Chew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional?
Where and when... http://tinyurl.com/dogduck, Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009.
Updates here and @sheldrake. Hope to see you there!
P.S. The current description of what MarComProfessional is about is here FYI.
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...
The B2B Social Web has arrived and it's not going to go away.
I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here's the first half of our conversation...
1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?
If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others' regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.
MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.
2) What major trends should my readers know about?
The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc. Read more
Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I'm asked on a regular basis "What's the point of spending so much time online?".
The very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into "offline" and "online" portions. Yet they don't distinguish "time eating / not eating", "time talking / listening", "time with new people / with old acquaintances", "time on the phone / not on the phone".
Like eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn't? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning... some of which just happens to be online and some offline. Read more
The word Cyberspace always makes me chuckle for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I noticed an article recently in the FT - "Business urged to woo social network figures" - about a report from Experian and Hitwise saying, well, that business should make sure they look after influential people online. Cool. My headline would be "Influential people are influential people, online or off".
But it was the box-out in the article that I wanted to highlight here, particularly as it relates to this MarCom Professional network. Not sure about the examples though. I quote.... Read more