Research

It’s a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It’s my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I’m delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote. Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here’s the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic ‘Content – An illustrated history ’, which is easy to breeze through :-) ...

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. And the reading, the planning, the structuring and first few chunks of copy have been enjoyable in a hard work kinda way. It’s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , and I’d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It’s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you’re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can’t help but learn more as you do it. ...

ESPN pulled the plug on their cell-phone product after investing $150m including $40m in advertising. This is precisely the failure market research is intended to prevent. How can business harness customers and prospective customers to improve their hit rate and time to market? The following simple figures demonstrate the difference between traditional market research and continuous engagement. There are dozens of differences between the two approaches. Research is ad-hoc or at regular intervals whereas continuous engagement is, well, continuous. Research is one-way, and engagement is two-way. Research is devoid of any direct brand benefit (and research purists will claim this is beneficial) whereas continuous engagement inculcates brand loyalty. Here’s a list of the primary differences: ...