Image by affiliatesummit via Flickr I interviewed Brian Solis for the CIPR’s website recently. Brian is one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist and futurist, Solis helps practitioners get to grips with the effects of emerging media on marketing, communications and publishing. His perspectives are well worth a listen: ...
My recent post “Where’s your brain at? Where’s your consultancy at? ” was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession’s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle. Well personally I’m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I’m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I’ve just found. Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. “The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web ” identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity: ...
Is social media good? This is possibly one of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked in my consultants’ capacity in recent times. Of course almost all media is now social, or has a social component. Take the BBC’s Question Time ? Sure, its live audience participation is social, but for the rest of us it’s simply broadcast TV. But things have only got more interesting for the programme’s fans as the Twitter backchannel has allowed us all to join the debate. But is social media “good”? I hadn’t seen Stephen Waddington’s post this week about the police effort to capture a killer-at-large in Northumberland when I was asked this question, but his description of “digital rubber necking” makes one pause for thought. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, rubber necking most often refers to those motorists who slow down to see some vehicular carnage, and it appears that Stephen isn’t too enamoured of the social media equivalent. Indeed, I felt most uneasy reading that the killer’s facebook page now has 17,000 members. So, my answer? ...
Facebook will die. When it comes to asserting my regard for Facebook’s prospects I feel a bit like the guys over at housepricecrash.co.uk. This website was set up by friends with a mutual interest in the UK property market in 2003 and, as the name of the site subtly betrays, they predicted a bit of a tumble in house prices. And of course they were proved right. Eventually! But social networks aren’t subject to the same dynamics as the ‘irrational exuberance’ that fueled the house price climb to an all-time high. In the arena of social networks it comes down to a mix of ‘softer’ issues, such as the simple push and pull of fashion, and ‘harder’ issues, such as the underlying technological construct of a social network. Economics can take a role, most obviously at play with the so-called ’network effect’ eBay concreted in many markets, and in their ceding some markets to Yahoo! for example where Yahoo! secured that market’s network effect first. But that’s more ecommerce than social networking. ...
Continuous professional development. Bloody important. Guess that’s why the CIPR just moved its whole system online. Brilliant. I mention it because I need some. Professional development that is. Look at the state of this Friday Roundup: it lists 16 great posts for goodness sake! Far too many! But they’re all so interesting (if I can say that about a list that includes one of my own). I need a course in editing to get the list down to, say, 10. I could propose some personalisation technology to the MarCom Professional team so you only get posts you’re really interested in. But then my post this week is about a new breed of consultant, an Influence Professional, who has to be savvy about everything going on out there in the world of exerting influence, and being influenced. So perhaps that wouldn’t work. Mmmm. Perhaps then I can just help to keep this Roundup shorter than otherwise by just stopping this intro. Here. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...
Do you ‘do’ search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who ‘get’ SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that’s how it should be. Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening’s conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid. ...
The PR measurement and evaluation community came together in Barcelona 16th-18th June for the AMEC 2nd European Summit. AMEC is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and they played host to organisations such as the IPR , the PRSA , the ICCO ,the CIPR and the PR Global Alliance . I was there representing the CIPR in my capacity as chair of its measurement group. AMEC equipped all delegates with some nifty electronic voting gadgets with which votes were cast on seven foundation principles. The headline principles were approved, and AMEC has now taken the action to tweak the detail in line with delegate feedback before publishing in full. I won’t duplicate the contents of a post on the seven principles by CIPR President Jay O’Connor , but I will convey here how delighted I am that one of the principles states simply: Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of PR** ...
I’m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn’t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won’t be verbatim as I wasn’t party to it, but it’s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly: _________ Marketer: We need an iPhone app? Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why’s that? Marketer: Because they’re really cool and cool’s where it’s at for our target demographic. Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who’s the target? Marketer: Teenagers. Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that’s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers? Marketer: Oh :-( _________ The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and ‘other’, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones. ...
Friday Roundup 11th June 2010 Seriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one. But you only have to read the 22 I’ve selected for the Friday Roundup! :-) Seriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme… Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media. On the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying “Social media is a waste of time ”, but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with: ...
This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday: The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake. As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008: If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security. And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are: ...