Posts

The CIPR has assembled a social media group, information about which I’ve appended here for your convenience. I’m delighted to have been invited and look forward to working with the group, half of whom I know and half I look forward to meeting. One of the first things I’m going to do is to invite the group to a meeting Wednesday 21st April 2010 to present the work to date on the Ontology For Feelings About Things and the PR Ontology, both pieces of work critical to the PR industries contribution to something referred to as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is most often what people mean when they talk about Web 3.0. ...

In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the “Awesome Analytics Advantage”, making those organisations achieving this advantage “Triple A”! Fundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases…. retail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage! Well, I’ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine , during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma ). My conclusion… ...

It’s just coming up to ten years since I participated in the first UK workshop on this new thing called blogging. During the ensuing decade I have formed a number of social media tenets that have so far stood the tests of time. One of these is simply that social networks work best when they span the on- and off-line worlds; when face-to-face leads to ’linking-in’, and when ‘friending’ leads to meet and greet. Of course, another tenet was that at some juncture we’d stop differentiating between on- and off-line in the same way we don’t feel the need to qualify whether a conversation was held in person or over the phone, but what’s a contradiction between friends? And the combination of on- and off- has worked in my favour recently. I had the benefit of a highly receptive audience at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 who went on to view and tweet and my presentation about influence on slideshare.net, which then helped catapult it to slideshare’s homepage as their most discussed document of the day. So how can you start making the combination of on- and off- work to your advantage? Lots of great posts for you this week. Enjoy! ...

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp . It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare! UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I’m delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that? View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake . ...

What’s influence? How is it achieved? Who’s got it? Regular readers of my posts will know that I have a penchant for labelling all the combined disciplines of marketing and PR as simply “Influence”. (Hey, the word even appears in the name of my consultancy.) And the combination or convergence of these skills under one unifying term helps erode the noun orientation of our profession and assists in constructing a verb oriented approach. What are we really trying to do? I’ve been pulling my thoughts together for a presentation about influence for this coming week’s Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London (about half a dozen tickets remaining I believe), and I’ll be posting my presentation to my blog on the day. But perhaps I can leave you with something to think about until then, particularly as I’m hoping that this will spark violent disagreement all the better for getting the matter resolved as soon as possible. Here it is. Influence scoring services like Klout and Social Mention are utterly useless. At best such services are harmless fun, and at worst they are a costly and wasteful distraction from doing the right thing the right way for yourselves or your client. ...

I’ve had the pleasure in the last two weeks of working with a dozen of the finest Brits in PR, branding, digital / Web, public affairs and news distribution. We’ve joined up to work voluntarily on an apolitical campaign in the run up to the UK general election (invincecable.org.uk if you’re interested). I’m telling you this because, having blogged about the convergence of marketing disciplines over the years (as distinct from “integrated”), this campaign of ours has revealed just how far the best practitioners’ expertise is now “converged”. Sure, there’s still the need to pause to explain the occasional aspect or define a particular piece of jargon or inevitable acronym, but generally the group just understands what we’re trying to achieve and how we can all work together to make it happen. There is no bewilderment, misconception or diffidence. And this is despite the fact that we haven’t actually all met each other. That doesn’t stop us. We’re Skype’ing, IM’ing, emailing, wiki’ing, posterous’ing, tweeting, and quickly assembling the resources, ideas and timetable for a cracking campaign. And all in the open . And all whilst earning a living. Awesome. ...

We have a super mix of posts for you this week. In fact the reason we send this weekly roundup on a Friday is because we think more people make some time to read about their industry towards the end of the week. And in a converging profession, that awareness can prove critical in securing that new business opportunity, and in maintaining the business you have. PR consultants should have a good grasp of search engine optimisation. SEOs should get the heads round mobile apps. Mobile digital pros may well do better stuff with training in advertising. And advertisers should be looking to learn PR skills. ...

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade… 1. Web 2.0 participation I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the “write” part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don’t contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc. ...

So-called “Web 2.0” dominated the last decade. This decade be prepared for “Web 3.0”. Why the quotes?… well these terms are loosely defined at best, but remain useful as signposts of major change. Most pundits associate 3.0 with something called the Semantic Web. Effectively, if Web 2.0 was about community and content, then Web 3.0 / the Semantic Web is about understanding the meaning of those social contributions and content. Importantly, Web 3.0 is going to have as big an impact on what it means to practice marketing and public relations as Web 2.0. The implications are widespread and interlinked, which is not surprising when something called LinkedData is a sub-set of the Semantic Web. ...

I learn something every day as I help moderate MarCom Professional. This week I was most intrigued by the idea that Google could add adverts to Google Streetview … both static and moving images in what constitutes a sort of augmented-virtual-reality I guess. AVR? Thanks to Michael Litman for flagging this. As always, Brian Solis has a couple of cracking posts this week, one on the socialization of email marketing , and another on the stages of social media integration in business , which shares some of the outlook of aspects of the Influence Scorecard initiative. I’d obviously recommend MarCom Professional for keeping up to speed on how marketing and PR have been and are being transformed. And if you’re looking for a comprehensive resource that’s insightful and digestible, I whole heartedly recommend The New Rules of Marketing and PR by MarCom Professional member David Meerman Scott. ...