Ebook

In my recent post, The social business mutuality stack , I describe PR theory as the foundation for social business. (You might like to read the post if your understanding of PR is what might be described as mainstream – yes, PR has a reputation problem!) Given the import, I added that I’d joined a new initiative to kick the tyres of PR theory and make sure it’s fit for purpose in the 21st Century. The initiative, #PRredefined, launches today and has a bold ambition – to stimulate and lead the way in new thinking about the theory and practice of public relations, and the first in the corresponding series of ebooks is published today, #PRredefined Vol I. (For Kindle and Kindle apps . Otherwise .) ...

Having gone down the traditional publishing route with The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011), I decided for a number of reasons to try a different route in 2013 with Attenzi – a social business story . Most of those reasons boil down to one simple fact, the publishing industry isn’t yet embracing social business principles. In fact, it’s perhaps a prime example of an industry continuously trying to manipulate the application of 21st Century technologies to maintain the 20th Century status quo. ...

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday “Where are the PR Numerati? ” (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he’s right and I’m numerate and I’m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book “The Numerati ” by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker. Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals. That simple world is no more. I don’t mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will: ...

I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn’t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it’s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff. One glaring betrayal of the ‘social media practices’ that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears. Listening to one person isn’t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information… turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics. Social Web Analytics This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. ...