Posts

I have always admired the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century’s rules to this one. That’s a repeat of the opening sentence to a blog post of mine from 2007. And in the last couple of weeks the NLA appears to just get sillier and sillier and less and less in tune with how the world works today. They have announced their imminent intention to begin charging agencies and clients for sending URLs to each other. Yes, you did read that right. I can assure you, that is the case, and no laughing please from those of you outside of the UK! ...

I was given a book last night. Free. Free, as in I didn’t pay for it, and “Free” as in the book’s title. The author is Chris Anderson , editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of the widely acclaimed 2006 book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More ” (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8 ). “Free” (ISBN 9781905211470 ) takes a look at the rise and rise in recent years of business models pivoting around the provision of stuff for free. The book has some interesting chapters for anyone involved in marketing, particularly in relation to Web search and publishing (the widely held expectation of not having to pay for Web content and the rise of free papers during the decline of traditional media). ...

Thanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who’ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I’m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven’t checked back with Charlene since February… are you around next week Charlene?) I do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don’t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date! Given that I’ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation. But that’s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That’s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question. ...

In Brian Solis’ latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers , he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition. If you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . Of course I recognise we’ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I’m tracking. And wow is this market exploding. (Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled “Listening + Conversation Management Systems”.) If you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch . Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt . ...

It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called “transition period” and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard. It hasn’t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I’m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach. Most encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved. So I’m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It’s concise. It’s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how. ...

When media training people, it’s sometimes a challenge to convey exactly what might be considered quotable, or a soundbite in common parlance. You know… not too long, not too short. Punchy. Insightful. Possibly controversial. Maybe funny. In fact, Wikipedia just informs me that Mark Twain described the concept as “a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense”. Well, Paul Gambaccini is obviously expert at it. Of all the tributes paid to Michael Jackson today, his in the one that has stuck with me. Not verbatim, it went something like this on Radio 4’s Today programme: There will only be one Michael Jackson. His life was in three parts. The Jackson Five years. The incredible Quincy Jones albums. And then the years as a freak. RIP Michael. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

There is a problem with social media. Conclusions should be drawn from the collective, from the aggregate of all social interaction, conversation, commentary, tagging, ratings etc. As the assertion goes, there’s wisdom in them there crowds. But that’s not how we’re all used to working. We have evolved, I think you’ll agree, to tune into one person at a time. Listen to one person. Watch one person. If I asked you to tell me what the population of London was thinking on a certain topic, unless that topic was their restricted choice of political expression and the question coincided with a local election, you’d be hard pressed to tell me. We like our individual news readers, individual film stars, individual celebrities. And our individual journalists. You see, we can trust (most) journalists because they’ve had to subscribe to a code of conduct, a code of ethics. They have standards to maintain in executing their task at hand. ...

There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That’s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one. Which is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn’t care. I put “they” in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up “they”, doesn’t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me. That’s why we use “they” as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct “it”. Secondly, the “they” also indicates what’s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is. ...

Well, we know what the big news is this week! The corresponding blog post has attracted over 68,000 comments at the time of writing… which is quite a lot. Is it about the economy? No. Saving the planet? No. A remake of Barbarella? Not even. No, the big news this week is Facebook usernames … get yours before someone else with the same name does. The feature goes live 12.01am tomorrow EDT. And what better reading material to keep yourself alert this evening as you wait for the minute hand to tick round than today’s Friday Roundup selection. ...

“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you) .” I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying “Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)” isn’t quite so catchy! Think about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you’d experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance. When you were tendering your PR contract, you didn’t care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves. So, on that basis, why does your website have an “About us” section, or equivalent, but not an “About you”? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true. ...