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The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ’traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard. For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy ’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward. I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing. We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation. Data visualisation Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently. ...

AVE. Three little letters I thought had been dragged and dropped into the PR waste basket some years back. Right next to “column inches”, you know what I mean. Yet I have come across Advertising Value Equivalent no fewer than four times this week, coincidentally and oddly. The first definition returned by a Google search is provided courtesy of SourceWatch : “…to ‘measure’ the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign”. The description goes on to describe how you ask yourself the question “Mmmm, how much would this space have cost me to buy advertising stylee?” and then you multiply that by, oooh I don’t know, 3, or 4, or 10? Public Relations is about exerting influence and being influenced. We do this by sparking debate. Creating stimulating content, and demonstrating insight, passion and leadership by finding and starting conversations about the issues that matter to the marketplace, to our customers and prospects, and to our customers’ customers. What’s the AVE of that conversation exactly? ...

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled “There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile ”, B.L. Ochman posted “Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet ” on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog. Right up there at number 1: You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy. Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake ) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives. I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that your business most likely isn’t ready to do business in 2009!) ...

“Innovate”. “Pleased to”. “Unique”. “Focused on”. And of course, “Leading Provider”. Keeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and engaging isn’t always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that’s the job, that it’s the way, is an easy trap to fall into. Which is why I like David Meerman Scott’s Gobbledygook analysis . Now in its second year, it does what David wants it to do… makes you think about everything you write. See, now I’m wondering about my use of the word “engaging” before. Is that hackneyed? Is that a marketer talking to marketers leaning lazily on an industry-word-of-the-decade? Hey, just doing a quick check on dictionary.com tells me it doesn’t even mean what I thought it did; apparently it means attractive, charming, winning , and not, as I’d assumed, the potential to compel someone to engage with whatever. ...

How are you feeling today? Jolly? Then you’ll thank Trevor Young of the newly launched ParkYoung for drawing our attention to this comedic video on the perils of design by consensus… a lesson in when less is more . Thoughtful? Then you’ll want to drop in on Brian Solis’ updated Conversation Prism . Poor? Then you might wish to review your investment in online advertising courtesy of Graham Jones. It is, he says, a waste of money . Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

I’m amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy. Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives. The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media. The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out. There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success. ...

This slideshow made me laugh. View more presentations from The Kaiser . I’ve been a Twitter user now for two years, and I’m intrigued by its success. You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and ‘clients’ that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore. You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation. You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious… with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more ‘many-to-many’. ...

It’s always difficult to pick out the highlights of the highlights from a week of MarCom Professional posts, but here goes… If social media thought leader Brian Solis didn’t occasionally blog from face-to-face events I’d swear he eats and sleeps solely on the big old WWW. I’ve yet to join a service, pre-beta, pre-alpha, or whatever, where Mr. Solis isn’t already embedded! Well his new book is out, as you will see from his post this week , “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations”. Haven’t got hold of it yet… but half way through David Meerman Scott’s World Wide Rave . And for pure poetry, you must check out the presentation brought to our attention by Trevor Young. Intriguing and powerful copy. ...

Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence. IBM’s awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text (“unstructured data” in the words of the experts). An analysis they’ve called “Phrase Net”. The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example. So I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto… ...

YAWN! A yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2 ). I’ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message. Just needed to find one I really liked. Fortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media’s guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don’t need to look any further. ...