Influencescorecard on Philip Sheldrake

The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession… all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

How the Influence Scorecard radically transforms marketing and PR

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that we ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we’ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com .

This is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.

That’s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.

The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard

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

I was delighted to host the first meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative in New York this week with a fine group of people :

Kate Delahaye Paine , the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (twitter , linkedin )
Marshall Sponder , the Web Metrics Guru (twitter , linkedin )
Ted Shelton , Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group (twitter , linkedin )
Jay Krall, Global Product Management, Cision (twitter , linkedin )
Aubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (twitter , linkedin )
Harish Rao, network science at The Rao Group
Diane Meier , Founder and CEO, Meier Brand
Connie Bensen , Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, Alterian (twitter , linkedin )

The task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. For those of you unaware of the Influence Scorecard project, you may want to flick through the presentation at the end of this post, or perhaps read my last post on the matter .

One of our first tasks was to get some definitions agreed. For example:

The first Influence Scorecard meeting

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

Thanks to all you lovely social Web analytics people who’ve emailed me about your excitement and concerns regarding the Influence Scorecard. I’m also delighted that Katie Delahaye Paine and Charlene Li have expressed their desire to be part of this (although to be fair I haven’t checked back with Charlene since February… are you around next week Charlene?)

I do appreciate your enthusiasm, but of course I wanted to post here about your concerns too. Once we have these concerns out of the way, it would be great to get these conversations into the public domain so I don’t have to write long blog posts keeping everyone up to date!

Given that I’ve been asked, let me start by saying why I love this space. Quite simply, it combines several passions of mine: organisational efficiency and effectiveness; the Internet and information technology; social media, democracy, consumer empowerment and community invigoration; mathematics and data visualisation.

But that’s me. What about the analytics industry? Why should competitors get in a room and tease this out collaboratively? That’s the concern some of you have raised, and there are two responses to this question.

The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In Brian Solis’ latest post, Unveiling the New Influencers , he reviews the reasons for listening to the marketplace for clues about how your organisation is doing, how it is perceived, and how the same stakeholders might regard your competition.

If you like his post, then you may like my free ebook on the topic, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 . Of course I recognise we’ve reached the first anniversary of the ebook this week (and over 35,000 downloads to date!), and it was time for me to post an update on the list of vendors I’m tracking. And wow is this market exploding.

(Brian lists some of these services in the section of his post titled “Listening + Conversation Management Systems”.)

If you are looking to procure such a service, then my ebook will tell you what you might want to look out for, and the list of potential partners below is pretty comprehensive. If you would like my help sourcing the right tool at the right price, then do just get in touch . Being based in London, I cover Western Europe, so for those of you in the US the man you need is Nathan Gilliatt .

An outline of the Influence Scorecard

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

It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called “transition period” and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.

It hasn’t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I’m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.

Most encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.

So I’m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It’s concise. It’s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how.

Influence Scorecard update

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

Thanks

Whilst the volume of responses to the Influence Scorecard has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I’ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!

Nevertheless, I’m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, “Thank you”. And I’d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I’ve added some reciprocal blog links…

Nielsen Online, TNS Cymfony, J.D. Power Umbria, Clarabridge, Influencer50, Techrigy, Brandwatch, dna13, VMSInfo, Radian6, Integrasco, BuzzLogic, MotiveQuest, RepuMetrix, Andiamo, CIC, Attentio, Scout Labs.

Questions

Where you’ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general… definitions and events.

Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard

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

Last week I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard . The post was testing the water to determine the level of interest such an event might generate, and I was answered by dozens of emails, direct twitters, comments and even some direct editing of the post itself, as I’d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)

I even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here…

Moreover, the interest was split almost 50:50 between Europe and North America, and it was spread fairly evenly amongst each of the required participant groups.

What is clear from all the queries and interest is that we now need to put some meat on the bones. Here are a few top line thoughts on ‘influence’, ‘scorecard’ and what we hope to achieve. Your thoughts are welcome.

Influence

Organisations want to influence the opinion and behaviour of their stakeholders. They do this via the various marketing and communications disciplines and approaches - PR, advertising, branding, community building, conversational marketing, direct marketing, events, product placement, public affairs, sponsorship etc..

Of course, stakeholders also influence each other and some will want to influence an organisation - how ready an organisation is for this dialogue is another matter.

Scorecard

The ‘scorecard’ is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as “business performance management ” or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute :

Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:

Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.