The very nice people at Global Dawn invited me in a couple of weeks back to meet the team and speak about some of the stuff covered in The Business of Influence. They were particularly drawn to the aspects of measurement / ROI / business performance management, and the convergence of the traditional influence-related silos come to that.
I was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series.
Thanks to Ema Linaker for making this happen.
A big thank you to everyone who joined me last night in central London for the launch party for The Business of Influence. And for those who were still around between midnight and 2am, I can only say that I rarely get the opportunity to cut those dance moves these days; so apologies.
Special thanks to the legendary Neville Hobson (@jangles) for taking the time to record a chat with me. For those who haven't yet had the pleasure, Neville is a co-host of the FIR (For Immediate Release) podcast amongst many other things.
[UPDATE 5pm 25th April: Neville has now published this interview on the FIR podcast.]
And thanks also to everyone tweeting their pics of the book, but I'm afraid Simon Sanders (@simonsanders) takes first prize so far for his tongue-in-cheeking unboxing (what's unboxing?):
Today's the day!
It's ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.
The Business of Influence is a rethink.
It's about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.
The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.
The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It's a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy. Read more
I'm in Boston this week for the Radian6 Social 2011 Conference. (Disclosure: Radian6 is paying my expenses to be here.) So far I've enjoyed talking with Radian6 CMO David Alston, OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave, Edelman's David Armano, Dell's Head of Interactive Marketing Adam Brown, Klout Head of Platform Matthew Thomson, Marshall Sponder and Nathan Gilliatt.
Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun has kicked off the event this morning by launching the new Insights Platform, and I appreciate why Marcel is so enthusiastic about it.
Here's how Radian6 describes it:
Insights are answers. Insights give meaning to unstructured volumes of content based your needs and integrated into our current dashboard offering. Current partners include Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais. The insights that each of these partners offer (like age range, location, influencer score, textual analysis) are added as drill down options on the Dashboard widgets, so you are able to take your Radian6 topic profile mentions and overlay the insight partner data all in one place. No exporting River of News and doing comparative analysis in Excel to these providers data from your separate account, now it’s all been brought together for you.
How does it work? Well Radian6 has leaned heavily on the three partners, with both OpenAmplify and OpenCalais having deep expertise in semantic technologies. This is the tech that helps interpret, understand and process the meaning of content. Serious stuff. Read more
It's a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It's my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I'm delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.
Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here's the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic 'Content – An illustrated history', which is easy to breeze through :-)
Real-time PR is a hot topic.
This is nothing to do with fashion, but the unavoidable pressures of modern PR. David Meerman Scott's November 2010 book, "Real-time Marketing and PR" is already a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and with Twitter responses frequently meaningless after an hour's delay, if not minutes, and many conversations requiring a response within the hour or two, awaiting the Monday meeting to debate possible responses is now simply unrealistic.
I presented at Social PR 2011 today on just this topic. The main take home... it isn't easy.
Being the eyes, ears and mouth of an organisation to the drumbeat of the daily news was never easy. Being the eyes, ears and mouth, with heightened sensitivity to influence and be influenced in real-time, requires enhanced levels of strategic diligence, meticulous planning, training, constant attention to detail and rigorous measurement.
Reality is perception.
It’s impossible to fake it.
Real-time PR must, by nature, be authentic.
Real-time PR marks the death of the persuasion / ‘spin’ school.
Long live two-way, symmetric PR fostering mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics.