Fridayroundup on Philip Sheldrake

Friday Roundup: I'd like to quote you

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to quote you.

Without doubt, the marketing and PR professions are in revolutionary flux right now. I reckon that if we didn’t have these disciplines to date but just realised here and now that we actually wanted to influence what people think and do, and ensure we’re influenced straight back, that we’d design things very much differently to the status quo we’ve inherited.

I’m delighted that Wiley has invited me to write a book on just this topic. It’s going to focus on the much needed transformation of marketing and PR strategies, and the related disciplines in the influence mix, for the current and future digital age.

The book explains what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming up. It points to the changes of direction organisations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant.

And in the spirit of a marketer honing a product’s positioning, I’ll tell you what this book is not. This book is not a social media ‘how to’. Rather, it’s about your organisation, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organisation and personal careers, whilst the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.

I’d like to quote you. Please do get in touch if you’d like to share your viewpoint and experiences… the book will only be improved by your contributions. Seriously, do it!

And if you’re interested in the bit about what’s coming up, I’m running a session this coming Thursday in London at the CIPR on the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things if you’d like to join us.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a “Human Seismograph”?

Brian Solis won’t mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It’s a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn’t quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.

And two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.

Firstly, Brian’s post “Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter ” reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine.

Friday Roundup 2nd July 2010

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Continuous professional development. Bloody important. Guess that’s why the CIPR just moved its whole system online. Brilliant.

I mention it because I need some. Professional development that is. Look at the state of this Friday Roundup: it lists 16 great posts for goodness sake! Far too many! But they’re all so interesting (if I can say that about a list that includes one of my own).

I need a course in editing to get the list down to, say, 10. I could propose some personalisation technology to the MarCom Professional team so you only get posts you’re really interested in. But then my post this week is about a new breed of consultant, an Influence Professional, who has to be savvy about everything going on out there in the world of exerting influence, and being influenced. So perhaps that wouldn’t work. Mmmm.

Perhaps then I can just help to keep this Roundup shorter than otherwise by just stopping this intro. Here.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - AMEC and the value of PR

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The PR measurement and evaluation community came together in Barcelona 16th-18th June for the AMEC 2nd European Summit. AMEC is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and they played host to organisations such as the IPR , the PRSA , the ICCO ,the CIPR and the PR Global Alliance .

I was there representing the CIPR in my capacity as chair of its measurement group.

AMEC equipped all delegates with some nifty electronic voting gadgets with which votes were cast on seven foundation principles. The headline principles were approved, and AMEC has now taken the action to tweak the detail in line with delegate feedback before publishing in full.

I won’t duplicate the contents of a post on the seven principles by CIPR President Jay O’Connor , but I will convey here how delighted I am that one of the principles states simply:

Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of PR**

Friday Roundup - social media is a total waste of time

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Friday Roundup 11th June 2010

Seriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one.

But you only have to read the 22 I’ve selected for the Friday Roundup! :-)

Seriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme… Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media.

On the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying “Social media is a waste of time ”, but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with:

Friday Roundup - discontent content management

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Content management has come a long way since the turn of the century. Back then, web design and content management systems (CMS) typically set anyone back five to seven figures of whatever currency they had to hand. And then some bright sparks developed the idea of blogging.

Blogging helped many non-technical web users start publishing for the first time by stripping CMS back to its bare bones, and I remember hosting a contingent from MIT in London in 2001 at the Work Foundation where we worked ourselves up into a frenzy about how big blogging was going to be!

Friday Roundup - social media training gets more useful

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Fortunately, the last time I was asked “what’s a blog?” whilst presenting at a social media conference was 2008. Thank gawd for that. But too many social media conferences continue to labour the basics whilst the majority of practitioners have moved themselves way up the learning curve.

So I thought I’d invest this Friday Roundup in identifying three initiatives in London that should tickle your advanced social fancy.

The first is the CIPR’s Digital Impact conference . For an institute that didn’t lead in the social media world back when I was being asked “what’s a refback?”, the CIPR has jumped three gears and is heading straight into the thick of things in 2010. The content looks fab. The speakers are great and the venue, for those who haven’t yet been to the CIPR’s new home, is lovely.

I’m going particularly for the First Direct and Vodafone sessions. (And don’t worry about the CIPR’s website, yes it is awful, and yes they do know it, and yes a new one will debut in just a couple of weeks!)

The second is Social Media Marketing 2010 from the same guys that brought us the successful Monitoring Social Media 2009 and Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp 2010 conferences. And with Chris Brogan and Brian Solis making rare appearances in the UK, it’s shaping up to be another “I like” feather in the Luke Brynley-Jones’ social hat.

Lastly, and another CIPR first, the CIPR Social Summer is the first event series organised by the CIPR’s newly formed Social Media panel, and a series that’s being developed openly on a wiki . Seriously, if you want to change it, you can.

Friday Roundup - the Internet of Things

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Last week’s Friday Roundup focused on the ramifications of the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, on the marketing and PR professions. So perhaps you’ll forgive me if I push my luck by talking tech two weeks running.

The Internet of Things changes many aspects of our lives, including the possibilities and practice of the influence professions; marketing and PR. What is it? Well, you can think of it as a network of objects beyond the usual computers and smartphones, for example:

The device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)
The electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)
Non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and
Environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).

And just like the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things isn’t just some futurologist’s dreamscape. It is here, now.

Friday Roundup - all aboard Web 3.0

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Do you recall the pre-Web days of PR and marketing? The time before The Cluetrain Manifesto signalled that everything had changed and that the social media train was about to leave the station whether you were on it or not.

If stretching out that train doesn’t stretch the metaphor too much, you could say that a very long train left the station from 1999 to 2009 with people jumping on board as and when they and/or their organisation felt ready. But undoubtedly, those who “got it” earlier than later have been best positioned to reap the benefits for their organisation and for their personal career.

Well, marketing and PR is about to change. Again. It’s 2010.

If Web 2.0 could be summed up as content and community, then Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of that content and community. Web 3.0 is more accurately known as the Semantic Web, and as the name implies it gives us the opportunity to have software applications connect the dots and spot patterns and coalesce information and reach conclusions on our behalf.

Friday Roundup - social 'in real life' and online

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s just coming up to ten years since I participated in the first UK workshop on this new thing called blogging. During the ensuing decade I have formed a number of social media tenets that have so far stood the tests of time.

One of these is simply that social networks work best when they span the on- and off-line worlds; when face-to-face leads to ’linking-in’, and when ‘friending’ leads to meet and greet.

Of course, another tenet was that at some juncture we’d stop differentiating between on- and off-line in the same way we don’t feel the need to qualify whether a conversation was held in person or over the phone, but what’s a contradiction between friends?

And the combination of on- and off- has worked in my favour recently. I had the benefit of a highly receptive audience at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 who went on to view and tweet and my presentation about influence on slideshare.net, which then helped catapult it to slideshare’s homepage as their most discussed document of the day.

So how can you start making the combination of on- and off- work to your advantage?

Lots of great posts for you this week. Enjoy!

Friday Roundup - Influence Influence Influence

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

What’s influence? How is it achieved? Who’s got it?

Regular readers of my posts will know that I have a penchant for labelling all the combined disciplines of marketing and PR as simply “Influence”. (Hey, the word even appears in the name of my consultancy.) And the combination or convergence of these skills under one unifying term helps erode the noun orientation of our profession and assists in constructing a verb oriented approach. What are we really trying to do?

I’ve been pulling my thoughts together for a presentation about influence for this coming week’s Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London (about half a dozen tickets remaining I believe), and I’ll be posting my presentation to my blog on the day. But perhaps I can leave you with something to think about until then, particularly as I’m hoping that this will spark violent disagreement all the better for getting the matter resolved as soon as possible.

Here it is. Influence scoring services like Klout and Social Mention are utterly useless. At best such services are harmless fun, and at worst they are a costly and wasteful distraction from doing the right thing the right way for yourselves or your client.

Friday Roundup - marketing convergence and social all over

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had the pleasure in the last two weeks of working with a dozen of the finest Brits in PR, branding, digital / Web, public affairs and news distribution. We’ve joined up to work voluntarily on an apolitical campaign in the run up to the UK general election (invincecable.org.uk if you’re interested).

I’m telling you this because, having blogged about the convergence of marketing disciplines over the years (as distinct from “integrated”), this campaign of ours has revealed just how far the best practitioners’ expertise is now “converged”. Sure, there’s still the need to pause to explain the occasional aspect or define a particular piece of jargon or inevitable acronym, but generally the group just understands what we’re trying to achieve and how we can all work together to make it happen.

There is no bewilderment, misconception or diffidence.

And this is despite the fact that we haven’t actually all met each other. That doesn’t stop us. We’re Skype’ing, IM’ing, emailing, wiki’ing, posterous’ing, tweeting, and quickly assembling the resources, ideas and timetable for a cracking campaign. And all in the open . And all whilst earning a living. Awesome.

Friday Roundup - the converging profession

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We have a super mix of posts for you this week. In fact the reason we send this weekly roundup on a Friday is because we think more people make some time to read about their industry towards the end of the week.

And in a converging profession, that awareness can prove critical in securing that new business opportunity, and in maintaining the business you have.

PR consultants should have a good grasp of search engine optimisation. SEOs should get the heads round mobile apps. Mobile digital pros may well do better stuff with training in advertising. And advertisers should be looking to learn PR skills.

Friday Roundup - the Semantic Web

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So-called “Web 2.0” dominated the last decade. This decade be prepared for “Web 3.0”. Why the quotes?… well these terms are loosely defined at best, but remain useful as signposts of major change.

Most pundits associate 3.0 with something called the Semantic Web. Effectively, if Web 2.0 was about community and content, then Web 3.0 / the Semantic Web is about understanding the meaning of those social contributions and content.

Importantly, Web 3.0 is going to have as big an impact on what it means to practice marketing and public relations as Web 2.0. The implications are widespread and interlinked, which is not surprising when something called LinkedData is a sub-set of the Semantic Web.

Friday Roundup - the New Rules

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I learn something every day as I help moderate MarCom Professional.

This week I was most intrigued by the idea that Google could add adverts to Google Streetview … both static and moving images in what constitutes a sort of augmented-virtual-reality I guess. AVR? Thanks to Michael Litman for flagging this.

As always, Brian Solis has a couple of cracking posts this week, one on the socialization of email marketing , and another on the stages of social media integration in business , which shares some of the outlook of aspects of the Influence Scorecard initiative.

I’d obviously recommend MarCom Professional for keeping up to speed on how marketing and PR have been and are being transformed. And if you’re looking for a comprehensive resource that’s insightful and digestible, I whole heartedly recommend The New Rules of Marketing and PR by MarCom Professional member David Meerman Scott.

Friday Roundup - the Forget Web

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If the end of the last decade was all about the massive growth in the social Web, the beginning of this one will witness considerable emphasis on social Web analytics … the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue.

It’s a busy market , but with Visible Technologies pinning down $22m in C series funding this week, things are starting to get serious.

Brian Solis discusses the social network advertising and marketing outlook for 2010 this week, and Michael Litman has been good enough to share a presentation by Charlene Li with us about the future of social networks. Unfortunately, Charlene’s presentation stops short of discussing the need for consumer facing (high mention volume) brands to adopt analytics, although it does reference the associated redesign of organisational workflow that’s demanded.

Friday Roundup - the Newspaper Licensing Agency

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the time of year when everyone is tempted to look backward and forward. The Newspaper Licensing Agency appears to be the exception to the rule, by looking forward and thinking backward.

For those who haven’t followed the debate, here’s a summary… the NLA, gawd bless’em and the past Century they still live in, has adapted its terms to charge parties for clicking on hyperlinks to content on their members’ websites.

That might not have sunk in on a cursory read. You might think I have mistyped or something. But yes, you did read it right… I know, it’s incredible isn’t it. If you are sent a hyperlink to coverage on a newspaper website, you have to pay the NLA a license fee to click on it! More exclamation marks warranted!!!

Friday Roundup - the social Web bigger than social media

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by David Meerman Scott recently for his next book. (Do you know that “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” has been translated into 24 languages?!)

David had just been speaking at Dow Jones’ launch of their new Media Relations Manager , and like all accomplished speakers he conveyed some serious points of view interspersed with the more light-hearted observations (the one about “Who are hell are these people?! ” got people laughing).

We spent most of our time talking about the Influence Scorecard (see my post this week ) and the expansion of “social”. By this I mean that the social Web is bigger than social media, even though the terms are often treated as synonyms. The social Web encompasses social (non-traditional / non-industrial) media, but also applications such as Tweetdeck and iPhone apps, services such as social assisted search and location-based services, and the network itself… which is becoming the Internet of Things.

Friday Roundup - Monitoring Social Media 09

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Monitoring Social Media 09 event this week was a ‘standing-room-only’ event. And I particularly enjoyed the presentations from Marshall Sponder , Giles Palmer , Brad Little and Katy Howell .

Here is a couple of points I made in my participation of the panel debating the future of social media monitoring.

Firstly, this sector will broaden its focus. I define social media as being a subset of the social Web, so the social Web = social media (blogs, facebook, twitter) + apps (tweetdeck, skype) + services (geo-location, social search) + the network (including the Internet of Things ). Then things get really interesting!

Secondly, there are more than 70 vendors in this space, and commoditisation has effectively made data, indexing, simple analysis and pretty charts FREE. The conclusive step in this process will be Google’s entry into social media monitoring, which I think might happen the first quarter of next year.

Friday Roundup 6th November 2009

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As the UK’s first appointment to the new role of storytelling laureate said self-deprecatingly this week on the Today programme, listening is more important than speaking, else we’d have two tongues and just one ear of course.

With that in mind, and having read all of this week’s top contributions to MarCom Professional, I’m going to shut up and leave you to browse amongst them.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - the BNP on Question Time

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nick Griffin, leader of the (racist, facist) British National Party, appeared on a prime time BBC news programme last night, Question Time .

It is hard to say which of the decision to do so or the content of the programme itself was most controversial. The event has most definitely generated serious heat, before, during and after, with Google News reporting in excess of 3000 stories on the matter.

The BNP is democratically elected, with two Members of the European Parliament, and that gives their leader a mandate to appear on a national TV funded by the electorate to convey his views and his policies.

Friday Roundup - Monitoring Social Media 09

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I thought I’d highlight some great contributions on the subject of mobile in today’s MarCom Professional Friday Roundup, and then point you to an event covering a topic close to my heart, social Web analytics (my ebook on the topic is here ).

So, first up, the ever vigilant Andrew Grill always points his readers to useful stuff. This time it’s the latest publication from Bena Roberts at GoMo News , a collection of insightful essays on all things mobile.

And David Knowles aims to inject a dose of realism into the iPhone app craze. If you’re intent on getting an app out there, here’s what you should know about what’s working and what isn’t .

Monitoring Social Media 09 is bringing together social media monitoring experts and suppliers with PR and marketing professionals for a one-day conference in London on 17th November 2009. Speakers from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Market Sentinel, Brandwatch, Edelman, The Conversation Group, and the UK’s #1 PR blogger, Neville Hobson, will be discussing issues such as ROI, sentiment analysis, reputation management, infuence detection and data quality. (There’s an early bird ticket until 17th Oct.)

I’ll see you there.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup 25th September 2009

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I need your clicks.

You see, I’ve been offline for ten weeks and handed the mantle of the Friday Roundups to Andrew Smith , as you will have noted. Thanks Andrew. But he appears to have grown the open and click rates in that short time faster than we were doing before he sprinkled his magic copywriter dust. Which is pleasingly irritating ;-)

(If you need someone who ‘gets’ the social Web, understands online communities and every Google Web tool under the cloud, he’s your man. Damn fine social media trainer too by all accounts.)

But I digress. I have to acquit myself now that Andrew and I will be alternating on the Roundups. So perhaps I can tempt you with the following morsels as you scroll down towards the long list…

Friday Roundup - the NLA and copyright

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have always admired the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency for its self-assured composure in freshly applying last century’s rules to this one.

That’s a repeat of the opening sentence to a blog post of mine from 2007. And in the last couple of weeks the NLA appears to just get sillier and sillier and less and less in tune with how the world works today. They have announced their imminent intention to begin charging agencies and clients for sending URLs to each other.

Yes, you did read that right. I can assure you, that is the case, and no laughing please from those of you outside of the UK!

Friday Roundup - Freemium

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was given a book last night. Free.

Free, as in I didn’t pay for it, and “Free” as in the book’s title.

The author is Chris Anderson , editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of the widely acclaimed 2006 book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More ” (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8 ).

“Free” (ISBN 9781905211470 ) takes a look at the rise and rise in recent years of business models pivoting around the provision of stuff for free. The book has some interesting chapters for anyone involved in marketing, particularly in relation to Web search and publishing (the widely held expectation of not having to pay for Web content and the rise of free papers during the decline of traditional media).

Friday Roundup - Michael Jackson tribute

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When media training people, it’s sometimes a challenge to convey exactly what might be considered quotable, or a soundbite in common parlance. You know… not too long, not too short. Punchy. Insightful. Possibly controversial. Maybe funny.

In fact, Wikipedia just informs me that Mark Twain described the concept as “a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense”.

Well, Paul Gambaccini is obviously expert at it. Of all the tributes paid to Michael Jackson today, his in the one that has stuck with me. Not verbatim, it went something like this on Radio 4’s Today programme:

There will only be one Michael Jackson. His life was in three parts. The Jackson Five years. The incredible Quincy Jones albums. And then the years as a freak.

RIP Michael.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - quoting the social Web

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There is a problem with social media. Conclusions should be drawn from the collective, from the aggregate of all social interaction, conversation, commentary, tagging, ratings etc. As the assertion goes, there’s wisdom in them there crowds.

But that’s not how we’re all used to working.

We have evolved, I think you’ll agree, to tune into one person at a time. Listen to one person. Watch one person. If I asked you to tell me what the population of London was thinking on a certain topic, unless that topic was their restricted choice of political expression and the question coincided with a local election, you’d be hard pressed to tell me.

We like our individual news readers, individual film stars, individual celebrities. And our individual journalists. You see, we can trust (most) journalists because they’ve had to subscribe to a code of conduct, a code of ethics. They have standards to maintain in executing their task at hand.

Friday Roundup - Facebook usernames

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, we know what the big news is this week! The corresponding blog post has attracted over 68,000 comments at the time of writing… which is quite a lot.

Is it about the economy? No. Saving the planet? No. A remake of Barbarella? Not even.

No, the big news this week is Facebook usernames … get yours before someone else with the same name does. The feature goes live 12.01am tomorrow EDT.

And what better reading material to keep yourself alert this evening as you wait for the minute hand to tick round than today’s Friday Roundup selection.

Friday Roundup 5th June 2009

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, couldn’t stop picking great posts for this week’s Roundup. What other marketing communications insight brings you all this in one nifty email?…

A look at what makes P!nk special and how your brand can learn from her
Straight forward advice for GM’s marketing team at a time when they really need to listen
Debunking “viral”
A fantastic video poking fun at clients who try and get too much for nothing ; and
A counter-balancing reminder to consultancy folk what it’s like to be a client

All the best, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - the Internet Psychologist

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Crystal clear, unarguable insight. That’s what I like. Sure, articulating complex stuff usefully can be most impressive, but stating the obvious when it’s only obvious with hindsight or with the assistance of an able guide, that’s cool in my book.

Graham Jones gets the complex stuff… he’s known as the “Internet Psychologist” after all! But he’s rather good at seeing the world for what it is, when the rest of us are running around with our costs-per-click, bounce rates and adword strategies.

Check out his post this week “How to ensure your web site makes money from offline marketing ”. Seems he’s found some excellent examples of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and all in a quick scan of the daily press.

Have a super weekend.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup 22nd May 2009

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A brief Roundup this week. Firstly, we had dozens more members join this week, so “welcome” to everyone who has joined since we last said “welcome”!

Secondly, good to see everyone at the Dog and Duck in Soho, London, on Wednesday, including Ted Shelton and Marissa Root of The Conversation Group over from San Francisco, courtesy of Mark Adams .

And lastly, a quick heads up re. another London event, this time hosted by Deloitte on the impact of convergence on advertising , 4th June, chaired by yours truly. See you there? And if you’re running a meetup, let us know and we’ll plug it here in the Friday Roundup.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - Blyk

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well I don’t know about you, but I’m totally confused. What is happening at Blyk ?

For those beyond the UK’s shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer’s completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing.

But on comparing this claim to Seth Godin’s articulate definition of permission marketing, I posted at the time that this wasn’t the game Blyk was playing . The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA’s Alex Farber:

“Blyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships ” and “Blyk’s MVNO shift causes industry stir ”.

Now if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex’s articles means, it’s Bena Roberts of GoMo News . Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise… “Is anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me? ”

Friday Roundup 8th May 2009

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Time for a change. Having sold Fuse PR to Racepoint Group in 2006, and as much as I will miss everyone, it’s time for me to leave the business in very fine hands and, well, do something else instead.

One thing I’m really looking forward to is developing and growing MarCom Professional. We’ve got some cool ideas, as you’d expect I hope, and we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas too. So, fancy a pint? If you are in London on the 20th May, I invite you to join us at the Dog and Duck in Soho.

Friday Roundup - night clubs and social media

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you with whom I’ve discussed social Web strategy, or even helped define and execute it, will know my analogy of the social Web with the social life of a typical city. For example, the Facebooks, MySpaces and Bebo’s are the mega night clubs on the ring road. The blogs and small forums are the pubs and bars on the high street. The likes of Ning are the market stalls or local fair rides. The tweeting of Twitter is the chitter chatter in passing and over the garden fence.

And this isn’t analogy for analogy’s sake, this is a great way to orientate social Web newbies to the norms and expectations of social media, applications and services.

Take the example of participating for the first time in a Facebook group, or a business forum, or blog meme. Enough to make the most confident of net newbies hesitate. Yet no-one enters a room buzzing with people they don’t know and starts gobbing off immediately before assessing the etiquette and the tone of the conversation, so why do that online? Social media newbies just need to look out for the analogous sort of things to which they are so naturally accustomed offline.

Offline - is drinking from the bottle acceptable? Online - is proper punctuation and spelling expected?

Offline - who’s got gravitas, attracting people around them? Online - whose point of view is attracting the most comment, the most feedback and interaction?

Friday Roundup - teamwork

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The likelihood of outstanding business success is greater with great teamwork. I’d say that was an obvious and uncontroversial thing to say!

For the Friday Roundup, I’d condense the management texts I’ve read and the experiences I’ve had to date into five teamwork must-haves:

a shared and clearly articulated vision;
mutuality (individual success is team success, and vice versa);
honesty;
clearly defined roles and responsibilities; and
a self-sustaining determination and hunger for success.

These qualities are being put to the most extreme of tests in current times. The economic climate today requires great teams to tend to these must-haves like never before, to keep them resilient and vibrant. But the ultimate test is for those teams that observers within or without rate as sub-par today.

Friday Roundup - AVE v SWA

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Friday Roundup - hackneyed copy

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“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.

Friday Roundup 3rd April 2009

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Friday Roundup - Brian Solis' new book is out

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Friday Roundup - get used to SEO

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recommend the SEO Toolbar (Firefox only). You should download and install it now.

Why? Because your prospects and wider stakeholders may stumble across your products and services in social interaction, on- and off-line, but they also revert to search engines to find what they’re looking for.

Search is important.

Friday Roundup - humans first, machines a close second

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

An indulgent post bag this week. So many fascinating posts, I couldn’t keep the short-list all that short.

Take the debate about search engine optimisation (SEO) amongst various pockets of the digital marketing profession. My approach to SEO has always been to develop content for humans first and search engines a close second. But definitely second.

And where does SEO stand when future ‘votes for’ a webpage, as interwoven into the search engines’ algorithms, come not solely from links from other websites but from more inclusive sources such as social bookmarking services like Delicious and Stumbleupon , and Twitter ed links?

David Meerman Scott hints this week at his view of SEO… “SEO and your crap filled site ”! And in case you remain uncertain, click over to Graham Jones’ “Search is on its deathbed…bye, bye SEO ”.

And if you fancy getting into this sort of stuff more deeply, Brian Solis struts his visionary stuff again this week with “Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? ”

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup 6th March 2009

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So last week’s Roundup featured some posts with good old fashioned moaning, and the email click through rate was amongst the best ever. Right then. So I’m going to pick a super moan to lead the Roundup today.

Thanks to Vero for a heartfelt post criticising a government social media sex education campaign that falls just a teeny weeny bit short in Vero’s opionion of delivering value representative of the four million odd pounds it cost. How not to…

And whilst we remain steadfastly focused on matching last week’s click throughs, how about this post by Trevor Young on how not to express yourself.

And just in case you’re not going to be tempted by negative pieces this week, check out Graham Jones on how to get retweeted .

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - Twangry

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There’s nothing like a blog post to have a good old fashioned moan. It’s cathartic. Good for the soul.

Brian Solis has a bit of a go at Facebook’s consistent shortcomings in good community relations. Stephen Waddington rips apart the journalistic coverage of new research that shows social networking is harmful, or does it? And I waded in on a PR Week article about Twitter that made many Twitterers very Twangry.

Twangry. That’s a new word I learned this week. Mmmmm.

Have a super weekend. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - Twitter goes massive

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What did we talk about before the current intergalactic financial burp and the rise and rise of Twitter? Just as recently as 2008, you could actually meet people quite regularly who had never heard of twitter outside the context of birdsong, but not now.

So “how to” and “for idiots” and “the ninety nine things you’ve always wanted to know but were afraid to ask” guides now abound, which is kind of odd for anyone who was around before the hashtag and just had to sort of fumble around like teenagers discovering a new genre of music and the opposite sex at the local youth club.

Nevertheless, these things are invaluable for mass market adoption, and Ben Matthews points us to five of the best . Top marks for most attention grabbing presentation title goes to Radian6 for “Become a Twitter Ninja”.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup - Twitter humour

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What’s Twitter for? Interesting question, but we know we enjoyed the Tweetstream from @cluetrainee this week. Subtle. Satirical. And beautifully efficient in poking fun at the bankers who have wrought the current financial terror and are feeling like they want to apologise this week, over and over and over again.

I’ve appended an extract for your convenience :-) before this week’s post highlights.

@cluetrainee gets it, but thanks to Rebecca Caroe for posting an entertaining video ridiculing those Twitterers that don’t.

Friday Roundup 6th February 2009

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s one of those days when I’m just going to let the highlighted posts do all the talking…

Friday Roundup 30th January 2009

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s mix of post highlights includes a couple of thought provokers from Brian Solis, one on his work with Anheuser-Busch in creating a fusion of public relations and social media , and another on Friendfeed… is it the new Twitter ?

And if anything tolls the bell for a service in the eyes of the influential early adopters, it’s the arrival of “celebrity”. Stephen Waddington sounds the alarm for Twitter .

And forgive me if I just hijack the last part of this Roundup intro. Marketing communications is a considerably different discipline today than it was at just the turn of the decade. The social web and conversational marketing mean influence is exerted in different ways and robust measurement is coming of age. PR is becoming fully and quantifiably accountable for the first time.

If this lights your screen, if it clicks your mouse, then please take time to read my post on the Influence Scorecard and let me know if you would like to help shape the cutting edge of marketing communications as it takes its place deservedly, centrally and irrevocably at the board table.

Friday Roundup 16th January 2009

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Optimists might say the cream rises to the top in a recession. What’s definitely clear from this week’s MarCom Professional highlights is that the effective marketing skillset has changed and continues to change apace, and it’s not a great leap to conclude that those that “get it” earlier than others will reap competitive advantage, or indeed simply survive this economic winter.

Andrew Grill, for example, examines an article in the FT painting a dismal picture for the advertising industry if it fails to adapt to the changes in media .

Or perhaps now’s your time to write a book? Trevor Young brings an absorbing slideshow to our attention portraying Rohit Bhargava’s route to book top-sellerdom for *Personality Not Included .

Lastly, a quick hello to everyone who has joined us here on MarCom Professional in recent weeks, you are most welcome. If you like what you see, please do invite your colleagues with the simple “Invite” feature at the top of all our webpages.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup 9th January 2009

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A new year is a time for resolutions, many of which will be focused on personal development and growth. That’s a critical kind of resolution for marketers in 2009 as our industry continues to change at unprecedented speed, and if the bag of posts below is anything to go by, MarCom Professional remains a great source of insight and learning.

And the occasional fun too.

So despite everything, we hope 2009 turns out to be what you make it.

Friday Roundup 19th December 2008

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The last Roundup of 2008 includes a diverse array of pressies under the MarCom Professional tree.

Brian Solis and Ben Matthews scrutinise the Techcrunch embargoe kerfuffle (marking the end of an era?), David Knowles chats about how we might all learn from the latest X-factor, and Stephen Waddington uses any excuse to include a picture of Kelly Brooks… although we agree Quick Response codes might be hot stuff in coming years.

And in amongst the brightly wrapped pressies, one from the US Air Force, courtesy of David Meerman Scott , about their use of social media in their marketing communications. That’ll get us flying into 2009.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, whichever you prefer.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Friday Roundup 12th December 2008

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Before we dive into this week’s MarCom Professional highlights, we’d like you to help us work out what we should be doing for you in the New Year. Here’s the shortlist:

A. An agency time planning, logging and reporting tool. Keep track of projects, people, tasks, time. Work out where you’re over- and under-servicing, and opt-in to anonymised benchmarkcomparisons.

B. Coverage collation, management and measurement. Scan coverage and capture screenshots directly to the browser, generate reports and share with your team and/or clients in your own extranet.

C. Journalist - PR relations is controversial of late. This service would act as a hub for PR consultants to discover what journalists need, and for journalists to manage stuff thrown at them by PR consultants.

Do drop us an email , tweet me , post or comment… we only want to deliver what you can use!

Thanks and best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.