Philip Sheldrake

Tag: public relations (page 3 of 4)

21 November 2011 / 10 Comments

Public Relations Defined – The PRSA invites you to help set a new definition of PR

Here's how the corresponding blog post by the PRSA describes its "Public Relations Defined" initiative:

As part of its mission to advance the public relations profession and professional, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has introduced a new initiative to modernize the definition of public relations and increase its value. As the digital age has caused significant shifts in how organizations communicate internally and externally, a question frequently asked by the public, media and practitioners is, "What is public relations?"

The PRSA explains the initiative in these simple terms:

Recent discussions, blog posts, tweets and mainstream articles have suggested that (1) public relations professionals (and, thus, the audiences we serve) continue to struggle with the question: "What is PR?"; (2) many industry professionals are unhappy with the current definitions; and (3) no one definition is considered "the" de facto industry definition.

What more justification do we need?

While my book The Business of Influence sets out to be a rethink of the 'influence disciplines', it starts by reviewing current definitions of marketing and PR. "Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we're all at A to begin with."

In hoping to contribute to the renewed debate, I've reproduced the book's definitions section here. Now all I need to do is work out if the PRSA will be open to a definition leaning on the Influence Scorecard and the role of Chief Influence Officer. What do you think? Read more

28 October 2011 / 0 Comments

What our publics are telling us

Public relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect mutual understanding. Right?

Well, from my experience, the vast majority of practitioners are looking to exert influence but invest considerably less time divining insight from stakeholders and feeding that back into the organisation to improve decision-making.

For the best part of this week I've been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what's going on in the minds of customers and prospects.

Miami beachESOMAR describes itself as "the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide". With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members' contribution to effective decision-making.

This particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far...

Firstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in 'traditional' marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we're all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently? Read more

4 October 2011 / 0 Comments

Communication Director Magazine book review – The Business of Influence

Communication Director MagazineMy book, The Business of Influence, has just been reviewed in Communication Director.

The magazine is billed as the professional specialist magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations in Europe. It documents opinions on important strategic questions in communication, discovers transnational developments and discusses their relevance from a European perspective. The publication is associated with the European Association of Communication Directors.

The review

Page 90, Communication Director Magazine, September 2011

"If you're in business, you're in the business of influence". So begins a typically thought-provoking chapter from The Business of Influence that explores the concept of the Influence Scorecard and the non-tangible results of new communication tools. Read more

17 June 2011 / 0 Comments

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone's lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. <sarcasm>Apart from that, it works just fine!</sarcasm>

This summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC's top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another.

Why? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps:

"Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…"

What does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment. Read more

3 June 2011 / 0 Comments

Not PR – Friday Roundup

"CELEBRITIES, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results. Online 'reputation management' agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings."

So opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can't provide the link to The Times as I'm not a subscriber to its paywall, but it's syndicated here, sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.)

On reading the article, part of me recognised this sort of capability at the same time another part of me felt very uncomfortable with it being associated directly with PR. And then I winced some more...

"[These agencies] typically use thousands of social networking profiles - set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person - to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories."

This is NOT public relations. This is not two-way communication aspiring to foster mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. Such activities clearly breach the CIPR's code of conduct, specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation. Read more

28 February 2011 / 8 Comments

Real-time PR demands rigorous strategic alignment

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.

How to plan & execute real-time PR that delivers for your organisation

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.

23 February 2011 / 2 Comments

The Marketing Century – a compilation of expert insight

The Marketing CenturyYou can now get your hands on The Marketing Century – out this week – a compilation of expert insight across a wide gamut of marketing and PR related topics to celebrate the centenary of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). The chapter outline here is based on the book's introduction.

I'm delighted to have authored the chapter on digital marketing, and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have on reading it.

Buy at Amazon / CIM / The Book Depository / Blackwell's / Waterstone's. And more info at Google Books.

1. Strategic Marketing (Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, Peppers & Rogers Group)

The Marketing Century opens with a clear statement from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers: it is vital that organisations put customers at the heart of what they do, both in the long-term and the short-term. To create value, firms must lift their sights from the typical focus on current profits and instead start seeing customers as the company's long-term resource – looking at each customer in terms of the long-term return they generate. A long-term strategy for marketing – one that focuses on customer equity and not solely on current profits – can provide marketing with the context and objectives needed to maximise the overall value created by each customer. Read more

29 October 2010 / 2 Comments

The next big big thing: it’s happening now

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that's changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you're an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it's the end of 2010, it's the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that's you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition's. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference, in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I'd urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Read more

29 September 2010 / 1 Comment

CIPR TV featuring the High Priest of Publicity, Mark Borkowski

Wadds and I benefited once again from the excellent work of the team at Markettiers4dc and another great guest this show, Mark Borkowski, MD of the eponymous Borkowski. Not exactly renowned for being a wallflower, Mark tells it how he sees it. We had some great questions submitted live via Twitter, and to be honest we could have chatted for twice the time!

My favourite comment relates to the attentiveness of advertising account managers to their clients needs. The quote won't pass you by :-)

27 August 2010 / 7 Comments

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things

@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:

Companies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they'll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF & the semantic web #CIPRSM [link]

My role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.

My slidestack is embedded here FYI, but before I sign off I should thank David Phillips (@DavidGHPhillips / http://leverwealth.blogspot.com) for his most pertinent and enthusiastic contributions to the discussion. He's a man who knows his PR and semantics for sure.

And it appears I may have achieved my objective. As @jonnystark and @Mark_Wyatt put it:

@Sheldrake thanks for the talk. Sat with @dewilded and still talking about it. [link]

@Sheldrake Many thanks for the talk yesterday. Really engaged and informative. Discussion carried on late into the night with @dewilded [link]

[Note: the video links in the presentation don't appear to be working in Firefox at the moment, but they do if you cut and paste the URLs into a browser tab. Odd. Investigating.]

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