in week out. Time and money constraints rule out keeping abreast simply via course and event attendance, and the only real option is books. Reading. Lots. Lots of books. Here’s a couple to make the Christmas List of any marketing and PR professional. Real-Time Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott Subtitle: How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now. I got my copy of Real-Time Marketing & PR end-October and I just read it yesterday. Mmmm, not exactly a real-time book review then. My only excuse is that I’ve had to focus on completing my own book (the manuscript is now submitted and it’s due out in April with Wiley, the same publisher of David’s latest books). Let’s cut to the chase. Should every marketing and PR professional read this book? Yes; even those who consider themselves or are considered to be at the leading edge of this sort of thing. And I make that assertion simply on the basis that David peppers the book with many case studies and examples that will prove useful when attempting to convince the less savvy amongst your colleagues and clients of your point of view. ...

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others. Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later. Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators. ...

I’ve been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK’s first Internet of Things conference, Internetome . Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK. Here’s my presentation “Marketing and Communications in the Internetome”: Marketing and Communications in the Internetome ...

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that’s changed relates. The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things. Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now. If you’re an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008. Now it’s the end of 2010, it’s the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that’s you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition’s. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference , in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company. And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I’d urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today. Hope to see you on the 10th :-) Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

I enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR ’s new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members’ questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen.